Stop it now, stop it, just stop it.

Please: Stop it now!

For those who continue to suggest the Democrats can somehow save our wretched and forsaken land, I beseech thee: Wake up and smell the corruption.

You are intelligent. You are kind. You care deeply about your fellow human beings. We know you have superb taste in columnists.

You are also clearly on the correct side, because if there were ever anything in this heavily gray area-tinged world that is laid out in stark black-or-white, right-or-wrong terms, it’s Us the Good Guys and Gals vs. the neocon-driven Bush Bastards.

But you have a curious -- and maddening -- blind spot that is a big-time time-waster, a non-starter, an energy sucker-upper, the Mother of All Dead-Ends: You still engage in the fantasy that if we work really hard, even harder than we all worked last time, which was damn ass-busting hard, we can get the Democrats back in power, buy some breathing room and start the long uphill climb back to semi-respectability for America.

Ain’t gonna happen. No way, uh-uh, no how. Fuhgeddaboutit.

Hope is nice. Gotta have hope. But delusional is, well, just delusional. (I say that only in a nice way.)

For one thing, America’s major elections are rigged. The fix is in; the jig is up.

Repeat after me: The fix is in; the jig is up.

Now, I could be wrong, but I’ve always thought sham balloting has the rather annoying side effect of taking the wind right out of democracy’s sails.

As if that weren’t bad enough (and it is), just what in the slimy, spineless, mush-mouthed, pants-wetting, knee-knocking, finger-in-the-air, thumb-in-your-eye, two-faced, CYA-ing recent past of the Democratic Party leads you to believe that in any way, shape or form these bipedal jellyfish can lead us to the Promised Land, or even the Implied Parking Lot, even if by the most miraculous of miracles the GOP somehow forgets to throw the vote-conversion switch in the next selection and the Dems manage to regain a majority somewhere?

Give me some names. Please. Tell me what Democrat has got the guts to stand up in front of the whoreporate media microphones and say: “You know what? The American people have been had. Our democratic republic does not exist. We are in the grips of murderous fascists who spit on the Constitution, or what little tiny scraps may be left of it, every chance they get. Not only that, but there’s every indication 9/11 didn’t go down the way we’ve all been led to believe it did and I demand answers NOW, no matter the implications.”

Oh, yeah, that would be something, wouldn’t it? Far too many questions remain about what really happened on September 11, 2001, a day that spread wide the gaping hellmouth of all gaping hellmouths and loosed the flesh-shredding monsters comprising the Bush administration to wreak their uniquely gruesome brand of havoc on, oh, let’s see, everyone in the world who isn’t them.

An independent and open investigation of 9/11 -- truly independent and open -- needs to be conducted by a panel comprising experts in physics, aviation, engineering, construction, demolition, metallurgy, photography, insider trading, etc. The “official” explanations of that shockingly barbaric day are pure rubbish. As many have rightly noted in a multitude of finely researched, detailed and compelling articles: How can three skyscrapers, one of which wasn’t even hit by a plane, free-fall into their footprints in the same day? Why did even one of the WTC buildings collapse, considering no skyscraper before or since has ever been brought down by fire?

Allow me to suggest a slogan: WTC? WTF??

And so I ask: Do you honestly think a Dem will call for such an investigation, ever? Are you really going to put your faith in Hillary “Always Toe the Waters” Clinton, Joe “Used Car Salesman” Biden or John “Rollover” Kerry to suddenly show what they’ve yet to demonstrate they hold even a thimble’s worth between them: integrity?

Did I hear someone say Russ Feingold? Yeah, okay, I applaud Russ’ censure move, too, and certainly his lone senatorial vote against the USAPATRIOT Act, but even he, just like practically the whole sorry, seedy, scaredy lot of ‘em, will only go so far, which ain’t nearly far enough.

Check this quote of his during a recent trip to Iraq: “It’s the reality of a situation like this that when you have a large troop presence that it has the tendency to fuel the insurgency because they can make the incorrect and unfair claim that somehow the United States is here to occupy this country, which of course is not true.”

Yes, of course. Not true. Attaboy, Russ. Way to completely ignore the Project for the New American Century and its right-on-schedule plan of removing U.S. military bases from our enlightened, freedom-loving good buddy Saudi Arabia’s territory and building permanent ones right next door in Iraq, at least four of which Tom Engelhardt reports as being humongous “super-bases” and all of which have been under construction ever since the occupation -- whoops, non-occupation -- began.

Just exactly who, senator, is gonna staff these babies -- dust devils?

Perhaps, gentle reader, your longing eyes are cast toward Barbara Boxer, the good senator from my home state who, on January 6, 2005, along with Ohio Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones, challenged the eligibility of Ohio’s 2004 20 electoral votes.

Or did she? Boxer asserted on that painfully depressing day on the Senate floor that she was “joining with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones” not to claim that George W. Bush had stolen the presidency (again), oh, no; but rather “to cast the light of truth on a flawed [balloting] system which must be fixed now.”

Nice try, Barb, but a little late. Sure it was brave of you to inconvenience your 99 fellow clubbies for a couple of hours. But it wasn’t enough. Not by a long shot. It falls just a smidgeon short of using your center stage moment to tell the world the harsh truth, that what it was witnessing that day was nothing less than the final nail being unceremoniously pounded into the coffin of our democratic republic and the official birth of American Fascism.

In fairness, there are a handful of Dems who do have real guts, folks like John Conyers, Jr., Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney and Barbara Lee. But they’ve all been marginalized to one extent or another by their whore, er, more “practical” political sisters and brothers.

If genuinely, dear reader, your understandable great white-knuckled hope is for fresh blood to somehow reinvigorate the Democratic Party, forget it. Any Dem newbie who doesn’t play by the rulers’ rules -- which in BushWorld means keeping one’s mouth shut and protecting one’s precious little piece of allotted turf for fear of certain incriminating photos hitting the ‘Net or family members being disappeared -- finds it’s not all that long before his or her very own party’s old guard is issuing pointed instructions on how to maintain one’s proper place in the scheming scheme of things lest there be a noticeable lack of party machine support come the next faux voting cycle.

Speaking of pointless exercises: A friend in Canada suggests we Americans at least have some fun with the election charade we insist on holding biannually. (Hey, if we’re going to get screwed, we might as well enjoy it, eh?) For real kicks and giggles, he says, we ought to, all of us, “vote Republican. Then, upon exiting the polls, act like one. In other words, lie. Say, ‘I’m a registered Democrat and I always vote the party line.’ When the exit polls show 50-50 (or whatever is announced) but the Republicans see they don’t have to fiddle with the votes and in their hubristic giddiness allow the announcement of the real 100 percent total, they’ll have a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do (although, ironically, they’re telling the truth for once!). Plus, in this scenario, the snakes are left to collectively stand naked (a revolting mental image; sorry) and be seen for what they truly are: the one-party puppets of the real power holders, big bidness. On the other hand, if the announced ‘official’ numbers are instead the now-traditional 52-48 percent GOP winning margin, this is additional proof, then, that the results are pre-programmed.”*

After all, my friend asks, “How bad can it get?” Indeed. In fact, I think his plan has real merit, for it only prolongs our ongoing agony to keep any Dems around at all. It’s been obvious for years how utterly ineffective they are, but it is much worse than that, as their continuing presence provides the Bushian fascists with a patina of legitimacy, making it appear to the less astute (and we know how many of those there are) that some sort of democratic process still exists in America. Believe me, the last thing the Rethuglicans want is for all the Dems to split.

Although, frankly, I guess it wouldn’t matter all that much if they did. I have long contended that when it comes right down to it, when it is necessary, when Bushco’s cover is at last fully blown, when enough Americans have finally had enough and take to the streets in sufficient numbers to rattle some cages, they’ll find tanks -- and cops and soldiers and mercenaries and helicopters and dogs and teargas and bullets and truncheons and hoses and horses and trucks and buses (gotta get people to those Halliburton-constructed “temporary detention” facilities somehow) -- to meet them.

The Bushies have slaughtered over 100,00 Iraqis (possibly up to a quarter million, per Dahr Jamail), sent more than 2300 U.S. soldiers to needless deaths, allowed 1,400 Americans to drown and die of thirst in Katrina’s wake and most likely murdered 3,000 of our own countrymen and women in New York, D.C. and Pennsylvania.

Blowing Americans away in the streets? Small potatoes.

I don’t care how many useless votes are cast or how many fine candidates there seem to be: The more-equal animals are not leaving of their own accord, and the complicit Democrats have enabled them to stay hog-slop happy in charge every sickening, self-serving step of the way.

We are entirely on our own, folks, and have been for a long time. If we are to ever survive the pure hell in which America is squarely mired, it is up to us -- and only us -- to pull her out. No one else is gonna do it. Nobody is gonna save us. The longer we wring our hands and furrow our brows, the worse it gets. Meanwhile, the rest of an exasperated and threatened world is looking on with horror and going:

Stop it; just stop it. Stop it now.

*Actual quote may vary.

Mark Drolette is a political satirist/commentator who lives in Sacramento, California. He can be reached at mdrolette@comcast.net.