The vote in Wisconsin and the defeat of Russ Feingold is the most dispiriting outcome for me in a very dispiriting election.  It almost pushes me to quote my dear departed father, a half-life conservative Republican, to say, “People are just damned idiots.”  I can only hope, as I have hoped for the “independents” and Democrats who put Lieberman back into office two years ago in Connecticut, that the Wisconsinites who locked up their intelligence while voting for Ron Johnson, a plastics magnate with no elected experience, will be utterly embarrased by what they have done; more than that I hope some of them are personally affected, for the bad, by the votes he will cast.  Independents my bootie! Not independent of all the usual bad arguments and untested ideas.

The irony was lost on no one. Senator Russ Feingold, a liberal with a fierce streak of independence who crusaded against the influence of money in politics, was toppled Tuesday in a campaign awash in the kind of unregulated cash he had struggled to keep out of the system.

And in a poignant twist, the loss came, in part, because independents flocked to his opponent, despite Mr. Feingold’s record of one maverick vote after another.

He was the sole senator to oppose the Patriot Act after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. He also broke with President Obama on several occasions, opposing the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, the bailing out of financial institutions in 2008 and the regulation of Wall Street this year, saying the restrictions did not go far enough.

Most prominently, he battled his colleagues to overhaul the campaign finance system; the resulting law, passed in 2002, bore his name and that of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican (who won re-election Tuesday). After being eroded for years, the McCain-Feingold Act was gutted this year by the Supreme Court, opening the way for millions of dollars from outside anonymous groups to gush into campaigns — at least $4 million in Wisconsin, virtually all of it against Mr. Feingold, 57, or for his opponent, Ron Johnson, 55, a wealthy Republican businessman.

NY Times

Russ hasn’t said what he will do next, but it probably won’t be raising hamsters.  We should all hope he finds himself at the center of a left-side-of-the road driving neo Democratic machine.  We certainly need some GD messaging out there!