Color me disgusted

In case anyone had any doubts as to the ability of the Democratic Party to eat its own young, here's more proof:

Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett, who gained popularity for his staunch criticism of President Bush, has dropped out of the Democratic race for U.S. Senate in Ohio, according to a published report.

Hackett told The New York Times for Tuesday's editions that the same party leaders who urged him to run for Senate after his political debut in a House race last year had turned on him.

"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me," Hackett said.

I'd heard rumblings yesterday that DCCC Rahm Emmanuel, who has allowed Tim Russert to devour him on national television any number of times, had asked Hackett to drop the Senate race and run again for Jean Schmidt's House seat -- the one he came within voting chicanery in Schmidt's home county of winning last fall. And this morning comes the news that Hackett, understandably, has told the Democratic Party to go fuck itself -- it can deliberately lose races without him. And calling Hackett's donors asking them not to donate anymore is about as low as you can get.

For all that I'm so angry I can hardly see straight, I respect Hackett's decision to draw a big red line under the hapless Democratic Party and not play their game. But it's clear that the party hacks only want soft-spoken, malleable candidates like Barack Obama, who will keep their mouths shut once elected and only speak when spoken to until it's their turn. This is politics as Olympic ice dancing, where you have to wait your turn. It's this tendency in the Democratic Party to keep to the hierarchy that gave us a certain loser in Walter Mondale in 1994 1984 instead of the upstart Gary Hart. It's this tendency that gave us the phlegmatic John Kerry last year instead of the electrifying Howard Dean. The Democratic party refuses to speak up for the people from whom it demands support, and when a candidate comes along who WILL speak up, the Powers that Be in the party do everything possible to stop them.

It's with a heavy heart that I remove Hackett's name from my ActBlue page. The only reason I'm not removing the entire thing is that ActBlue collects donations for specific candidates. And if you still feel you want to donate, please do your donating this way. Do NOT give a nickel of your money to the national party -- to the DCCC or DSCC, unless you want a Democratic Party that continues to sell YOU and YOUR RIGHTS and YOUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE down the river because they still think they have to be Republicans to win.

How's that strategy been working for you anyway, Rahm?

Across the blogosphere, the reaction is what one would expect.

Markos, having tasted the nectar of hacktocracy, is rewriting history by saying that Hackett only ran after Sherrod Brown announced his candidacy, thus proving that he has been corrupted by the same forces that have rendered the Democrats irrelevant.

Mother Jones tells a different story:

Soon the national party came courting: Hackett met several times with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), both of whom encouraged him to run for the seat of Ohio’s senior senator, Republican Mike DeWine, in '06. Hackett said he would—after been told by Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown that he wasn’t planning to run—and on October 3 he publicly threw his hat in the ring.

Then, last week, his phone rang again. It was Sherrod Brown calling to tell Hackett he’d changed his mind: he was running after all. Then Schumer called, and this time he wasn’t delivering a pep talk. Hackett got the distinct sense that he was being asked to make way for the party insider. "Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive," he says. "But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do."

DSCC spokesman Phil Singer insists that "We didn’t play any role in bringing Brown in. We were as surprised as anyone else when he decided to reconsider."

Commenters at MyDD are as furious as I am.

Digby is succinct.

The Left Coaster, like me, thinks the Democratic Party must be on the take from the Republicans.

Joe Gandelman calls Hackett's withdrawal from politics entirely a "snit fit" -- which it is, but an understandable one. Hackett isn't an idiot. He sees a president with approval ratings below 40%, who's up to his eyeballs in scandals, with a vice-president who SHOT A MAN over the weekend, and even with all this roiling STUFF going on, the Democratic Party is still quaking in its boots as if it were still September 14, 2001 and Bush were still standing at Ground Zero with the megaphone. Why on earth would any sane person want to be a part of this?