So what you mean to tell me, Ms. Martha Coakley, is that you couldn’t hang onto a seat for the Democrats that Ted Kennedy held for 48 years? And that his brother Jack held for eight years before that?

Fifty-six fucking years, Martha!

There isn’t a more liberal state in the entire union than Massachusetts. Gay people can get married up there! The birthplace of Camelot, for fuck’s sake! Joe Kennedy spent a lot of his ill-gotten Prohibition-era bootlegging gains on locking that seat down for his family, and that corrupt old gangster is spinning in his grave in light of your abject failure to keep something Democratic that’s been so for more than half a century.

I’m sure this Scott Brown character is a fine man, an upstanding citizen, and all the rest of it. He ran an above-board, honest campaign. He’s in bed with the Tea Party clowns, but he himself seems like a decent guy who wants to do what’s right for the great state of Massachusetts. Hopefully he can get some distance from the Tea Party Douchebags in the coming months, and make a name on his own as a fine, upstanding Senator.

He’s also the first Republican to hold a Massachusetts Senate seat in 30 years.

How did you blow it, Martha? How? Ted Kennedy passes away with his baby, health care reform, on the doorstep of being passed, and your inept handling of what should have been a cakewalk put the whole thing in jeopardy.

This was our time! The GOP had their run of things and drove the plane into the god-damn mountain! Our country is broke because of them, Martha! Liberals finally had the numbers to get some things changed with no hope for the other side to do anything more than piss and moan and take their medicine.

But you not only lost independents, you also lost jaded Democrats. Few are pleased with the rush job the President and his buddies have been pulling lately, but how did you let Scott Brown hijack Obama’s themes of Change and Standing Up to the Establishment? He’s been in office for exactly one year, and all of the sudden he’s The Man that angry Americans are standing up to? How did you let this happen, in Massachusetts of all places?

Okay, okay, Martha, I’ll lay off of you. By all accounts you were a clumsy candidate who ran a terrible campaign (calling Curt Schilling a Yankee fan? Really, Martha?). There should have been broader support for you in a Blue State such as Massachusetts, but you also should not have given people a reason to listen to the other guy. I’ll leave you be, you’re no doubt disappointed enough.

The problem then, folks, is that if you thought nothing much good was getting accomplished this past year in Washington, going forward less will. The gears have been gummed up, and our politicians are going to fall back on the nouveau-politik strategy of not listening, not compromising, and falling in line with the rest of their party to protect their own personal interests while letting the federal government fester and degrade as a result.

But wasn’t that the way things were moving anyway, you ask? Yes, but Democrats had numbers! They were being the ultimate sore winners, jamming whatever they felt like jamming down the throats of people who opposed them and laughing haughtily because the other guys didn’t have the numbers to do anything about it. With Coakley’s loss, they no longer have those numbers. So nothing – repeat: nothing – is going to get accomplished any time soon in Washington.

Mass. Democratic Congressman Richard Neal may have said it best: “We fell into the trap of post-partisanship. I’m all in favor of being post-partisan, as long as the other party is post-partisan.”

What that means? He thought things were post-partisan before. Hatches will be battened down in light of these results.

Another reason for concern? Whereas Brown and Obama shared Change and Standing Up to the Establishment as common themes while campaigning, in place of Obama’s Hope Brown ran on Anger and Public Outrage. It was a reactionary campaign in response to a situation that a mere fifteen months ago the public chose over the previous one. I realize things change fast these days, but that quickly?

One hopes that the Democrats take this loss for what it is, nineteen alarms going off at once and signaling that, though perhaps they thought what they were doing is right, they’ve given serve back to Republicans in less than one year of total control. Perhaps compromise will re-assert itself as a legislative tool. It’s going to hurt to lose health-care reform in its current form (even though it was a bit of poo-poo platter), but maybe they can reconfigure it into a workable plan created through discussion, issue generating, counter-points, compromise, and consensus building. Perhaps no longer having the power to do whatever they want will force the Democrats in charge to actually debate, instead of pissing the other side off and driving them further from The Center, that magical area where three or four fence-sitters can find common ground with their opposition.

Or, more likely, this is a disaster of epic proportions that signals the end of Hope and Change as guiding principles and sets us up for as contentious a two-year span as we’ve seen in twenty years. Nobody’s happy, on either side. Everybody’s pissed off, on both sides. Hope was replaced by Anger as a winning theme, and the one state Obama thought he could count on to protect his party’s slim margin of filibuster-proofing (because, you know, it’d been in the fold for thirty years) went for the other guys.

We thought it was bad before, but something tells me we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Thanks again, Martha.