Paul Hackett for U.S. Senate

This is the race in '06 I really wanna see. Paul Hackett is the guy who carried 48% of the 2nd District in Ohio this summer in a special election, the most conservative district in Ohio and said to be one of the most conservative in the nation. The winner? Uhm, you remember the hideous crone who called John Murtha a coward on the House floor a few weeks back? Yup! That hideous crone.

Well Hackett's making another run, this time for Mike DeWine's Senate seat, and one that had been considered safe until the so-called Culture of Corruption festered to a level above subliminal in the American voter's consciousness.

Hackett's beauty, meanwhile, is he's the next generation, a new breed of Democrat... one who's unafraid to, well, act like a man:

A TV crew is setting up nearby, but Hackett doesn’t seem to care. “What’s your fuckin’ problem?” the candidate snaps. “You got something to say to me? Bring it on!” Hackett, all 6 feet 2 inches of him, is nose to nose with the heckler. “Problem?” he taunts. The man turns around and storms away.

“These guys in the Republican Party adopted this tough-guy language,” Hackett tells me, still steamed, an hour later. “They’re bullies. They’re offended when somebody takes a swing back at them.”

If you haven't heard by now, Hackett's a marine, fresh off a tour of duty in Iraq. His references to Bush and Republican decision-makers as "chickenhawks" with the follow-up of "Yeah, I said it! I meant it! I stand by it!" ought to be used for one of those feel-good pharmaceutical commercials. This jarhead's a tonic to what's clearly been a decades-long malaise of Democratic inbreeding. Hell! I'd be running to my doctor for a prescription if the FDA wasn't in Republican hands right now.

Nevertheless, Chuck Schumer and the Democratic "leadership" want the inbred's favorite, a change of heart for them now that Sherrod Brown changed his mind about not running. Brown's not a bad choice of Democrat, given his stature as a progressive and his recent good fight against CAFTA in the House.

But I don't want Senator Schumer or John Kerry or Hillary deciding who gets to represent the party and who doesn't. That's precisely where their inbreeding is manifested. So I say let the Democratic voters in Ohio -- and everywhere else -- decide on who their nominees oughta be. There's enough anger out there and it'd be good to tap into it. And God bless 'im, Hackett just isn't taking the hint:

“The Democratic Party is like an addict,” he says. “They’re addicted to failure. I want to help the party. The question is, how do you help someone that doesn’t want help?”

Like I said, he looks like what Democrats should look like.