Lest We Forget (11/06)

Our dear cousins in the corporate media have been telling us for awhile now that the election tomorrow is a referendum on the Iraq war and the horrible mismanagement that has led to so much death and ruin suffered by both our men and women in the services but also by innocent Iraqis.

This is largely true.

However, as we know (and it bears repeating), this election is about someone else who (sadly) can no longer run for office again, and that is George W. Bush.

The time to send him packing and limping back to Crawford, Texas has come and gone (though impeachment should very definitely be on the table as a weapon in the Democratic arsenal). However, short of that, we are stuck with him.

I’m prompted to say this based on a couple of links to news and opinion columns that I found today. The first is this account from CNN of Bush’s 35 percent approval rating, and the second is this Editor and Publisher link to a piece by Andrew Sullivan who, though he is primarily a conservative blogger, managed to come up with a great line; based on Bush’s promise to retain Cheney and Rumsfeld through the rest of his term (and seriously now…would Dubya do ANYTHING ELSE?), Sullivan said “this isn’t an election, it’s an intervention.”

Precisely.

The goal tomorrow is to elect a Democratic U.S. House and Senate and totally marginalize Bushco so they CAN’T RUIN ANYTHING ELSE!

And bless CNN, MSNBC and – of course – FOX for not point this out. And bless them, as noted by Eric Boehlert and other “A” listers, for absolutely REFUSING to provide historical context to the unbelievably Godawful approval ratings that Dubya has registered since the carnage of Hurricane Katrina to now and into the future (trust me, people – I’m hardly clairvoyant, but I can tell you that those numbers aren’t going to go anywhere). And bless them for REFUSING also to tie Bush’s numbers with the Iraq war and providing any kind of serious analysis.

(And as always, courageous individuals like Jack Cafferty of CNN and particularly Keith Olbermann of MSNBC stand as exceptions.)

I say bless them because their abject failure to do their jobs gives bloggers such as your humble narrator more credibility.

So yes, we should support all of our candidates tomorrow as much as we can and do our best to elect Democrats because it is the right thing to do for our country. Not just for the war, but for a whole host of other issues, including fixing Medicare Plan D, restoring sanity to the federal budget, supporting stem cell research, preserving the environment, and addressing homeland security for real.

But we should also do it to make sure President Stupid Head and his cabal can’t do any more damage.