No, I'm not referring to Barbara Streisand, Alec Baldwin, Bruce Springsteen, nor the rest of the Hollywood glitterati in the twilight of their careers as entertainers.  I'm referring to the death of the Democratic Party. Its hysterical mouthpieces, the likes of Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Jane Smiley, Susan Estrich, Lawrence O'Donnell and James Carville may continue to enjoy the blessings of life and liberty, but their pursuit of happiness may be significantly impaired.  Their recent histrionics, reaching a climax with  O'Donnell's call for secession, have provided the same pyro—spectacle as the death of a star, exploding into a nebula, then collapsing onto itself in a black hole where even light cannot escape.

How do astrophysicists know that a star has died? From the telltale gamma ray burst signaling the violent dispersion of the superheated iron core. And from the phantasmagoria visual remains of a nebula.  Eons before the electromagnetic expirations are evident, the core of a star runs out of fuel— first hydrogen then helium.  Starved for sustenance, the inner layers shrink, gradually reheating under their own mass while the outer layers expand, cooling off and losing brightness looking bloated and ruddy—called a red giant.  Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Ted Kennedy, doesn't it?

When the inner mass has become so overwhelmed that electrons and protons have fused into neutrons, it explodes setting off  radioactive energy waves over millions of light years. Which, not to be outdone, has a match in Al Gore and Howard Dean, the Democrats'  'death star duo' who, seem to have taken their cues here on earth from shrieking Elsa Lancaster in the 1935 classic horror film  The Bride of Frankenstein.

How do we know when a political party is dying?   When it runs out of ideas and its constituents die or move on.  The American political universe is strewn with the remnants of small stars, the white dwarfs, fleeting fringe players like the Free Soilers, the Know—Nothings, the Mugwumps or Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose, the Progressives, the Libertarians, Ross Perot's Reform party or the more recent Greens.  They all had potential energy for an election cycle or two then disappeared in a nanosecond, like a zirconium filled flashbulb.

The Democrats recent erosion has much in common with non—conforming religious sects who flourished for a season and then disappeared just as quickly. The Shakers, actually persisting against great odds, are best recalled for their round barns designed so the devil couldn't find a corner to hide, straight—back chairs, brooms, tasty herbal recipes, and 'Simple Gifts' popularized by Aaron Copeland.  But more important, their austere and eccentric ideas led them to literally run out of people.  Enforcing sexual abstinence even among married couples, asserting that procreation was a distraction from religious devotion, the Shakers relied on conversion to perpetuate their community. Predictably there are only a handful of Shakers surviving today at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine.

The Episcopalians, determined to outrace the Shakers down the human biology dead end, now worship gay and lesbian marriage above all else. Close on their tail are the Presbyterians, who recently pledged allegiance with the Palestinian terrorists and will likely hold a memorial service for Yasser Arafat. And so it goes, as mainline Protestants, abandoning their apostolic mission while embracing the Democrats' radical social agenda, are seeing their ranks shrivel up by 10% or more every five years.

The Democrats' depleted hydrogen may be traced to the indiscriminate bombing unloaded on the Plain of Jars and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, when their world—picture was forever cauterized by revulsion and moral indignation.  Roger Warner in his fine expose, Back  Fire, about the CIA adventures in Laos in the 1960's,  pinpoints the genesis of the Democrats' remorse about the war they started. Warner refers to the 'the two million tons of bombs...which worked out to two—thirds of a ton for every man, woman and child.'  Even worse than the horrors in Vietnam, as Warner continues to quote part of a column by Anthony Lewis of the NY Times, 'the most appalling episode of lawless cruelty in American history, the bombing of Laos.'

The Democrats' retreat from any semblance of a muscular foreign and national security policy was further provoked by the Sen. Frank Church committee investigations of the 'CIA's misdeeds.' Warner goes on to skewer Jimmy Carter, who installed Adm. Stanfield Turner as CIA Director 'a moralist who knew little about the intelligence business.' Recalling a conversation with Bill Lair, a CIA operative, Warner writes 

'Turner's management replaced the old vice of excess activism with the new vice of excessive caution.  At least in the old days, according to Lair, people had believed in what they were doing, even if they made mistakes. Now they didn't do anything at all, even for the right reasons and with the right people.' 

The Democrats' tightly zippered policy of multi—national platonic love since the Iran hostage crisis fits perfectly with the forced celibacy of the Shakers.

And on the domestic front who is still buying into the Democrats' brand of utopian socialism?  Certainly not Nixon's silent majority joined by Reagan Democrats and now bolstered by suburban blacks, Hispanics, firefighters, independent truck drivers, coal miners and hard working God fearing regular people all over the heartland.  They refuse to be brainwashed into believing their lives aren't much better than how Hobbes described life in the 17th century, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'.  

Democratic Party groupies are now agonizing between a quick splat after free—falling from a twenty story building or a slow bleed in a hot bath. The less honorable cowards among them are still lined up outside the Canadian consul offices despite being denied entry as political refugees.  Whatever method they choose to leave the scene, they will be haunted by Joe Lieberman's remarks at the National Press Club in early August when he predicted that the leaders of the  Democratic Party  ' could send us back to the political wilderness for years to come.'

The last major political party consigned to the wilderness was indeed the Democrats, losing ground to the new Republicans who inherited the remnants of the Whigs in 1854. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig as a young man, became President in 1860 as a Republican. The Republicans enjoyed a nearly unbroken 70 year span of dominance through McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. The Democrats finally found their voice in FDR but lost it again during the Eisenhower years and of course to Ronald Reagan's resurgence and now to the most unlikely of standard—bearers, George W. Bush.  Will the 21st century Democrats find a second wind or be consigned to the absolute zero frigid wilderness of the cosmos?

If the elite liberal media editorials and op—ed pieces are reliable telltales, lately rivaling the most virtuosic gamma ray showers and spectacular super novas, the Democratic party, as we know it, may already be gone.

Geoffrey P. Hunt is an electronics executive in Massachusetts