Election Eve News Digest

Don't count your chickens... -- Picture courtesy Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I've thrown together some election eve tidbits here. It's a grab bag of political topics -- fairly random, no particular order...

As we draw down to the last hours before the 2006 mid-terms, it looks like the races are all tightening. Polling organizations think that the GOP will do better at getting out the vote this year, in spite of the GOP lagging behind Dems 47% to 43%. On a more optimistic note (for a Democrat that is), Chris Matthews predicts that the Dems will gain 27 seats in the House, and squeak by winning 6 seats in the Senate. After 2004, I can only feel that American voters will disappoint; I'm predicting that the Dems squeak by w/ a tiny edge in the House, but still lose the Senate. So much for "lessons learned". We've talked about partitioning Iraq -- maybe we need to partition the United States too. If that happens, I would call Texas "Bush-landia".

Governor Rick Perry of Texas has ventured into religious territory and says that only Christians can go to heaven. If this were not Bush-landia, Perry would feel very silly making such an assertion -- risking the alienation of non-Christian (and I can only suppose, Godless) voters. Following my stream of consciousness, Bush-landia calls to mind W. Bush. A friend of mine says that if Bush fired Rumsfeld, he would replace him with someone as bad or worse. He's right; Bush has run off anyone with a conscience -- Collin Powell and Andrew Card come to mind. His remaining gang is a crew of yes-men with Mafia-like social skills -- Rove, Rumsfeld and Cheney. A scarier threesome is hard to imagine. It's better to retain Rumsfeld on the ropes. Rumsfeld is a punching bag who no longer gets any respect from the military that he "commands" -- let him stay there. Maybe Bush figures Rummy can draw fire away from himself, who knows.

Another headline -- Saddam just got the death penalty on election eve. Imagine that? Shiites are delighted and Sunnis are angry. Considering that Shiite death squads are maintaining Saddam's tradition of torture and bludgeoning, it hardly seems like progress.

I'm listening to David Limbaugh's book "Bankrupt" which describes the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. He asserts that in fact two million Iraqi intelligence documents discuss Saddam's desire to amass nuclear weapons. He cites a Fox news report that the Taliban had invited Iraqi officials to its meetings prior to 9/11. "Several sources", he says, including the Boston Herald, believe that Saddam actually had WMD but moved them to Syria prior to UN searches. If there were a credible thread to any of this, it would be pursued by no less than Bush and Cheney themselves. Satellites would be mapping out the Syrian countryside and every "smoking gun" document would be traced. The fact is, these claims are all lame. They remind me of Arkansans who've been abducted by aliens; they only have hazy, anecdotal third-party reports to support the story. Mr. Limbaugh, to avoid being laughable, here's something you need: it's called HARD EVIDENCE. Without that, you can't be serious.

Well, it's nail biting time. In 48 hours we'll have a new Congress -- let's hope we get some much-needed gridlock. It's a tradition for Presidents in their final months to have lame duck status, and we want to observe that tradition.

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