You don't believe we're on the eve....

I go to bed tonight hoping that the Bush Administration will not spring some last-minute plan to disrupt the election tomorrow. I go to bed hoping and praying that the election will go smoothly, but dreading that it will be tainted by fraud and by blatant Bush administration attempts to suppress democracy to preserve its profitable, cozy grip on power. I find myself wondering whether, if exit polls begin to go against the ruling administration, there will be "terrorist" attacks intended to panick the remainder of the electorate into voting for a warmonger.

Am I paranoid? Or are these thoughts rational when the ruling administration has shown itself to have no moral or ethical principals whatsoever in its singleminded, Machiavellian pursuit of power, profit, and personal aggrandizement? Can it be that the only reason democracy has survived thus far in the U.S. is because no political administration thus far has been amoral and vicious enough to subvert or defy it?

Is it rational for me to wonder whether the Bush Administration, which believes itself to be anointed by God and (more importantly) to have the unquestioning support of the military, will accept the results of any election that goes against it? Or to wonder whether the votes cast will even be counted?

For you who are on the fence, or contemplating voting for Bush: Consider the various proposals that the Bush Administration has floated as "trial balloons" in the past couple of years, and then backed down on because they feared the loss of popular support. Cancelling elections. PATRIOT II. Enabling corporations to import vast numbers of indentured servants from the Third World to replace American workers. Consider its chutzpah in starting a bloody war on blatantly fraudulent premises, and using that war to funnel billions of dollars to its business cronies in no-bid contracts so openly rigged that the FBI is investigating them even in the face of likely retaliation from an administration whose notorious penchant for petty vengeance has led it to betray CIA agents in order to "get back" at their spouses for criticizing it. Consider the President's assertions that he and his operatives have the legal power to seize anyone, at any time, and plunge them into a black hole of perpetual incarceration without trial, without legal representation, without family contact or judicial review or public acknowledgement of any kind. To "disappear" people in the style of the old-fashioned South American goon squads. To torture and degrade prisoners in total disregard of international treaties and basic human decency.

Now consider what that same administration would be like in a second term, with no Constitutional incentive to care about popular opinion.

If you consider Bush and Kerry to be equally offensive, consider this: Kerry will at least have an incentive to acknowledge public opinion if he wants to be re-electable in 2008.

If you are morally offended by Kerry's unwillingness to outlaw abortion, consider this: is Bush's insistence on smugly sending thousands of adult men and women out to die or to wreak havoc on tens of thousands of other human beings in an unwarranted war any morally superior?

I grant that the bulk of the American populace may, in fact, be blinkered and ignorant enough to blindly follow Bush down the path toward further destruction of America's historical tradition of political and economic liberty. As P.T. Barnum famously said, no one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public. I hope that this is not the case. I don't think it is.

And I go to bed hoping that when the tumult and the shouting dies tomorrow, the tumult and the shouting will be all that dies.