Monday, July 12, 2004

The Last Straw

Y’know, I first started reading talk about this a few months ago. That if Bush started to fall significantly behind in the polls - and polls now show Kerry/Edwards 4 or 5 points ahead of Bush/Cheney in the last few days - there’d be an “October Surprise” or something else that would be manufactured to ensure Bush’s re-election. I thought it was just over-the-top, paranoid delusional doomsaying. I thought those who were saying they’d try to postpone or cancel the election if it looked like Bush was going to lose were raving loons, addicted to reading whacko political forums and upping the ante.

Now, I’m not so sure - I got up this morning and ths was the headline on CNN, “Officials discuss how to delay Election Day" - and I got the same feeling that I got 4 years ago and before the invasion of Iraq.

It seems that Bush is asking for a legal opinion and for Congress to give him the means to change or postpone the date of the election, which is written into the Constitution and election laws. This is just like their doing whatever it took - fudge, lie, and twist arms and laws to get the authorization to use military force against Iraq, and to get a legal opinion allowing the use of torture, and to ignore the Geneva Convention.

This administration has produced nothing but a steady stream of fear and war-mongering, of pointing the finger at bogeymen, of raising the specter of terrorism whenever it became expedient to.

Now, they want the ultimate blank check, permission to hold the nation’s democracy itself hostage. They should get no such thing.

If you can’t vote, you can’t vote them out.

Instead, they need a free bus ticket the hell out of Dodge, and back to Crawford, where Bush can be put out to pasture, as the country tries to recover from the massive damage he’s done to it - an economy hobbled by huge deficits as far as the eye can see, a foreign policy of scorn and arrogance that has cost us most of our allies and all of our goodwill and trust, and the disaster of a war that is breeding the very terrorists that it purportedly was to destroy.

- Bob Woods