Dear Dr. Democrat:

I find that since the election I am just really feeling defeated. Reading the news is so painful right now.

Things in Florida are beyond bad. The legislature has no brakes and is loaded with everyone aboard and steering right over the side of the mountain. They have two priorities right now: overriding all Crist’s vetoes, including the ultrasound and education bills; and challenging the recently passed redistricting amendments. The money flowing toward that particular pursuit blocks out the sun.

Nationally, I am disgusted and disheartened as well. I am so ashamed of the Republican women in Congress who joined the filibuster against the Paycheck Fairness Act, and I get sick to my stomach at the thought of people who quote Genesis to dispute climate change chairing the House energy committee.

And if I see one more thing about Sarah Palin or her redneck mean girl children, I will scream.

Will I get past all this? Right now things seem catastrophic and it’s hard to see them as manageable.

Gobsmacked in Gainesville

Dear Gobsmacked:

I don’t mean to trivialize a good catch phrase but I promise you: It gets better. Or, more accurately, for the GOP, it’s gonna get worse, much worse.

Polling up to Election Day was the weirdest I’ve ever seen, no exaggeration. Huge percentages of swing voters were signaling that they planned to vote for Republicans even though they had a lower opinion of Republicans in Congress than of Dems in Congress. In the one poll I’ve seen since the election on this, these voters are not particularly happy with their results of their efforts. Approval of the GOP has spiked all the way to 38 percent.

So the GOP did not “earn” their win of the House. It was handed to them by swing voters out of petulance — they voted for Gops in their districts to show their displeasure over the economy. Never mind that it took 10 years to dig out of the Great Depression.

Boehner and McConnell are already screwing up big time. They are both truly hacks and they’ve got nothing new up their sleeves. Their strategy is to defeat Obama in 2012 and they’re going to keep at the “party of no” tactic to get it done. They will filibuster everything in the Senate and do a bunch of retrograde stuff in the House — repeal HCR, defund NPR, etc. It won’t take long for this to annoy swing voters. I predict that the GOP’s 38 percent approval will be the highest they will achieve over the next two years.

Boehner faces a new wild card, however — not sure if the tea baggers are going to vote in lockstep with him, and if they don’t, the “party of no” will crumble. Without that weapon, Boehner’s got nothing. The tea baggers will be his biggest challenge — and ironically their election to the House is a direct result of the “party of no” tactic. Now there are about 100 new Michele Bachmanns, Louis Gohmerts, Steve Kings and Virginia Foxxes. These new folks are really going to annoy moderates and energize liberals. I’ll bet half of them are defeated in ’12, if not by Dems in the general by establishment Republicans in the primaries.

Shorter term, I expect we’ll see the GOP in Congress in utter disarray by summer and collapsing in the fall. If so, they won’t be able to do the bidding of the Koch brothers, et al, who handed them this opportunity, and those big funders will redeploy their donations from the tea bagger astroturf groups back to mainstream establishment GOP causes and candidates. That means Dick Armey will be defunded and Rove’s group and others like it will become the kingmakers.

As for Florida, I promise you: Rick Scott will go down in flames, and his undoing will come from his own party in the legislature. He has no constituency there and when he starts to screw up — and the right-wing self-funding amateurs and celebs always do, because, surprise, surprise, politics is like everything else: experience matters — the sharks in his party in the legislature will smell blood and go after him while the weenies in his party will see disaster looming and abandon ship. By this time next year, he will be a lonely, rejected pol with polling under 40 percent, maybe even under 30 percent. He is going to blow a giant hole in the Florida GOP. No way it won’t happen.

Save this letter. This is not a prediction. It’s a promise.

Yours truly,

Dr. D