From TruthOut
By Elizabeth de la Vega

Last year during the holiday season, I wrote a piece called “Shoot the Moon and Forget About the Bell Curve,” which was published at TomDispatch.com. In it I asked: Is it futile – or foolish – to continue working to hold the Bush administration to account for defrauding the American people into war, even though the odds of success seemed slim given the Republican-controlled Congress. My answer was a resounding “No!” It is neither futile nor foolish to continue to push for justice despite seemingly intractable obstacles; on the contrary, we have no reasonable choice but to do so.

Twelve months later, it seems we have moved three steps forward and two steps back – or perhaps it is the other way around. Democrats routed the Republicans in an election that was a virtual clarion call for accountability and an end to this war. But now we have our new House leader Nancy Pelosi saying impeachment is “off the table” and Senator Harry Reid considering whether to send more troops to Iraq.

Okay. Maybe the Democrats are not listening, but does that mean we stop talking? No. It means we have to speak up – more loudly and more often. Maybe the Democrats are strategizing themselves into paralysis, but do we give up and say, fine, whatever you guys think is best? Of course not.

Persistence in the face of overwhelming odds is something I think about a lot at this time of year. It was six years ago that George W. Bush received his best Christmas gift ever – the presidency – from the United States Supreme Court. And every year since then, I’ve thought about the night of December 13, 2000, when the president made his formal acceptance speech. I remember it well: Bush speaking from the Texas House of Representatives about a bipartisan foreign policy and his plan to reunite the country. It’s not that I was particularly interested in the president or even the election at that point. I wasn’t. I had taken a leave of absence from my job as a federal prosecutor in San Jose and flown 3,000 miles across the country to be with my sister. So I watched the speech while sitting on a portable cot, looking at a hospital TV suspended from the ceiling, while my sister lay in a bed next to me amidst a tangle of tubes. She was dying.

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