Smells Like.....

HSTFridays
10thEditionVille

.....Optimism

War of naked aggression gone bad.....Economists beginning to flay the stag.....Congresscritters indicted....Lobbyists justifying.....Base ankle biting....Braintrust re-upping with prosecutor.....Poll numbers supertanking....

That is today's Bushworld in a nutshell, one year before midterm elections that could give Americans hope, especially if the Democrats manage to seize control of one of the two houses of Congress and force real committee hearings before Bush III Comes To Washington.

But now is not the time for the Dems to sit back, play it safe, and wait for good things to happen at the ballot box in 2006 and 2008.

After all the very fine folks with their hands around the neck of American Democracy have been in trouble like this before. And that was before redistricting, electronic voting machines and trickle-down cronyism:

"Political gibberish is not a purely American art form, like jazz and the safety blitz. But in only 200 years we have raised it to a level of eloquence beyond anything since the time of the Caesars or even Genghis Khan.....

The Democrats' game plan, until then, was to lay low and talk like The Universal Underdog - just another bunch of good guys and athletes who got victimized by the cruel ignorance of Ronald Reagan......They felt strangely out of place, like Mike Tomczak or Turk Schonert, thrust into starting roles they hadn't played for years. Barney Frank, apparently worried that his party members would drool all over themselves in some sort of presidential feeding frenzy, counseled moderation, "There's no point in us trying to reform the NSC....there's no way for us to keep cowboys like North off the staff. It's not wise to try an institutional solution of personal defects," thereby earning a place of his own next to immortals like Hubert Humphrey, Al Haig and Yogi Berra.....

After all, Oliver North is not a Cuban burglar. He is a lieutenant colonel in the United States Marine Corp....."

Hunter S. Thompson, 'The Lord And A Good Lawyer', Dec. 1st 1986
The San Francisco Examiner, Reprinted in Generation of Swine, Summit, 1988 pg. 182

And Karl Rove is neither Cuban nor a Marine, except perhaps in his wildest dreams and/or his favorite Village People video.

But that is neither here nor there. The point is, if the Dems allow Plamegate to go the way of Contragate, start making book on The Jebbinator in 2008.

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