No, I'm not hiding, I've just been both too busy and too fucking enervated about politics at the moment to post anything that wouldn't devolve into the literary equivalent of frothing at the mouth. But I'm working on a fairly long observational post that may or may not appear here within the next couple of days.
In the meantime, this is a good little article.
"The Scandals Finally Break" by Kevin Drum
I know I'm not the only leftie out there who's had those quiet moments of desperation, those brief interludes of thinking the unthinkable: a second Bush Term. God, just typing that out almost makes me physically ill. However, ever the optimist, I've been thinking about what good might come of it. Believe me when I tell you that we are actively, seriously figuring out a way to move to Vancouver, BC if November 2nd goes to the Amazing Smirking Chimp. Realistically, it probably won't be possible for us to do so, but neither was the move to Portland and we did that so who knows. Anyway, worst case scenario, he manages to steal the election just enough to squeak by for another reign of terror...then what?
Well, if you believe as I do at my worst moments that he's the Anti-Christ, it would mean Armageddon's probably not long around the corner. But in my more lucid moments, I think that there will be one good thing to come of it: the assured impotency of the GOP for the better part of a generation. Because if anything's going to put a stake through the heart of the Republican party in its current ugly incarnation and permanently turn the American public away from from its dangerous flirtation with the right-wing radicals and the horror show that has been their ascendancy. Well, for the next 50 years, anyway.
Look, we all know the Bush Administration is evil incarnate. The mind scarcely has the energy to boggle anymore at the true breadth and depth of the various and sundry scandals, atrocities, crimes, and bad acts committed by this man and his administration. And, as Kevin Drum so ably states, those are some big-ass chickens coming home to roost. If we end up getting stuck with him again, I'll derive no small amount of sadistic glee from watching him pay the price for his tyrannical policies, watching him flee in terror from the kind of popular uprising not seen since the French Revolution.
A sick part of me wants to see Bush finally see the consequences of amoral policy-making, wants him to see the catastropic consequences of taxing the low- and middle-classes into oblivion, of letting the rich amass even more obscene wealth at the expense of our nation's economy, of allowing the energy companies to set the energy policy, of throwing away environmental protections, of outing covert agents and desclassifying information for political gain, of making backroom deals with Baathist flim-flam men, of pushing out science in favor of the Bible, of making stupifyingly outrageous demands of our educational system and then underfunding it, of calling it a win when the big bombs go boom and not bothering to worry about what needs to be done afterward, of letting big pharma get away with extortion of the most vulnerable among us, the consequences of all these and countless other acts of malfeasance he's perpetrated just in the last four years. He's lived the frat boy dream his entire life, never had to answer for his actions, never had to pay for his mistakes, never known suffering or want or desperation, never had to survive in a world that seems at times designed to crush you. It's about fucking time he did.
PLEASE NOTE: Am I panicked about Kerry's chances? Hell and no. Concerned a little, yes. But there are 60 days left in this election, which might as well be a paleolithic age when it comes to politics, which is to say that there's a lot left to happen between now and November 2nd. The Chimpster and the Rethugs are basking right now in their little confab (though as conventions go, I have to say that the suckitude on display won't likely be matched in the near future, my bias not withstanding) and they're high on life after the damage of the Swiftboat Shitheads for Profit. We're a little battered, sure. But this is what we expected, this is the game they were planning to play all along, and all they've managed to accomplish after slinging the mud like insane little monkeys during the month that our side had to go dark (funding restrictions and campaign law) is a whopping tie.
