BUSH PRESIDENCY – R.I.P.
A PRE-MORTEM
Why can’t the commentariat just come out and say that the consensus is that John Kerry is going to win – maybe big and maybe early – on Tuesday? They all know it, they all act like it, they are all speculating about Biden at State, Sam Nunn (eesh) at Defense, Holbroke at NSC, etc. If the Bushies were doing a slow, incremental-but-certain climb up the national and battleground polls the way Kerry has since the first debate, you know damn well there would be at least one smug wingnut (from the Wall Street Journal; the National Review; the Weekly Standard and from, well, Planet George Will) on each of the Sunday morning talk-fests, waving their hands and talking about the second Bush administration, who’s in, who’s out, whatever. As it was this morning, though, nothing. "Boy, it sure will be close" is the best anyone could come up with. We are left to read between the lines of the faces representing the campaigns for the past week: Exuberant Dems and dour Bushies-in-denial.
The sense of Bushie angst is most palpable over at Fox News, where the staff is probably wondering what they’ll do now that their primary function as the Bush house organ and Amen-chorus is about to go the way of all out-of-power propagandists, except that they will probably be spared the firing squad of some, uh, less polite nations. Although they deserve to be moved back in the hallway – Helen Thomas, come on down – they can probably expect at least to be moved a few rows back in the White House press room. Carl Cameron will have lots of time on his hands to attend Bush staff reunions.
In the meantime, it’s hard to say what the shiny-faced studio Fox-heads (where do they get those people?) are going to talk about without the wonderful imaginary land of Bushworld to bring to their breathless viewers. Perhaps they will discover another world with real problems, real disasters and real news. Might be too icky for them. I predict a major staff turnover; the station goes to all black-and-white; and the nation is portrayed as dark and desolate. Maybe Big Bother wasn’t really the Government; maybe he was the voice of the Angry Opposition.
Even the bottom-of-the-barrel Drudge Report seems to have given up the Ghost. After blaring "breaking news" all last week, trying to cover for the Bushies’ incredible failure to guard Iraq’s primary weapons depot, the main story tonight (if you can believe it, and why would you?) is light attendance at a Chelsea Clinton event for Kerry. As Junior was scrambling to escape responsibility for something he was responsible for again, both Drudge and the soon-to-be looking-for-sponsors Rush Limbaugh got sucked in to trumpeting the press conference of a soldier who claims to have taken tons of something (but not the dangerous weapons of concern) out of the depot in late April 1993. Drudge gave it the full, silly "developing..." play and Limbaugh was actually dumb enough to go live to the conference (ducking out for a "commercial after it was clear he had been had). If either of them had any integrity, shame or dignity, they would have ripped whoever in the Bush hierarchy gave them the bad tip. As it was, the story simply fell off of Drudge’s page and Limbaugh (along with Hannity and the other talk-radio clowns) simply lied about what the guy said. Limbaugh never did let the facts get in the way of a good pro-Bush story.
The mainstream media, meanwhile, will have to figure out: a) why did we go along with the charade of the Bush regime in the first place?, b) how did the majority of the voters figure out that the Bushies were a radical bunch of nuts when we avoided the issue like the plague; c) how do we back off of our patronizing acceptance of radical right-wing ideology as somehow normal?; and 4) what the hell were we thinking when we let the invasion of Iraq happen without critical thinking – in fact, why were we out-in-the-open cheerleaders for a disaster?
But the Masters of Media are even less likely than Bush holding a smoking gun over a dead body to admit a mistake. They will ascribe Bush’s defeat as a failure of strategy (should Cheney have flown all the way out to Hawaii on the Sunday before the election? Should Bush have spent any time at all in New Jersey?) rather than a sound rejection of his radical regime, his Stupid War, his lame puppethood and his disastrous record on all levels. Kerry will be damned with faint praise, portrayed as the lucky beneficiary of (they will say) irrational hate of a dim-witted son of privilege who may have been inept and couldn’t talk too good, but, gosh, he was a great guy if you got to know him. "If only everyone could get to know him in a small-group..." "Sure, he was stupid and wrong. But he called me Skippy ‘cuz I liked peanut butter..."
In the end, Bush couldn’t even live up to his own low expectations. If he hadn’t taken such radically wrong actions that ended up in thousands of Unnecessary Dead; hadn’t taken the good will of the world after 9/11 and turned it into world-wide eye-rolling ("What’s with this guy?", in 250 languages); hadn’t allowed his wealthy contributors to move a cot into the Oval Office and write the laws that made them rich(er) – if he hadn’t done all that and more, he likely would have been re-elected by a mostly-sleepy populace that didn’t give a rip, as long as he didn’t get in the way. As it is, Kerry will have to spend at least his first two years in office just trying to repair the damage caused by these dangerous bozos at home and around the world.
The Bushies and their wealthy supporters should be happy with the incredible gifts they have given themselves over the past four years. But they won’t because they are and always have been nothing but self-serving greedy bastards. And greedy bastards always want more.
10:11:55 PM 
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