The Fail-Safe option.

A modest proposal for returning civility to public life.

When I hear Republicans – anywhere, but most recently on the talk shows -- calling for détente and for cooler heads to prevail, I think of the movie “Fail-Safe”.

You remember “Fail-Safe”, right? Either the Clooney or the Fonda edition.

Where we accidentally nuke Moscow?

We listen, along with President Henry Fonda (Ah. Those were the days.) and translator Anthony J. R. Nelson Ewing as the American ambassador’s phone melts because he’s at ground zero.

We know the Soviet bombers are on the way.

We hear the President pleading with the Premier that it was all a mistake.

But how could the Premier believe him? I mean it was Hank Fonda, but still…

You want Democrats to play nice? Fine. Show us that you are sincere or shut the fuck up. You impeached a Democratic President for trivia and in doing so you yourself set the non-downwardly-negotiable standard for your own redemption.

Your own “Fail-Safe” test.

Richard Cheney is a liar and a disgrace to this nation, and George Bush is either a liar or the most spectacularly incompetent President since the ill-fated Bernard J. Fife Administration, and when the question on the minds of most Americans is, “Are they lying scumbags or are they just unbelievably stupid and criminally negligent?” you know the time has long since passed to take action.

So apply your own remedy: the one you were so very casual and cavalier about seven years ago.

It is time for Republicans of conscience to call for the resignation of George Bush and the impeachment of Dick Cheney. To use the tools the Constitution affords you to replace the disastrously failed Administration with one that can bring us together and bring our kids home.

But absent that act of atonement and commitment, all of your lovely words are meaningless.

You set the bar, Republicans, and if you will not now belly up to it and pay what you owe and what you demanded of far better men for far lesser offenses, why would we trust the Party of Atwater, Gingrich and Rove to do anything but what you have always done -- stab us in the back and laugh at our weak and foolish ideas of comity and compromise?

Why would we think this is anything but yet another in a long, shameful string of Rovian tactics designed to exploit tragedy, hate and fear for partisan gain?