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In the last week, there have been millions
of words expended on the subject of the mass murders that occurred
on the ninth day of September in 2001, most of it emotional pornography
of the lowest sort. It's been five years since a small group
of fanatical assassins got together and perpetrated the ugliest
crime in American history, excepting possibly Thomas Kinckaid's
gallery-opening franchise scheme. Roughly three thousand people
died that day when passenger jets were highjacked and flown into
buildings in Washington and Manhattan. Everybody knows this.
The most powerful folks in America at that time announced that
'9/11 changed everything' (the crime is called 9/11 because that
is its birthday). I said to myself, "No, it didn't",
and for the first and only time on any subject, I was wrong.
9/11 did change everything, although not in the way I thought
they meant. For one thing, the Democrats ceased to be a political
party.
I will now make my predictions
for the 2006 elections. There have been dozens of predictions
made by all sorts of clever-boots Washington Watchers, mostly
showing a rout on the Republican side, with them losing control
of the Senate and possibly even the House, although which house
they don't say. I'm guessing the House of Representatives, because
unlike most houses, it is capitalized. The general mood is that
Republicans can't hold on to power because they are hated by
everybody except the looniest of the loons on the extreme 'bring
on the apocalypse' right-wing fringe (a group comprising some
35% of Americans, which is why I have taken to carrying my passport,
a Derringer, a Canadian phrase book, and a thousand dollars in
gold coin wherever I go). I disagree with the general mood.
Pundits, by which I mean people
getting paid to do what I am now doing entirely for free, all
agree that the election will be a national referendum on the
dismal performance of George W. Bush, the 109th Congress, and
Republican radicalism. And they agree that this roistering roost
of rectum rooters has done just about the worst job governing
since Tomás de Torquemada took over the Segovia Rotary
Club. The only imaginable good news is the Congress has worked
fewer days than the famous 'Do Nothing' congress of 1948, so
they haven't done as much damage as they could have. There just
wasn't time. These pundits are all predicting hurricanes, landslides,
pogroms, and double noogies for the Republicans in November.
Nonsense. The Republicans
won't gain any seats, but they're not going to lose more than
a handful, either. Why not? Because of three very important
things, or possibly seven very important things, of which I will
enumerate the three I can remember.
First (I always begin with
the first thing) there's FEAR. Bush and his big bad buddies
are all pounding the fear and terror drums like orangutans on
phencyclidine, and by some incredible coincidence we now see
newly revealed 5-year-old videotape of Osama bin Laden handing
out airline tickets to his pals on the World Trade Center Welcoming
Committee, among many other reminders that America is under attack,
more or less. Americans respond well to fear, because we are
a nation of trembling little newborn kittens with all the valor
and courage of freshly shucked oysters --even though God has
personally chosen America to do His heavy lifting for Him.
Second (always next after first;
I'm a traditionalist) we have GOOD NEWS. The Democrats have
walked into a brilliant Karl Rove trap. They imagined the bad
news would continue to rain down on the Bush parade all the way
through the election, but they forgot an important fact. The
Commercial Media are on Bush's side. Or at least, the radical
Republican side, seeing as those are the folks that will disband
the FCC and see copyright legislation through Congress that allows
Comcast to send dwarfs with cats o' nine tails to your house
to make sure you don't make any illegal copies of those old videotaped
episodes of Three's Company you made back in the 1980s.
So the Democrats find themselves finally and astonishingly acting
just the tiniest bit oppositional to the war in Iraq, the planned
war in Iran, the war on New Orleans, and so on, believing these
are ironclad Bad News subjects for the Republicans, and meanwhile,
instead of the actual bad news about all this stuff, the media
are portraying (to the best of their limited abilities) this
disastrous period as somewhat of a corner-turning time. It's
morning in America all of a sudden, with gas prices conveniently
plummeting, the economy universally described as 'strong' (although
it has all the strength of a spoonful of decaffeinated Nescafé
in a trillion gallons of water), and hey, how about Tom Cruise's
baby? So all of a suddenlike, the Democrats look like the grumpy
old worry-worts that, for reasons unknown to me and probably
historians throughout the future of our species (if any), seems
to be the label the Democrats fear more than any other. Democrats:
the cheerful, mild party.
The second important thing
got a little bit long because Uncle is just a little bit loquaxine
in the volubility department, so I will make the third thing
short, which it is, in any case. PErhaps the third thing lacked
proper nutrition when it was small. I do not know. I only know
that the third thing is sitting in the corner staring at me in
a kind of weird, shifting shadow that cannot be explained by
the room lighting; the third thing looks like one of those dead
ghost children that is always crawling out of evil closets to
kill unwitting Japanese people in horror movies with titles like
Pulse and Ring and Never Leave A Drowned Schoolgirl
In A Cistern. But I digress. The third all-important reason
the Republicans will shake off modest losses this midterm election,
and then beat the Democrats to death with their own severed legs,
is ELECTION FRAUD.
See, nothing has been done
to fix the problems (other than miserable candidates) that lost
the Democrats the last two national elections. Au contraire,
as John Kerry would say. The evil electronic voting machines
have been installed far and wide, although it has now been revealed
that a mongoloid penguin could break into these devices, reverse
any election result it wished, and be gone inside of four minutes,
leaving nothing behind but a stolen election and the faint aroma
of herring. Let us remember the apocryphal quote attributed
to Joe 'Laughing Boy' Stalin: "It's not the people who vote
that count, it's the people that count the votes". There
are other problems, too. Gerrymandering has proceeded apace,
sealing off entire slabs of the landscape from Democrats. Black
people will find the nearest polling station is five hours from
where they live (or used to live before the hurricane). And
the whole anti-immigrant maneuver wasn't just a Republican faux
pas-- it had a severe dampening effect on the desire to vote
of persons of the recent immigrant persuasion, just as the anti-gay
legislative efforts have a dampening effect on the desire to
vote of homosexual queers. People don't vote for revenge. They
avoid voting for revenge. That's why the elections are being
decided by a tiny percentage of eligible voters.
So there is my reasoning for
why the Republicans will enjoy a surprise resurgence at the polls
this November. If one wanted to add a few categories, there's
the perennial favorite God, who will command millions of witless
Americans to vote for Republicans. There's hate, which will
drive many Americans to vote against fags and macacas and towelheads,
regardless of other factors. There's misinformation, as what
we consider to be 'data' is actually 'balderdash' (see The
Path To 9/11I, et al). In the end, however, it will be an
overarching failure of will on the part of the American people
that accounts for the astonishing, last-minute surge the Republicans
enjoy at the polls, leading them to what the utterly guileless
news media will narrate as a 'near-disaster-but-actually-almost-a-
second-chance-referendum-to-continue-to-lead', or 'benefit of
the doubt' (it's coming, and it will be mind-blowing).
Even a modest failure will
be regarded as a mighty triumph for the Republicans this November.
And if there's one thing the Bush administration excels at,
it's making triumph and failure interchangeable. So look out,
Democrats. You can't win, even if you do-- but not to worry,
because you probably won't.
CounterPunch
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