brainrow

Do you ever get the feeling that some people take their devotion to political leaders just a little bit too far?

About a week before Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination, I thought about posting a blog entry that would have said:

Psychic prediction: Harriet Miers will never sit on the Supreme Court.

Actually, there was nothing psychic about it. That evening on television I had seen Republican Arlen Specter and Democrat Patrick Leahy, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They called Miers’ responses to a questionnaire from the committee “inadequate,” “incomplete,” and “insulting.” Also, I’d noticed that Harriet didn’t have a single true champion in the Senate.

I don’t suppose I get any credit at all for posting the prediction after Miers’ withdrawal.

Back in January, I considered posting an entry that would have gone like this:

Psychic prediction: Now that Bush and Cheney have a second term, look for gasoline prices to hit $3.00 per gallon by the end of this year, and $5.00 per gallon by the end of this term.

That one wasn’t psychic, either, but I can’t remember what particular bits of news made me think it might be a good prediction to make. Three-dollar gas has come and, for the moment, gone. Still, I don’t suppose I get any credit for posting the prediction now. Time will tell about five-dollar gas.

I’m going to break with my tradition now, and post a prediction before the event I’m predicting has actually happened. It’s a good one, too.

Psychic prediction: George W. Bush will resign the presidency before the end of this term.

His poll numbers are way down. His dream of fatally wounding Social Security is itself gravely wounded. Because he is weakened, even Republicans aren’t falling into lock step behind his every utterance these days. He’s not going to get his way on Social Security or many other big issues unless he can get an even more strongly right-wing Republican House and Senate in next year’s elections. Right now, that’s not looking very likely.

He could still move parts of his agenda through Congress, but that would require sitting down and negotiating with people who don’t agree with him, and Dubya doesn’t do that. He could accomplish a lot with some give and take, but neither Dubya nor the right-wing leadership in Congress do the “give” thing.

Bush could salvage his presidency by changing the way he operates, but he won’t do that. Every success he has ever had has been handed to him on a silver platter. Bush is almost unique among people at high levels of power in that he has no capacity for adaptation to changing circumstances.

A couple years ago, I read somewhere a very sharp observation about Bush’s handling of 9/11. At the time, the war on terror seemed to be going well. The writer said we had all assumed that Bush had risen to the challenge of history. But perhaps we were mistaken. Perhaps, on 9/11, history had stooped to the simplistic, good-vs.-evil level of George W. Bush. A few years later, that observation seems almost psychic.

Bush can’t change. When he needs to make a bold new mission statement about Iraq for Veterans’ Day, he dusts off some old speeches from last year’s campaign. When he needs people to fill vacancies, he plays musical chairs. He can’t bring in fresh blood. He can’t accept new ideas. He can never, never acknowledge error. He will cling to his myth of infallibility while his presidency swirls down the drain.

Things are bad for Bush now, and unless he changes, they’re only going to get worse. Watch him answer questions sometime. He’s not having any fun. When he accepted responsibility for the government’s failures in response to Hurricane Katrina, he looked like he was being stabbed.

The prediction: Bush is going to get tired of this. He doesn’t have the ability to change, to fix the situation. So, in the words of comedian Bill Maher, he will “lose interest and walk away,” as he has done so many times in the past.

Seriously. You read it here first.

On Election Day, the polling places here open at 6:30 in the morning. Last year, aware that everyone was predicting a record turnout, I went early, arriving at 6:45. There were long lines. The conventional wisdom was that a large turnout would benefit John Kerry. I was happy to see long lines. I was happy to see the lines were even longer when I was done voting.

I waited patiently for about fifty minutes. I overheard a couple of the poll workers talking. One of them wondered why there were fewer voting machines for this record-turnout election than there had been for the previous off-year election. The other said it was probably because the turnout had been so low at the previous election.

At that point, listening in on their conversation, I probably nodded my head. That explanation seemed to make sense. I wasn’t capable of believing what was really happening all across Ohio.

As Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell was responsible for running the election in Ohio. He was also the Ohio chairman of George W. Bush’s election campaign, a job that trumped his obligation to honest democracy for Ohio voters. He presided over a massive voter-suppression effort for the Bush campaign. Long lines at my precinct, which leans toward Democratic candidates, were only a tiny part of his efforts to undermine democracy.

Lines grew longer all day long at Democratic-leaning polling places. Long lines of voters stood in the cold rain outside some polling places until midnight and beyond. When someone suggested using paper ballots for some voters to speed up the lines, Blackwell said voters who didn’t want to wait should just go home.

Well, tomorrow is Election Day again. There are four voter initiatives on the ballot to try to seize power back from the anti-democracy schemers. Of particular interest to me is Issue 5, which “places a bi-partisan Board of Supervisors in charge of Ohio’s elections, instead of a partisan official who backs candidates and takes sides in elections.” Other issues restrict campaign financing, allow Ohioans to vote by mail, and take control of legislative redistricting out of the hands of gerrymandering politicians.

I’m sure Ken Blackwell will be working hard again tomorrow to defeat the will of the voters, if they disagree with him. If I get my way, it will be the last time he’ll have a chance to do that.

I’ve just finished reading Al Franken’s new book, The Truth (with Jokes).

It’s better, I think, than his previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and that book was pretty good.

Franken is not a reporter. He’s not uncovering new Republican scandals. Rather, he takes stories that have already been reported and puts them together very effectively to show the depth of hypocrisy, incompetence, and malice of the Bush administration and its apologists in Congress. Despite the jokes mentioned in the title, it’s a serious book. The jokes aren’t laugh-out-loud funny (although I did laugh out loud a couple times). Mostly they serve as a sort of safety valve. Without them, many readers might collapse sobbing after learning just how bad Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, DeLay, Frist and their ilk really are.

From a chapter about the Iraq war, Franken summarizes:

Let’s face it. You can’t count on them to give you straight information. You can’t count on them to tell us straight why we’re going to war. You can’t count on them to tell us what’s happening over there.

You can’t count on them to do their homework. To keep track of our money. You can’t count on them to punish war profiteers. You can’t count on them to protect our troops.

You can’t rely on them for much of anything. Armor. Veterans’ benefits. You can’t count on them for the true story of how Jessica Lynch was captured, or how Pat Tillman died. Even for how the “Mission Accomplished” sign went up on the USS Abraham Lincoln. They actually lied about that.

You can’t count on them to count terrorist attacks. You can’t count on them to count civilian victims. You can’t count on them to listen to military commanders and send in enough troops, or not to lie about the commanders asking them to send more troops, or to listen to Colin Powell and not torture people, or to not lie about whether the torture policies started at the top.

You can’t trust them to care. About Iraqis. About Americans.

You can’t trust them to do the work of actually signing killed-in-action letters. You can’t trust them not to lie about not signing killed-in-action letters.

You can’t count on them to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever. You can’t trust them not to lie when confronted with those mistakes.

You can’t trust them not to believe their own propaganda.

You can’t trust them. Period.

…

If you want to know what I think we should do in Iraq, it’s that we should think about what we have to do in America. We have to throw these guys out.