I'm no political junkie.

For one thing, a junkie needs a fix just to keep his head from popping off. Then there's the fix itself: pure poison. It accomplishes nothing except to keep the junkie on that yo-yo of tension between up and down, between satisfaction and craving.

There's nothing complicated, compulsive or mysterious about my reasons for posting on TPM. I'm not here to wind and unwind on the spindle of political rhetoric. I'm here because I want to help spin the direction of our politics one way and one way only: toward electing Obama and empowering ourselves to solve common problems.

I'm not interested in the political junkies playing on their rhetorical yo-yos. I pay no heed to those who can't decide who they support, those who alternately write disparaging posts about McCain, then about Obama. They are habitual fence-sitters who grind their axe on some high ideal only to carp loudest about the candidate most in tune with that ideal; that candidate is always Obama.

I am least interested in the poseurs who pretend their haughty critiques of Obama are some elite form of art, punditry worthy of prize money and scholarly accolades. Those who invest more in talking about change than in making it happen. They hound Obama to inflate their egos, possessed by the same pointless hunger that consumes the junkie. They not only hurt themselves, they hurt us all.

Like junkies, birds sometimes gorge themselves to death. In the rarefied branches of discourse here at TPM, the tweeting and twittering political junkies score points without purpose, like a throng of bird brains engaged in collective confusion.

Who do they really support? How can they expect their petty critiques to build a better life for themselves and others?

If only they would come down from their perches, stop their fence-sitting and do something purposeful and constructive, I might read their posts more often. But I'm too restless for that. While the junkies get their fixes and the elite meet to tweet, history races to collide with the future.

There is an election to win, a country to rescue and a world to make whole. We cannot afford the opiate of political neutrality or the luxury of flight. We can't just fly away or fry away. We have one chance to take a stand. This is it. Now is the time.