Unleashing stern looks.

What a surprise: Republicans feverishly exploiting their echo chamber to pound out a familiar percussive drumbeat that Democrats are weenie girly men who can't be trusted to keep their frilly underwear unsoiled, much less protect this country from terrorists. The very frightening GOP mole Joseph Lieberman parroting the same crass cross-party line when he whined that Ned Lamont's win was a victory for the kind of people involved in the British airline bomb plot. One CNN news anchor called Lamont the "Al Qaeda candidate." Democrats have vowed to mount a vigorous defense. Soon. Maybe. Once they rinse out their underwear. And by vigorous they mean ready to unleash a variety of stern looks.

What is wrong with these guys? They got to get out there. Now. No. Now is too late. They got to build a time machine. Go back a couple weeks to the day after the liquid bomb scare. Issue predated press releases. And drag everyone along with them. Dig up a couple of dead Dems, the three-initialed hero kind like JFK and FDR. Get Lucas or Spielberg or one of those Hollywood guys who wants to stick it to Mel Gibson to animate their corpses and send them out on tour. Do whatever it takes to keep the GOP from locking them into the sissy box. Again. Get Al Gore to put together a PowerPoint presentation and use bar graphs to display exactly which party is at fault for America being less safe now. And slap him silly until he grows his he-man Grizzly Adams beard again.

It's time to fight back. Time to start slamming Bush and his toadies for diverting money for research to screen for liquid bombs to fight a war against the wrong people. We got to remember 60 percent of us aren't happy about invading the wrong country. And 98 percent of Iraqi Sunni Arabs want us out of there. And you can't tell me that's good.

With only weeks left before the midterms, Democrats have to trot out their history of proposing security legislation that the Congressional majority routinely scuttled. Have every single Democratic elected official go out and tell those same silly people who still believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that the reason we don't have bomb detection technology for this sort of thing is because Bush wasted all our money on his rich buddies. Is Paris Hilton going to buy D.C.'s Dulles Airport a liquid bomb scanner? I don't think so. I doubt if Paris Hilton can spell "D.C."

Point out that we still haven't caught the six-foot-seven-inch Arab guy traipsing around the Khyber Pass dragging behind him a solar-powered kidney dialysis machine from the Islamabad Sharper Image catalogue. Point out that Mr. Bush has created more terrorists than he's killed with an emphasis on how odd it is that nobody in this Mickey Mouse Administration is familiar with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

And then have the bravest, most charismatic member of Congress (from the safest district in the country) reel off all of the Democratic plans to secure our borders that have been trashed by Bush's Republican legislators and hoist these squeeze bags on their own petard by warning Americans, "Every vote for a Republican is a vote for another 9/11." And when they come at this Dem with teeth bared, waving sharpened flag poles (and they will) just blow up the paragraph from The Washington Times where Tony Snow and Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman said the same damn thing in reverse. Then brace yourselves for an October ad featuring Hillary Clinton wearing a burqa.

Comic, writer, actor, radio talk show host, social outcast Will Durst would pay to see Ann Coulter in a burqa.