Fear and smear: the final days
President Bush, campaigning in a state of clear desperation, told an audience in Sugarland, Texas, yesterday that if the Democrats take over Congress after the Nov. 7 election, terrorists win. And it's not just the President doing this. Republican congressional candidates, with nothing to run on and running from the Iraq War, are putting out some of the slimiest political ads in memory, according to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.
It's hard to imagine even President Richard M. Nixon in the last days of his Presidency in 1974 stooping so low as to accuse Democrats of virtual treason. The Bush Presidency is beginning its death throes, and Bush has to know that he is about to be repudiated as remorselessly and thoroughly as President Herbert Hoover was in 1932. My only regret is that Bush won't suffer the ignominy of a decisive personal defeat at the polls (other than the one in 2000 overturned by the Rehnquist-Scalia Supreme Court majority). But perhaps, unlike Nixon, who was pardoned by President Gerald Ford before it could happen, Bush will someday face criminal indictment or at least a probing Congressional investigation for things he did in office.
Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be taking no chances. As Wonkette reported, a shredding service truck was recently seen heading toward the official Vice Presidential Home at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington. You can expect a lot of that to go on in the final months of 2008, whether it's illegal or not. Think of the mass shredding at Enron described in the book and movie, "The Smartest Guys in the Room."