I know: Everybody hates it when I get like this

Here we are, two weeks away from election day, voting day, v-day, judgment day, whatever, and 2001 days after that W guy declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. And it is only days away from the onset of a cold winter for many. But the boys on Wall Street, all those well-manicured and cared-for cronies of Hank “Santa Claus” Paulson, will all be warm and snug, and able, if all else fails (and it damn well might) to burn those piles of billion dollar notes that got handed out by Congress, recently. Oh, they will be fine. In fact most of them won’t even be on Wall Street: they will be offshore somewhere in the sun, with their (our) money. What does this have to do with the election? Funny you should ask.

Anyone worth his salt, and who has any inclination to read anything at all, knows that the several hundred page “bail-out” bill is full of crap…er, pork. It was bad enough when it was $700bn, but in order to get it passed, our public servants (those slimy bastards) managed to ratchet it up to something around $850bn. After I read some of the details, I of course felt better very quickly, knowing that lots of that money went to subsidize NASCAR and native American Indian Casinos. We all realize that these are essential mainstays of our economy, supplanting the beer, liquor and tobacco industries. I have yet to find the funding for the bridge to nowhere, but I’ll bet my last Ted Stevens dollar that is in there somewhere. Next to that tax subsidy for wooden arrows. Remember them?

Now since that bill was passed, the Most Lame Duck in Chief and Paulson and Bernanke and Pelosi and every other publicly funded non-managerially qualified idiot in Washington has made announcements, speeches and proposals, and held press conferences about it on some well manicured lawn or from behind a walnut desk somewhere And they all tell us how much good it is going to do for us. And every time they make one of these speeches, the stock market tanks again in the next hour or so. They should shut the f*%# up. They are not helping. And I think all of the children are being left behind, if for no other reason that to pick up the tab. Lord only knows what that will eventually look like, but the bill will be in Chinese. And it will be insured by AIG. With our money.

You know, don’t you, that the designated administrator of the bail out bill is a Paulson crony in his 30’s who has no freaking idea what the hell he is doing with that much money? We need a guardian angel and we got Rasputin with an adding machine. As Jon Stewart would say, “What the Pf*^@k?”.

By the way, the statistics say that this nation’s constituents (that’s you and me and Joe the Plumber) called and wrote to those public servants of ours, in a ratio of about 100 to 1 AGAINST the passage of the bill. Not only did the servants not listen, they went ahead and overspent way beyond what we didn’t want them to do in the first place. “Hi! I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you!”. But I understand this somewhat, as well. They didn’t listen because they are lawyers. Logic and reason, despite their chosen profession, mean nothing to them, because they can only hear the sound of the cash register ringing in their office. They have selective perception: it comes with the job. They also know that once they have been elected, they are on the public dole for life, and they don’t have to listen to anybody.( Funny they didn’t mention that when they were running for office and needed our vote.) Besides that, they over-spent because not one of them knows how to balance a checkbook, much less the national budget. If a Senator or a Representative or Hank Paulson or W ever was forced to sit down and explain to a real accountant what they had just done with $700bn, it would be like hearing Sarah Palin describe what the Vice President’s job is. Doggonit.

Please remember: people run for public office and stay there because they are not qualified to do anything else. That's why we have the mess we do. This is the most obvious axiom in the world, and everybody misses it. Would you let Tom DeLay fix your car? Lieberman do your taxes? I don't think so.

But back to the upcoming election. (You have probably guessed that I have this figured out, too.) The fundies, the Christian right (which is always wrong), the doomsayers and the far lefties have been predicting for decades that a Rapture of some sort was coming. The End of Days. Armageddon. Revolution. The skies would rain fire, Jerry Falwell would be President, everyone would get shit on except the chosen few, and sinners, muslims and other Jew-like non-believers would wind up on marshmallow sticks and there would finally be a worldly and universal reckoning. And we would all have lower taxes. Well, here it comes. (I always get a warm feeling in my heart when someone gets it right)

If McCain wins the election , and this is possible if the Republicans and their legions can be vile and crooked enough; (have you ever tried to vote Democrat in Ohio?; tried to get a straight answer from a retired Florida resident? Spent any time in rural Pennsylvania? Holy crap. They call that Pennsyl-tucky for a reason.) Now that the end is near (they can smell the brimstone) the Repblicans will no doubt play every dirty trick in the book and rig every voting machine that they can. It is already happening in early voting in TX and FL. At any rate, if that happens (and don’t tell me you haven’t thought of that? And why can't Democrats do that stuff?), the masses of Americans who have set their hopes and dreams on Obama and the Democrats and the new beginning and the housecleaning and all that…WILL F*%3king go Bananas! The backlash of the poor, the disenfranchised and the white, middle-class, hard-working people of Palin’s “real” America that she mocks, will stage such a revolt that no one in government will be safe. The millions from both north and south who are sick to death of lying, cheating and deaf/dumb politicians will rise up in a very loud voice. They will demand some form of justice. I don’t know if it will be a complete revolution, but there will be angry mobs in places you never dreamt of. There will, of course be a military government backlash and all of that combined will be a kind of Armageddon. The fundies will have been proved right abou the end of days, but their crummy little churches may get burned to the ground and their sanctuaries of selfishness and faux piety destroyed in the process. People simply will no longer be able to tolerate this blatant and obscene fraudulence. There could be a mandate for a national end to ignorance. Those of us who have thought this through will simply declare an end to the tolerance of stupidity. The mighty in government will fall and chaos will be the rule of the day until calmer heads prevail. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich will look pretty good. Domestic spying will become illegal and we will regain the Constitution. But it will be ugly, first.

However, if Obama wins, there will be a short-lived groundswell of rejoicing and celebration, followed by an unholy, bitter, gun-slinging period of indignation by the polarized and angry right. This will happen because, despite their heart-felt convictions that they have been right all along, they will have just been told, at least somewhat resoundingly, that they were wrong. Oooo. That’s gotta hurt. The drastic and foul polarization of the citizenry, begun by Ronald Reagan and his trickle down bullshit, and cultivated and allowed to fester for eight years by this Bush/Cheney/Wall Street idiocy and greed (and a pliant and self-centered Congress), will be exacerbated beyond any ugliness we have seen in these latest Republican election rallies. There will be expressions and demonstrations of evil and hate incarnate. The South will rise again…in Omaha, Detroit, Cleveland, and every other unlikely place you never thought could hold so much backward thinking and racial predjudice. This, too, will be the end of days, Armageddon, the Rapture, but backwards and upside down. And the right will be scratching their head, asking, “How come this happened, Elmer?” and Karl Rove and the rest of the culprits will be in Paraguay, scratching their asses and drinking rum. Yes, they will get away. But let them go, be done with them. And the Democrats will apologize and promise that it will never happen again...in an attempt to save their scrawny asses. You wanna know here the whiners are in America? Here you go.

So the end is near, one way or the other. We will either get a purloined lily-white (but temporary) extension of the corruption and callousness that has put us where we are today, lead initially by a senile old fart, then followed by an insurrection that will stop just short of pulling out the guillotine, OR we will have an honest result from the honest efforts of the many, followed by a period of hatred and raging retribution by the masses (of racists) who have been foolishly waiting for Jesus to make everything OK. A black man as President will destroy their very foundations of self-righteousness and fanciful illusion. (That REALLY hurts). All of that will, of course, be financed by a frightened Wall Street. No one else will have the money to do it. And the golden parachutes will be floating down over Paraguay soon after the money is distributed.

I could quote with some erudite elan from the Book of Revelation (it isn’t one) or hint that the scientologists might have been on to something by promoting a new mode of self-delusion, but none of that and no other form of daydreaming is going to help when the shit hits the fan on November 5.

This is all contingent upon W not managing to start WWIII between now and then, in which all bets are off. And would someone PLEASE make Sarah Palin go away? I can’t stand that level of stand up comedy on the eve the apocalypse.

Life goes on in Texas.