Will the real America please stand up?

Ever since Bush was reelected, it's felt like someone switched countries on us when we weren't looking. On Tuesday, we have the chance to start taking it back.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War, 2006 Elections

Nov. 7, 2006 | If the Democrats don't grind the Republicans into the political dust Tuesday, I'm moving to Transylvania. I really don't want to spend my waning years in Karl Rove's remake of "Night of the Living Dead," a doomed member of the reality-based community besieged by hordes of flesh-craving zombies. I'd rather take my chances in the land of Vlad the Impaler.

It may seem harsh to accuse those who plan to vote for the GOP of being uncoordinated, shuffling cannibals who won't stay dead. But it's difficult to come up with any other explanation. Because this election, in the immortal words of Dick "waterboarding in defense of liberty is no vice" Cheney, is a no-brainer.

Let us review our choices. In one corner, we have the worst president in American history, a feckless know-nothing whose résumé includes launching a disastrous war for no reason, illegally spying on Americans, trashing the ancient writ of habeas corpus, ignoring the catastrophe of global warming, running up a ruinous national debt, pouring billions into the pockets of the super-rich, severely weakening the military, doing a heck of a job in New Orleans, and making America more hated abroad than at any other time in its history.

In the other corner ... well, actually, who even cares who's in the other corner? Unless the Democrats were Satan himself and his minions, the choice would be obvious. Come to think of it, even then it'd be an easy call. After all, say what you will about the devil, he knows how to get things done. With Lucifer at the helm, the Brownies, Rummies, Wolfies, Bremers, Tenets and other colossal Bush administration failures would not be praised, given Presidential Freedom Medals and sent off to head the World Bank. They'd be basted with jalapeño butter and roasted slowly (actually, eternally) on a mesquite grill.

So anything short of a major GOP defeat will raise serious questions not just about the American people's political beliefs but their sentience and even their species. It is true that certain animals have been known to engage in self-destructive behavior, but a Republican victory in the midterms would go well beyond all previously recorded examples and could force scientists to consider the possibility that many apparent humans in North America are, in reality, disguised ferns or other biological anomalies.

Since that is unlikely, a Democratic landslide would seem to be all but certain. But there's one little problem: the 2004 election, an event that cast more doubt on the theory of evolution than a million Bible-thumping sermons.

Just two years ago, Americans went dutifully to the polls, closed the curtains, and in the sacred privacy of the booth voted for ... four more years of the same idiot who had already surpassed such luminaries as Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding to establish himself as the biggest dodo ever to sit in the Oval Office.

If they did it once, could they do it again? Even though these are the midterms, and Bush is on the ballot only symbolically, the possibility seems insane. But it seemed insane two years ago, too.

It's true that 9/11 was a serious anomaly, a massive thumb on the political scales. The 2004 elections can't be understood without understanding that people do weird things after they've been mugged, especially if they don't know who mugged them. And it's also true that in 2004 Iraq had not yet descended into total hell, and Katrina had not yet swept away the idea that Bush might possess some minimal competence. Nonetheless, by November 2004, it was amply clear that Bush was an unmitigated disaster.

It was already obvious that Bush's administration had lied its way into Iraq. And the war had turned irrevocably south. The dual uprisings in Najaf and Fallujah had made a mockery of the administration's claims that the insurgents were just a few Baath Party "dead-enders" or foreign jihadis. The appalling Abu Ghraib story had broken. The Middle East was melting down. Osama bin Laden was still at large, and the Taliban were creeping back in Afghanistan. At home, Bush's invasion of Iraq and the Machiavellian tactics of his political mastermind, Karl Rove, had left the country more bitterly divided than at any time since World War II. Domestic initiatives? Besides huge tax cuts for the rich, an easy-for-Leonardo Medicare reform and some desultory gay-bashing aimed at the GOP's troglodytic base, zilch.

And on the second day of November the American people looked upon what Bush had done, and they said it was good.

Next page: Most people I know still haven't recovered from Bush's reelection