Look, I know you need money and I know you’re busy fighting the good fight. This has been very evident from the ten phone calls I’ve received from your organization this past week. You have asked for an “Edward” or a “Mr. Champion” and the hell of it is that I don’t even recall giving you my phone number during those years when I filled out the form and did, in fact, send you some money. In fact, I left the Home Phone # field deliberately blank. My phone number is listed in the Do Not Call registry. Do these not so subtle clues not indicate to you that I consider talking with hucksters on the telephone about as much fun as being electrocuted by a particularly aggressive CIA torturer?

But being a fairly polite gentleman, I have told you that Edward Champion is not here or that he is in volunteering his services to a leper colony or that it is “currently a sensitive time for us in the Champion household because our pet rabbit just died.” I have tried to intimate with these creative prevarications that I am currently not interested in giving your organization money — in large part because your organization appears to have violated the very civil liberties it purports to uphold (i.e., ferreting out and calling a telephone number that I did not, in fact, give you sanction to call). Bad enough that you folks can’t seem to take the hint and that you can’t seem to scratch my name off your list, but I am also troubled by the belligerent tone that your many representatives voice when they slowly figure out that the man they are talking to may, in fact, be Mr. Champion. They are angry when I refer to their pleas for membership renewal as a “sales call.” Which it quite rightly is, given that you are asking me for money. I am certainly not asking you for money. Perhaps I should start doing this to level the playing field.

Furthermore, why does your organization presume that it’s entitled to money from me? Why are there hostile suggestions that I should be a good liberal and pony up the dough? Do you honestly believe that I am not doing my part? There are, in fact, gestures I commit on a perennial basis that don’t involve a monetary transaction: things that I try to do when I have the time that I feel rather embarassed revealing because I try to keep such acts as egoless as possible. As ACLU founder Roger Nash Baldwin once said, “The smallest deed is better than the grandest intention.” Do you not know your own history?

Because of this, I don’t think I will be giving you money in some time until you can straighten up your act and treat your past donors with something a little closer to courtesy. I will not be giving you money unless you stop this aggressive fundraising approach. I will not be giving you money until you get away from this “you are either with us or against us” mentality common to both left and right these days. In short, I will not be giving you money until you can put the civil back into the ACLU.

To riff off of Ron’s points, there is a certain blonde woman prone to making outrageous and spiteful statements. (I will confess that, this weekend, while encountering a prodigious display of the blonde woman’s books in a bookstore, I did turn each and every book around, so that the back cover faced out instead of the front. This was, of course, one of those small civic duties to ensure that innocent customers weren’t unsettled by that hatemonger’s face while sauntering through the bookstore, but instead bore witness to the ass end of the book, which I thought quite appropriate.)

But I will no longer mention her name here. I will no longer pay her any credence whatsoever. Let her howl like Cerberus to the winds of Hades. Let her publishers dump all manner of money into her books. But her spiteful brand of demagogery means nothing to me. Nor should it mean anything to you. Nor should you heed the easy impulses burgeoning within your solar plexus to remark, posthaste, at her latest enmity.

Because, to employ the dog metaphor further, I know the bitch’s days are numbered. I don’t know when. And I don’t know how. But I know that it will happen.

There comes a time in any hatemonger’s career when the lack of substance embedded within his vitriol eventually comes to bite him in the ass. We saw this most recently with Ralph Reed. We saw this a few years ago with Trent Lott. And we shall see this again with the blonde woman. There will come a time in which the sum total of her abuses will be tallied up so that no rational human being, not even the most reactionary, will give her credence.

And on that day, I will stop ignoring her and cite her by name to remind the world exactly how her hateful and nonconstructive thinking was her downfall.

Here in California, we get to vote on the Devil’s Day, which is only fitting given the number of Democratic dunderheads running for various offices. For example, for the Attorney General’s race, do you want Jerry Brown, the Democratic answer to Alberto Gonzales, or the inexperienced Rocky Delgadillo, who tells us on his website, “My parents named me Rocky for a reason” and doesn’t even offer us a platform, much less a concrete plan of action? Can you really stomach voting for Dianne Feinstein again, the Waffling Queen, as the incumbent Democratic senatorial candidate? Well, there’s always New Age nutcase Colleen Fernald, who lists “organic victory gardens as one of her key U.S. “governmental issue.” (I don’t know what’s more frightening. The batty notion of an “organic victory garden” or the amalgam of the name Orwell gave to Oceania’s cigarettes with “organic.”)

In the end, I’ve decided to vote half-freaks and half-hopelessly corrupt incumbents. It’s the only way I can corral pragmatism with quirkiness. I don’t feel good about it either way. And I’m going to need a cold shower when this is all over. Really, Democrats, is this the best that you can do?

Oh well, at least I can get behind Phil Angelides.

All signs point to yes.