Dear President Obama,

My assumptions about Washington have been more than borne out by the past year: The Republican leadership and nearly all Republican members of Congress only care about one thing: defeating and punishing Democrats. They don’t have an altruistic bone in their bodies and they have no interest in bipartisanship. Their game plan is like that of any other grueling sport where time is a factor. They want you to lose badly, for anything you accomplish to take as long as possible so that you will achieve as little as possible, and for controversies surrounding your unfinished agenda to get carried into the next federal elections.

I said a year ago that in your first months in the White House you should be very decisive and take advantage of your mandate to get a lot done. Any delay caused by bi-partisan efforts would simply be exploited by the Republicans to propagandize against your agenda, whip unsophisticated voters into a frenzy and scare them to death. This would slow down the process and prevent you from accomplishing much. Was I right?

The message the voters sent you in Massachusetts was not that they hate your health care plan, although Brown did exploit fears that the state was not getting a fair deal. The message was that they don’t want you and Congress to spend anymore time on this. They want you to fix the economy!

You should threaten to pour boiling oil on reluctant Democrats in the House, get them to pass the Senate health care bill, and sign it! If you don’t get substantial reform done, you will lose your base. Some tea partiers will get over their hysteria once they see that previously uninsurable people they care about can get insurance, but only if you get a bill signed in time for this take effect before elections in November.

You need to get health care off the table ASAP and move on so that 90% percent of your time and your messages to the voters are about fixing the economy. People want you to kick the banks hard. You have to stop the perception that you are in the pocket of Wall Street. Be swift and decisive with regulation to avoid dragging out stock market reactions. The sooner you get this done, the sooner the markets will recover. You don’t want to cause any major downturns less than six months before the mid-term elections.

Your message to the voters, passionately delivered several times a week, should be hope. Just like FDR. You know how to do that well. You should continually paint the Republicans as only interested in obstruction and protecting big business at the expense of the people. If you don’t do this you may lose Congress in the fall.

It’s not going to get any better for you with Congress. Your majorities in Congress will only get smaller. You may have just this year to get anything significant done in your time in the White House. Think of this as your last chance. Unlike the Republicans in Congress, I want you to succeed.

Rove's latest dirty trick: The Patriot Act prosecutor switch

Just when you may have thought there might be nothing more to know about the extraordinary malfeasance by the Bush administration, come more sickening details. A little-known provision of the "Patriot" Act apparently was designed for no other purpose than to allow Karl Rove to create more Republican pseudo prosecutors to run for Congress. The plan, as described in a N.Y. Times Op-ed, kills two birds with one stone. It lets Bush axe some particularly effective prosecutors of corrupt Republicans and replace them with inexperienced novices who will then use their new title of U.S. Attorney as a tough-on-crime credential to win a seat in the 2008 election. Diabolical. The change in the Patriot Act allows the newbies to serve indefinitely as interim U.S. Attorneys without ever having to face the embarrassment of rejection by the Senate.

As with so many of these political dirty tricks and abuses of power, Democrats will not have enough guile to use them if they get the White House back, so there is very little downside for the Republicans. Public outcry (and maybe some sense of the integrity that is critical to public trust in the inherent power of the U.S. Attorney post) probably will motivate Democrats to close this wormhole if they get the chance to overhaul the Patriot Act. But who knows? The bar has been set so low it may never get raised back to where it was before Bush came to town. (See followup story.)

Democratic blunder on Iraq.

There's been lots of cheering, applause and praise for Senator Webb's speech for the Democrats last night, responding to Bush's State of the Union speech, but I was dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity of the ending. The final mental image that lingers in viewers' minds is key to the success of any important speech and Webb sent exactly the wrong message. I'll lay out the dots and then connect them as I saw it.

It's become politically fashionable of late to use the words and actions of the other side's heroes to make big points, a trend that seems to grow more prevalent as the national discourse has become further partisan and polarized. Republicans cite FDR and Democrats cite Reagan, which they imagine makes them sound more reasonable. So, some genius speechwriter decided that Webb should refer to Teddy Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower. He ended his speech by reminding us that Ike quickly ended the Korean War because it had become a "bloody stalemate."

The main justification Bush gave in 2002 and 2003 for the invasion of Iraq was that some crazy dictator in a country with a culture Americans don't understand was about to get nuclear weapons and use them against the U.S. As Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Of course, the nuclear weapons and WMD claims weren't true. Now, most people believe that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence information to get public support for the war, but the WMD fear is still there. We've heard a lot in the past two years about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, Iraq's neighbor and likely participant in the Iraq civil war meltdown that could follow if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq.

So what do people think of when they think of the legacy of the Korean War? Most likely, it is North Korea, a nation with a culture Americans don't understand, ruled by a crazy dictator who has nuclear weapons and missiles that he may use against the U.S. If Jim Webb and the Democrats want to convince the American public that we should get out of Iraq, I can't think of a worse example to use than the Korean War.

If any of the New York Times reading, latte drinking, sushi eating liberals that Webb surely consulted for his speech had bothered to see Team America: World Police, they would have realized what a blunder it would be to end a pullout-from-Iraq speech with a reference to Korea. If the Democrats want to lead us out of Iraq, they'll have to be a lot smarter in making their case.