You can't say you weren't warned. It was repeated over and over again: just because there is no presidential election, does not mean that it is not as important to vote in 2010 as it was in 2008. The bleat in this space went this way:

We are at a very difficult point in our history. The moment we are in always seems more significant than those of the past, and I suspect this election, or this crossroads may not be as much a moment of decision as it seems today, but, as Rachel explained perfectly the other day, we almost seem to have lost the will to do anything but hunker down, tell each other why we don't trust one another and whimper about our broken political system. This is not the time to put one's head in the sand, or to complain about things we wish the President had done, but did not. Dreaming about third parties, or making ours more liberal, has no place as we approach this election.

... this is not the time for Rockefeller Republicanism. We've got a country that is sinking. We've got a country that is on the verge of a crisis in the debt ceiling issue, and that's just one symptom of much larger problems.

---Former Minnesota Gov Tim Pawlenty on Meet the Press, July 10, 2011

This has become an annual rite: the recitation of a blogger, one who sees himself as a defender of all that is the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society about love for this so secular holiday and for this country in which we were blessed to live, and for the luckiest of us, to have been born here. It applies no less this year than any other even if the ties that have bound us all together as one, often frayed, and pulled apart, are really on the eve of destruction.