Death Knocks:
There's nothing sweeter than the sound of the bleating death cries of the Bush Administration. They've gotta be feeling it in their bones about now: the rattling chill of mortality, the horrible, nauseating pit of the stomach knotting at the knowledge that they stretched their credibility so far and they are now paying the consequences. Goddamn, the sweet, sugary taste of their tears, the masturbatory pleasure of watching them fall, the pure glee, like a 35 year-old virgin getting her first good fucking, as we watch the fall, watch the fall.

How else do you explain the utter chaos in the Bush campaign and the GOP? They're filing FEC complaints to stop left wing organizations from running anti-Bush ads, although one wonders what the NRA thinks about that attempt to silence advocacy groups. The poll numbers are dropping, not stabilizing, and Bush has lost the trust of the people. Any time Bush touts the "good" of his tax cuts, he's undermined by the facts, like the CBO's report that, well, the tax cuts are a sham. Bush, and what else can we call it?, flip-flopped on his meeting with the 9/11 commission (like he flip-flopped on the commission's creation itself). And, really, nobody gives a damn what he says about a vote John Kerry made to cut intelligence spending by 1% back in the mid-90s. (Slate's Fred Kaplan has done solid reporting about this and other attacks on Kerry.) And even when he talks about his "record," as he will today in Ohio, Bush just sounds so empty, so much a fool, so dead in the water, like the marriage amendment (which is being attacked by Log Cabin Republicans in an upcoming ad) , like Bush's push to make his tax cuts permanent, like his presidency.

Watch all the poker shows on ESPN now. It's the thing every gambler knows - you go all in on a single hand and sometimes you lose and you're sent home, pockets empty, disgraced, looking like an idiot. And the Bush Administration when all in on Iraq and WMDs. But seemingly sure bets, like four-of-a-kind, always have hands that beat them. And once you lose, your skills are called into question.

Watch the President these days. He's visibly rattled, looking older, older by the minute, like Dorian Gray. Because he knows - he's lost us. We don't look at him as the man on the pile of WTC rubble. We look at him as the wimpy ex-cheerleader drunk who led us into a corrupting of democracy and America. And when he speaks, there's nothing he can say that can get around objective reality. There's no spin to put on things that everyone knows - no jobs, no WMDs, a culture war that no one wants but a few fundamentalist nuts. (It doesn't help that a recent poll shows that the majority of Americans support John Kerry on civil unions for gays.) And reality will, like death, bite you on the ass every time.

Death is knocking at the White House, dragging behind it the corpse of the first Bush administration. And, like father, like son, so will this one be dragged off in disgrace. God, let's enjoy its screams.

Until, you know, they drag out Osama.