The Road Ahead

Today is October 9th, and I’m nervous. With less than a month to go until the fall elections, I’m still looking for an October Surprise. Meanwhile, due to the Foley scandal, the Republicans are looking at the very real, and richly deserved, possibility of losing both houses of Congress, i.e. losing power. Speaker Pelosi’s first act might be to start issuing subpoenas. The Republicans have blocked any meaningful investigations into Abramoff, lying about WMD, Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force, et al. The list is long and it ain’t pretty; there have been actual spend-some-time-in-jail crimes committed. But Foley scandal has only reinforced what we all know: there is no depth to which the rightwingers will not stoop to maintain a hold on power. Don’t expect this cornered animal to go down without a fight.

Meanwhile, North Korea has poked us in the eye, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran, sensing the same weakness as did North Korea, didn’t take a poke also in the next couple of weeks. Why?

Think about this: what would our enemies prefer to happen on Nov. 7? My belief is that they’d just as soon see Dubya and the neocons hold onto power and continue the disastrous policies of the last 5 years. In his wildest dreams, Osama bin Laden could have never imagined that, in order to make themselves “safe”, US citizens would be surrendering such bedrock rights as habeus corpus, and that nursing mothers would have their hand sanitizer snatched from them at airports.

Iran could have never believed that the US would allow a Shiite government to take hold in Iraq; after all, back in 2003, Bush said such an outcome was “unacceptable.” Iran also never thought that the US would allow Israel to destabilize Lebanon, the one Arab democracy in the Middle East. Despite all our blathering about Iran’s nuclear program, they are in the catbird seat in the Middle East.

To quote Barbara “Let them eat cake” Bush, “This has all worked out very well for them.”

Meanwhile, the evidence is becoming ever clearer that we are, as we speak, at Peak Oil.

There are desperate people out there, full of fear as they sense that It’s All Beginning To Slip Away. The rats are fleeing the various sinking ships.

At times like this, I remember the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”