Doing a passable Claude Rains impersonation, Russ Feingold has expressed shock that his fellow Democrats are “cowering” before Republicans.

“I’m amazed at Democrats ... cowering with this president’s numbers so low,” said Feingold yesterday. Yes, he’s shocked I tell you, to learn that Democratic timidity is taking place in his little establishment.

All this shock and cowering comes as a result of the Wisconsin senator and presidential candidate having introduced a censure resolution against POTUS for having committed the criminally and incredibly obvious, although, as the Associated Press reports, “not a single Democrat has embraced [the resolution].”

Why? Well, “they want to see the results of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation before supporting any punitive legislation.”

As soon as you’re through laughing over that one….

Putting the politics in further perspective, the WP reports that ballsy “GOP leaders who had been reeling from the impact of Republican political scandals, an unpopular war and Bush’s mishandling of the port-security issue” -- and, by the way, the Harriet Meirs fiasco and the exploding deficit and twisted intelligence and a nightmarish Medicare program and … you get the point -- “sensed that Feingold overplayed his hand [emphasis added].”

I labeled “GOP leaders” as “ballsy” because the then-ensuing passage, of course, pretty much encapsulated Republican chutzpah. All those self-inflicted wounds from breathtaking malfeasance, yet the GOP still manages to play the ethical nanny -- and gets away with it.

“Many Democrats, while sympathetic to Feingold’s maneuver, appeared to be distancing themselves from his resolution yesterday, wary of polls showing that a majority of Americans side with the president on wiretapping tactics.”

And that, as you know, is the trouble with Democrats. They aren’t just now cowering in the face of Feingold’s gambit: they’ve been cowering for five years in the face of the ballsiest nonsensical government ever perpetrated on the American people. And they’ve done so with polls in hand rather than the truth in mind.

There is real doubt, at long last, whether Democrats ever will realize that public opinion is shaped by outspoken leadership, that ballsiness works, and that only wariness has kept them as second-class political citizens.

When asked Tuesday if he thought Feingold was “grandstanding for 2008,” Sen. Joe Biden answered: “No, I think it’s more of an intense frustration. Do any of you in the news media or any of us have any idea what the president is doing?”

Speaking of intense frustration, Joe, none of us has any idea what your party is doing, either, and all are fed up that it’s doing so damned little of it.