Let the Mindless Palin Speculation Begin!

So Sarah Palin made some headlines this week, abdicating the throne of Alaska to pursue...something other than running Alaska.

While it's all well and good that she's making actual headlines, rather than wedging herself awkwardly into the conversation by talking about how creepy that Dave Letterman guy is (slaps forehead), what she has now started is an endless carousel of annoying speculation.

The news ran between segments about Michael Jackson and that Jonas Brother who got engaged, if that tells you anything about the magnitude of the speculating.

There are a few schools of thought on the subject. One is that she's bailing due to up-and-coming lawsuits that would derail her political viability, another is that she'll use all that time she was wasting trying to run Alaska and devote it to a tour of the lower 48 on her way to the White House, and another thinks that she'll ride the gravy train with biscuit-capped wheels all the way to the bank, getting out of elected office and speaking for money.

The three are not incompatible, which leads to a wide array of various combinations (seven!), and fuels speculation further.

I yield to the imitable Mark McKinnon, who prepped her for her admittedly low-bar and successful Vice-Presidential debate with Joe "HEY!" Biden. He says that she exceeded his expectations in the debate, always knows how to keep things interesting, and he concludes that she has still more up her sleeve.

But what do we actually know about Palin, and could that shed light on her future intentions? I don't think we know enough about her, honestly. There's not enough on the record, politically, to gauge her actions in that arena.

That plays to her advantage. While I think it'd be akin to comparing apples to oranges F-16 Tomcat jet planes, she, like President Obama, has enough of what I'd call a "blind appeal" that makes her, to many people, simply wonderful, despite lacking hitherto considered invaluable intangibles, in their cases, experience.

In other words, those who cultishly cling to Palin, as Obama, don't cling because of their brief political stints as governor and senator respectively; They've got something else altogether. Call it snazz, I guess. Now, from there, you can go off on a number of different tangents and directions spouting the obvious differences between Obama and Palin. I'm not comparing them any further or to any other extent.

She's very folksy, which appeals to some and doesn't to others. She's relatively inexperienced, which matters to some and doesn't to others. But across the board, the consensus is that she keeps things interesting and is therefore someone to keep an eye on.

Whatever breaks up this Michael Jackson mania is a-okay with me, anyway.

Yep. Still Funny.

I thought he was retiring it after his Tony-nominated performance, but Will Ferrell brought back his George W. Bush imitation while plugging his new film Land of the Lost on SNL.

Yep. It's still funny, even though it's an old formula.

Yep. It still works to make fun of Bush. I've often wondered on this site how long people will ridicule and mock and generally hate Bush. My friend reminded me that people hated Nixon until he died.

On this episode, Ferrell also un-retired his imitable Harry Caray impersonation, now referring to it as the Ghost of Harry Caray, since the bespectacled Caray passed away over 11 years ago.

That was funny too. It seems that as long as Ferrell's around, mocking Bush will still be a premium.

You Can't Talk to Me Like That! This is a Members Only Jacket!

When isolated in relative obscurity, one does crazy things. The same is true for the Republican Party currently.

Due to a woeful dearth of qualified and exciting candidates, the GOP is taking the same old faces on a listening tour, aimed at revamping the Right, making it more attractive, all while simultaneously stimulating and staying loyal to the base.

'Listening Tour' has all of the appeal of a trip to the save-a-lot proctologist. Ugh.

One of those old faces, trying to stay even more relevant, is saying that these guys are silly, but then says the almost exact thing that they're saying.

This infighting will continue, I predict, until there's one person in the middle of these sentiments who appeals to not only both sides, but to those who aren't completely sold on the Democratic ticket, and of course, after the Obama dust has settled.

This 'principle' jargon has got to go. No undecided voter cares about them, much less can define them as ardently as those on the Right are doing. "We've got to get back to our principles!" they all clamor to themselves.

What they need is some people who can speak with authority, with credibility, something the party (state and national, for those local people tuning in) lacks.

My quaffed friend David J. Sanders tweeted today (and I reviewed and edited) his column for tomorrow. In it, he claims that the GOP ought to be a little more Clintonian in its dealings, who in his own dealings, was more like Reagan. In Reagan Sanders does trust, and he notices the proven success rate of those who mirror his candor, believability and credibility, including that of our current President, who ran as someone who was remarkably underqualified but mounted a strong campaign of hope.

Sanders puts a lot on that word 'Hope' and 'unbridled optimism.' Regan, Clinton, Bush (at first) and Obama had it and won. I think Hope is a little soft. How about not just 'hope,' but how about something people can repeat on something other than a comedy night show.' Or something with a little bit of confidence. I see none right now that isn't immediately shut down. You see sparks here from the Huckabees, the Jindals, the roster of no-names in Congress. But you don't see the same steady stream of gems like you got with Obama, Bush, Clinton and Reagan.

If it's really rock bottom for the GOP, it's because those people don't exist. I think they do. They just don't know it yet.

Majority Punditry In Midst of Identity Crisis

This is an objective observation about the slow demise of objective news.

Liberal punditry has scored some big time victories this decade. Not only has their voice been made legitimate, but they have taken once-straight-news organizations,most notably MSNBC, and made them their own. Conservatives are left with talk-radio and FoxNews, which has never sought to be objective, and therefore has always lacked a degree of credibility, as far as most are concerned.

The Fairness Doctrine, once ballyhooed by the Left as necessary to counter the formerly dominating Conservative punditry on the radio, with the likes of Limbaugh, especially, has been aptly dropped; They've staked their claim on television and blogs, as blogs are typically driven by a younger crowd and younger crowds often lean leftward.

But in order for these people to establish a reign, they're going to have to appeal to a minority they soundly oppose. Which is of course nonsense.

Watching Hardball last night was anything but Hardball.

The openly biased Chris Matthews, whose contract was extended past the next presidential election, tossed softballs up to fellow Democrats about the salvation of Obama's budget, in between talking about how happy and glowing he is all of the time these days (not kidding, he said that).

My favorite line: "The economy. Republicans don't have a plan. Democrats have one. Back after this."

Well, that's newsworthy.

If it were really hardball political analysis, he might be more concerned with how this Democratic majority will handle the budget and all of its ambitions agenda points and not how the Republicans will be powerless to stop it. The bit about the GOP isn't news; It's olds.

Olbermann has been particularly hackable. Bush and his cronies remain in the headlines, showing you how pointless Olbermann's headlines are. "BREAKING NEWS" isn't a question of whether or not Bush was the worst President ever. I'm not even sure breaking news should be a question to begin with. Sure, George W. Bush was terrible. But there's nothing else to be done about it. He's out. Obama's in. Obama's in the White House. Bush doesn't even have a house, he lives in a Dallas condo.

Same goes for Maddow and the rest. Lamenting over the past is not news. In fact, the news isn't even their business anymore.

And therein lies their deal with the devil. By abandoning objectivity, they have sought to merely be weapons of the minority plight, which is all well and good, until you become the majority.

Want to know why O'Reilly is all over Olbermann's 'Worst People in the World'? Because he's thrashing Olbermann in the ratings. The conservative voice, while not necessarily missed just yet, merely a few months out of the Bush era, will continue to grow.

You heard nary a peep out of Rush Limbaugh during the Republican dominance of the early century. These days he's being labeled as the face of the whole franchise, which only helps his cause.

I started this as some kind of vocal plea for these "news" anchors to get over Bush and start being real journalists about the current President. But that won't work. I think it's the ebb and flow. They'll be down again, just like they were during the Clinton years, while conservative radio surged.

Then they were back up during their Minority Glory. I suspect the cycle will roll on.

W: Memoirs, Baseballs, and Whatnot

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of watching Will Ferrell's one-man Broadway show, You're Welcome, America: A Final Night with George W. Bush.

It was absolutely wonderful.

Delightfully and unexpectedly raunchy, Ferrell retired his beloved caricature by unloading every bad thought or misstep that one who hated Bush as sincerely as Ferrell does (he has stated publicly that, despite a tradition as such, he would not want to ever meet the person he so famously portrayed on SNL) could ever conjure, guns-blazing. It may be the last we see of the truly hilarious depiction of No. 43.

For awhile, it should be the last we see of any depiction, real or imagined, of George W. Bush.

In the UFW archives, I've rehashed my optimist's guide to the Bush Legacy. It's not pretty, un-spectacularly amounting to a "nowhere-to-go-but-up" scenario. I stand by it. The bar is set pretty low, anyway.

But now I hear about his 2010 memoirs about the decisions he made while in office, and the circumstances as he interpreted them during that decision-making process. That was a couple of weeks ago. Today, ESPN tells me that he's throwing out the first pitch for the first game of the Texas Rangers this season.

Bush would do well to sit back and let the smoke thin out a little longer than a few months than to bust back onto the national spotlight.

Cheny is sticking his nose into the limelight, to the tune of thunderous boos and hisses, even from Republicans.

There will come a time when his voice may want to be heard. Not by everyone, mind you, but by some. But for right now, even the GOP is trying to figure out how to move on Bush free.

Presidents are often guided by precedents, and skewing from those boundaries can often lead to hot water. One such precedent is to not speak ill of another President while they're in office, even if they're of a different party. You never heard that much from Bill Clinton about W, until he began campaigning for his wife, in which case he subscribed to the obligatory shackling of Bush to the GOP at large. That criticism is often taken poorly, which is why Jimmy Carter and Clinton aren't the best of buddies.

Another such precedent, the precedent for a President to fade into the background for awhile, ought to be heeded more actively by W. There's not a lot of good, if any at all, that can come from this.

Aside, of course, from a Disney-esque freak accident that enables the President from tossing 103 mph fastballs in his opening day pitching. That'd be noteworthy. But otherwise, let's just save it.

Obama & Signing Statements: Big Whoop

Beneath the mire of all of this altogether uninteresting business about stem cell research, there was another bit of uninteresting news that Maxwell "Not the Coffee" Brantley brought to my attention.

The headline reads "Bye Bye Bush Era," and it applauds that Obama advising that signing statements under G.W. Bush may be ignored if convenient.

Bush's signing statements — clauses attached to bills that basically call for certain parts of a bill to be openly ignored — had enough coverage in its day. It basically is a loop around line-item vetoes, which are prohibited. So, Obama, accordingly, said that they are all now subject to interpretation by Atty. General Holder, and then they can be deemed constitutional or not.

I wonder how many of them will make it through the filter. What's the over/under on one to two?

Obama getting elected was the mandate. Once in office, he quickly did away with many of Bush's policies and rules, notably the implementation of a White House Happy Hour and looser dress code.

But then Maxwell misses another "important" piece of the NYT puzzle: Obama isn't against doing all that his own dern self. Is this not the pot calling the kettle black?

Of course, not. This is OBAMA we're talking about. You remember? The Hope and Change for America? He makes houses appear for the homeless, jobs appear for the jobless, and still has time to hoop with the Bulls?

I say that sarcastically, not to say that Obama won't do any of those things (he's done all of them) or even that he won't do any of them again (he's on track to do it all again and again).

It's just another example of how bias is often thinly-veiled and useless when some good ole fashioned objectivity would be a better lens.

The next president, who will likely be a Republican if trends mean anything, could reverse Obama's reversal. In fact, I bet he (or she!) might throw out nearly everything Obama puts into play. Clinton did it to Reagan's ugly step-child, Bush I. Bush II did it to Clinton, which I'm sure sticks in some people's craw, that Obama is reminding some of Bush. I'm sure that wily coot Jefferson did it to that old buzzard Adams, and then that upstart Adams II returned the favor, although I'm sure wigs and gloves were more involved back then.

I understand that there are liberal commentators and conservative ones, and I especially understand that those views are more prominently displayed in the blogosphere. I'm just saying that there ought to be a little more objectivity out there.

So I therefore understand the roof raising by some, heck, by many that Bush is gone and out, exiled to his Crawford Ranch and new ritzy Dallas condo. But that's a little old news by now, don't you say Maxwell? Olbermann still harps on Bush, and Maddow is relegated to doing fluff pieces about Boy Scouts, and now this. There's nothing to be critical about in Obama's short time as President? COUGH Wow! Look at all that pork in the gazillion dollar stimulus! COUGH!

I say let's freshen up that material. Frankly, we're still dealing with Bush's inheritance with this whole economy business and I'd rather not bring him up unless we have to. I don't think this is one of those have-to moments.

Stimulus: It's the Patriotic Thing To Do

"Seconds in this business," my venerable publisher told me, "can mean everything."

The salty veteran was teaching me the lesson that when you have an idea for a news story — or in the case of the this humble site, something I find remotely interesting — get it out before it's too late.

I learned that lesson as I looked on the front page of the good ole Demozette this Sunday morning: On the front page, Alex Daniels hosed me.

Well, not completely. I still think I have a mayoral unique angle. And this could be a valuable lesson of two things: how to salvage a story when someone rightly beats you to it instead of watching cartoons over the weekend, and that maybe these old timey newspapers can still break a news story. Hey, it happened here, after all, just the other day (speaking of Old Timey).

But anyway, to the story.

Daniels rightly compares the sprint-to-the-finish tactics between recently pressing yet controversial federal legislation in the wake of dire circumstances; the 2001 USAPATRIOT Act and most recently the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Obama signed into law Tuesday.

Both are timely: The USAPATRIOT Act was a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In just under three weeks, the Bill was rushed through committee and chamber to the President, then Dubya, and signed into law. The Stimulus is a response to the stagnant and somehow still slowing economy that is putting millions in the bread line, the worst economic crisis since that Great Depression thing, as most would surmise.

Both faced strict opposition from the out-party: The USAPATRIOT Act was lamented by liberal Democrats as a foul piece of legislation that put American civil liberties in a headlock. The Stimulus is seen by every Republican congressional delegate — save for three Senators — as further expansion and dependence on an already swollen federal government, sending the country into a greater number of trillions in deficit than one.

Both encourage a lack of transparency and general oversight: The USAPATRIOT Act, apparently written in capital letters so that everyone who invoked its name would be required to scream it at the top of their lungs, seemed to be, at its essence, a legal loophole.

The debate over whether the means justify the ends can certainly be debated. Republicans will claim that the proof is in the puddin': No terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since. Democrats contend that in spite of the safety it provides, there was and is a lack of respect for inalienable civil liberties, like that whole right to privacy thing that people seem to like. Slack-jawed delegates will bellow from their chaw-stained mouths that "Freedom ain't free." Toby Keith will say that it should be. So on and so forth.

But the point is that whether or not it was the right thing to do, it certainly opened up avenues for the government that had hitherto been blocked off by the writ of law. It expedited the process to get the goal of the bill realized in a quicker-acting fashion.

Well, guess what I heard this Friday from someone speaking with the President.

A caucus of mayors was gathered in Washington, an earnest attempt by the new Executive to reach out to local officials and make sure that this important legislation was implemented as soundly as possible.
The mayors assembled to meet with key figures of the Obama cabinet that were crucial to the success of the stimulus, and even had a good sit down with the President himself.

Now, you may have read the story I wrote for the Bureau last week. The important part for most Arkansans and central Arkansans specifically of my conversation with North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Hays was that there will be money on the streets as soon as this very week, "next week" at the time of publishing.

But my conversation with Hays also yielded something else I found remarkable, so remarkable in fact I had to ask him to repeat it.

Hays said that in the 45 minutes the President spoke to the mayors, Obama told them that there would be a lot of room to "cut corners" and that a lot of this stimulus spending would be unregulated, although there would be an office established by the President for the sole purpose of monitoring the stimulus funds to make sure everything was transparent.

In Hays' defense, Obama was speaking about this in a challenging light. Obama was using this as a charge to the mayors that they had better make sure that they were handling this money in the right way, otherwise the whole system will be doomed to ruin. It was supposed to be encouragement that the Federal government was entrusting and enabling local officials; what I heard was that the keys are being given to governors, mayors and local officials with little oversight and a message: Do good, or it'll be bad.

Well, duh. But what about corruption? What about protecting this investment? One office to monitor the $787,200,000,000 or so dollars and make sure its not getting spent on a fur coat for the First Lady of Dallas? I thought the name of this game was de-deregulation; It was the deregulation that got us into this mess, so get those shackles back on, right?

"We're not promising some silver bullet for the economy," chief economic adviser to Obama Lawrence Summers said in an interview Friday on NBC. "Indeed, what really is very important about President Obama's approach is his commitment to working this through step by step in its many aspects."

It seems like we're putting an awful lot of trust in the some very important steps on shoulders untested.

Obama in his inaugural address said that it's time of the country to get up, dust itself off, and get to the business of fixing itself, paraphrasing. Then, its taking control of the deregulation that drove it into the gutter. Now its re-releasing it into the wild, at the whim of God-Knows-Who-Has-Been-Elected?

The Stimulus seems to be being formed as it goes and on the fly, possibly because of the unprecedented nature of the situation in which we find ourselves, but also perhaps of the rush to get these 1,071 pages of legislature on the books ASAP.

We can see the ending of the USAPATRTIOT Act in the public's eye. It was the beginning and the cornerstone of a country that no longer trusted its government nor its hero in the strife, George W. Bush (look at the approval ratings then; everyone loved him, despite what current sentiments are).

With all of the similarities between that bill and this new one, will we be reviling Obama's Administration for creating a rushed and unstable expansion of the federal government forged on the backs of the American taxpayers?

I sincerely hope not. We need this thing to work. We need these leaders that Obama has dutifully charged to pay heed. We need transparency.

I sincerely hope this falls the other way. I hope the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act does everything is says it will.

But it sure feels like I'm hoping for a lot.

UPDATE: My boy, Mike Allen at Politico, has more on the Stimulus Funny Money Watchdog. The field mouse is fast, but the owl sees at night, as per the old man from Talladega Nights

Electoral College? Is that a technical school or somthin'?

You'd be hard pressed to find a lot of people 'round these parts who can give you a clear cut definition of what the Electoral College is, and it's only once in a blue moon — like the year 2000 — when the E.C. actually does anything worth mentioning.

But when it is noteworthy, get out of the way because mass hysteria and rioting are about to ensue.

People are all riled up about it now that a legislative committee in Arkansas has endorsed a bill to do away with the pesky Electoral College once and for all, joining the ranks of legislative powerhouses Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Old Jersey and last but not least, Hawaii (!!!) who have passed similar bills.

The fuss is that people think that their vote is watered-down or doesn't count for as much, just because their vote seems to evaporate if — gasp! — their candidate doesn't win. It might appear to water down and somewhat encumber the democratic the process a little, but it is a necessary insular.

I'm reminded of a quote I heard from my friend and yours John Brummett, who was quoting Benjamin Franklin. "Democracy is akin to two wolves and a sheep sitting down at a table to discuss what's for dinner," or something close to that. This means that direct democracy doesn't adequately represent the interests of all of the parties involved, namely the minority.

The Electoral College doesn't offer that either, but it's at least closer than direct democracy. What we live in is a Democratic Republic. We elect representatives that cater to our specific constituent needs rather than just let the government en masse deal with our focused nit-picking.

We have three whole levels of representation — a bicameral legislature with a House and Senate, and then an executive branch with a president — all with different constituency populations and term-lengths and limits to ensure that your very needs are heard and guarded with the utmost care.

Now this Electoral College was put in place to safe guard that representation, although it's a bit more difficult to see in this ever-shrinking community that we live in called the United States. Surely one can recognize that there are larger cities and smaller cities within bigger states and smaller states. There are very different needs for these different geographic regions of population.

Maybe a large city like New Orleans is all about raising taxes to fund levies, while a small city in Montana wants to lower taxes so people will have more money to purchase firewood to keep warm. Different constituencies, different needs from their government. I'm sure you can think of better examples.

The founders were rightly concerned that the race for the Presidency could be skewed by a candidate focusing on one demographic over another by focusing on larger populations; hey, more hands to shake with less ground to cover. The Electoral College attempts to ensure that some of the hands in some of the smaller states at least get a fair shake. The needs of New York or Los Angeles aren't the same as, say, Goose Knuckle, Mississippi, or any other remote and odd-named locale in the middle of the country.

The Electoral College is there to make sure that the trailer-dweller from rural Arkansas' voice can be heard through six votes from the College rather than hope that the Presidential candidate gets to his issue that could sway his single vote out of a billion.

Proponents of the elimination of the College make two pretty good points. One is that the globalization of the country has made the need to physically be on the ground in every state less of an imperative, that everyone's voice can be heard from the youtubes or the blogosphere or whatever the next communication fad will be.

They also argue that it doesn't matter, their voice is still insignificant. In 2008, Obama never set foot in Arkansas, or much anywhere else in the deep South, knowing it was long gone. In every election down the home stretch, certain states, like Pennsylvania or Ohio in 2008, are visited more frequently as battleground states.

Doing away with the Electoral College won't grant that these people will be better represented, just that their vote will be one of now hundreds of millions rather than just a couple million, as is the case in Arkansas. Oh yeah, that should help get your voice heard. Just increase the pool by a couple hundred million.

Those against the Electoral College also hang their hat on the 2000 election, where Gore won the popular vote (like in LA and NYC) and Bush won the electoral vote (more states like Bush than Gore).

Person to person, Gore should've won. But constituency to constituency, demographic need to demographic need? Bush won. Thinking about it in that context — and neglecting the...uh...unfavoribility of Dubya — makes the denial of direct democracy seem less treasonous and more American than initial instinct would lead one to believe.

People fear what they don't understand and unfortunately no one seems to grasp the benefits of the Electoral College. If it's gone, look for everything between LA and New York to have a tremendous drop in voting value.

An Optimist's Guide to Bush's Legacy

Here's the bottom line: George W. Bush has not been good for business.

He is terribly unpopular, especially regarding Iraq, and his approval ratings have been in a tailspin since 2004. These dismal numbers have been reflected in not one, but two elections, with Democratic sweeps in 2006 and 2008. His beloved GOP has all but abandoned him, keeping him out entirely of the Republican Convention and only mentioning his name with the caveat "I'm not him."

I would very cautiously argue, however, that history may be kinder to him than the present.

I'm not saying he's a good president now, to do so would toss any semblance of political or journalistic credibility overboard. But I am claiming that there may be a potential upswing of favorable remembrances for W. And let me constrain myself to say that I do not believe that there is any way history will ever remember him as a great president; his potential, in my opinion, can only lift him from the ranks of 'bad president' to 'not bad president.'

We cannot deny Bush's handling of the Iraq War, which most would say was altogether disastrous. Faulty intelligence showed that there were W.M.D.'s in Iraq and that they were indeed a viable threat to the United States. Granted, it wasn't Bush telling himself there were weapons there, it was the hitherto reliable intelligence agencies who were, but Bush really dropped the ball on this one. W. used the same bull-headed tactics that had done so well for him in Afghanistan (or had been doing well for him), when all he needed to do was let diplomacy run its course.

Speaking of bull-headed, his abandoning of conservative principles was offensive to conservatives. For a party whose primary figurehead, Ronald Reagan, called for limited government, one would think that this president would not be one of the most government-expanding and empowering presidents since Lyndon Baines Johnson. Au contraire. So not only was Bush losing favor with those who he regularly would quarrel with, namely Democrats, but he was also losing Republican comrades along the way. In fact, many suspect that the very ideological fabric of the GOP may have been irreparably altered, as 2008-conservatives are scrambling to appeal to voters who have sacked them in consecutive elections.

That was very bad. But, Bush has not been all bad.


We cannot deny Bush's handling of September 11th, which most would say was altogether masterful. Many of the idea-void individuals in the GOP cling to this day as some kind of banner of victory like someone clinging to an iron bar in a tornado, and subsequently trivialize Bush's actual accomplishments. Bush coolly and calmly went about handling the situation, uniting the country under one patriotic emblem. (SIDENOTE: That's not an excuse to trivialize Sept. 11, though. What happened on that day was God-awful, and to speak frankly about someone benefiting from it is unsettling, while possibly true.)

So, for now, everyone is down on this Bush fellow. Presidential-hopeful John McCain, who is about as liberal as a Republican can get, was hamstrung by any and all associations he had had with Bush, and ultimately lost the election. A mandate from the public against Bush, Democrats won across the board.

But let's say everything from now on, following Bush's administration, goes his way.

Optimistically speaking, what if Bush's Middle Eastern democracy-manufacturing plan firms up and carries on? Iraq has been making marked improvements since the ballyhooed Surge, and perhaps could gain self-sufficiency in the future. If the country is in fact better in fifty years than it was prior to 2003, Bush could be regarded as a national hero. That potential is certainly there, although it may be far-fetched.

Which are people more likely to remember, his blunder of Iraq or his grace under fire in September of 2001? A lot of this has to come from hindsight and hindsight alone. The projection is there, in fact it is all Bush and Heir Cheney cling to: "We are safer than we were on Sept. 11." Well, we've only come seven years. Call me naive, but I'd like to think that there are some safeties that have to be monitored for longer than that span of time. Maybe we are and maybe we aren't.

This could go in Bush's favor, or blow up in his face. If it doesn't bounce his way, it will be just one more thing topped on a pile of grievances. Recall when the economy - Bush's economy - nearly crumbled this fall? No one was any more angry at Bush than they were before. You can only be so mad, before it's just noise. It was like everyone expected it.

If it does somehow go in his favor, then perhaps history can salvage as much a morsel of dignity from the Bush Administration, which won't be much, but it could be something.

One thing is certain; there's nowhere to go but up.