The Fix Is In

You can tell who's in and who's out at the court of the Boy King these days. These guys are out:

"Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7–a concern aggravated by the president's news conference this week.

"'They aren't even planning for if they lose,' says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing."

Contrast that to the guys who really know what's going on:

"Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove.

[snip]

"The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities, in part to squelch any loss of nerve among his legions. Come January, he said last week, 'We'll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate.'"

Rational observers -- those who spend their time in the real world rather than in the hot-house environment of the Royal Court -- suggest His Imperial Cluelessness and his Popeil Pocket Machiavelli are quite simply, out of touch with reality. Well, DUH! They are famously disconnected from the world where the rest of us live.

That doesn't mean they don't have designs on -- and for -- that world. I'm with Steve Soto on this one. The Torturer-in-Chief isn't overconfident. He simply knows what the rest of us do not -- the fix is in. The Royalist machine simply cannot lose on November 7th, no matter the outcome of the election (assuming, against all evidence, there will be one).

So let's play a little game, shall we? It's called "Guess How They'll Do It". I've explored some of the possible ways the Royalists could thwart the will of the American people before. Recently, though, I have hit upon an idea that I think would appeal to the apparatchiks of Pennsylvania Avenue. It is based on the ideas expressed by both The Pretender and his Texas Rasputin. As the Washington Post reports:

"But party operatives say Rove is predicting that, at worst, Republicans will lose only 8 to 10 seats -- shy of the 15-seat threshold that would cede control to Democrats..."

The most recent polls suggest Anti-Royalists will gain significantly more than the 15 seats needed to retake control of the House. As Charlie Cook puts it:

"I think a 30-seat gain today for Democrats is more likely to occur than a 15-seat gain, the minimum that would tip the majority. The chances of that number going higher are also strong, unless something occurs that fundamentally changes the dynamic of this election. This is what Republican strategists' nightmares look like. "

If what "party operatives" tell the Post is true, Rove is ready to concede up to 10 seats. With three incumbent Royalists already behind bars and a fourth safely tucked away in rehab (with, one would hope, little or no Internet access), that means he only has to let six additional seats fall by the wayside to hit his number. I suspect he already has those seats picked out. So now he need only find a way to meddle in five (at a minimum) to 20 (at a maximum) races and he'll achieve the Royal Court's goal.

And they need not steal all of those races, though I'd be thoroughly unsurprised if they did. No, they only need to gum up the electoral machinery a bit. A well-timed call to Diebold would do it. If I was him, I'd have a congressional district map already marked with stars to denote which 20 races will be targeted. (Okay, maybe 30, just to be safe.) The Royalists have a powerful weapon as they hatch this plot: Bush v. Gore. In that case, the Surpreme Court was asked to take the extraordinary step of halting an election because -- and this was the most salient point -- someone might lose. Not just any "someone," of course. It was the "someone" to whom most of the Justices had sworn fealty. The actual ruling hides that issue in a blizzard of contradictory and obfuscatory legalese, but the petition (.pdf) filled on behalf of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney nakedly states their cause of action:

"A stay pending this Court’s review of these substantial federal questions is
essential to prevent Applicants from suffering irreparable injury..." (emphasis added)

The injury, in this case, was losing the election. The Busheviks were fully aware that if there was a fair and accurate count of the votes cast in Florida, they would lose. The Supreme Court dutifully accepted this argument and issued a stay, halting the Florida recount. Once the stay was issued, there was no chance in hell the votes would ever be counted. Game over.

It worked then, and there's no reason to believe it won't work again. After all, the Supreme Court is, if anything, more compliant now than it was in December of 2000. So all it will take to prevent the Anti-Royalists from claiming the majority in the House (or, for that matter the Senate, but let's focus on the lower chamber for simplicity's sake) on November 7 is a few dozen legal challenges, based on the same argument -- counting the ballots will cause "irreparable injury" to the losing candidates.

The Bush v. Gore case sped through the federal judiciary in 38 days. Any challenges based on the same reasoning this fall will, no doubt, take a more leisurely stroll through the courts. (Bob Dornan, a proto-Royalist defeated for re-election in 1996, was still trying to wrest his seat back from its lawful holder more than a year after the ballots were counted.) It is well within the realm of possibility that 20 or 30 House seats will still be contested when Congress reconvenes in January. That raises the intiguing spectre that the Royalists could -- in effect -- prevent Congress from doing any work, indefinitely.

Providing they can convince federal judges of the pressing need for a Royalist majority...ahem, I mean, that Royalist candidates would suffer irreparable injury if all the votes are counted, the Bushies can deny their opponents a majority on the opening day of the new Congress. This is a key element to the scheme. The Rules of the House require a quorum to conduct any business, including the election of a Speaker. Under the Rules of the House, a quorum consists of 218 members*. Should the Royalists manage to bottle up several -- or several dozen -- elections after the November election, they can ensure that, on the first day of the new congressional session, there won't be 218 Anti-Royalists on hand. All the Royalists need do then is retreat en masse to someplace outside Washington.

Don't laugh. There's nothing outlandish about using this tactic. In fact, it was done recently in Texas, when Anti-Royalist lawmakers decamped across the Red River in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to stop a patently illegal Royalist plan for congressional redistricting. (Needless to say, the Supreme Court later ruled it almost-perfectly legal.)

If there aren't 218 members of the House present, no legislation can be enacted. No Speaker can be elected. No subpoenas can be issued. No committee investigations can be launched. Any action taken by the Senate is be irrelevant, since it cannot be considered by the House. In other words, Congress simply doesn't exist.

No Congress -- the ultimate Royalist wet dream. King George will be free to rule by fiat and there's no one to stop him.

God bless America.

* There are contingency plans for conducting House business in the absence of a quorum. They are only exercised, however, on the order of the Speaker. If there's no Speaker, QED, no one can "pull the trigger" to put them into effect.

Making It Up

What is it about Royalists? It has been abundantly clear since at least the 1970's that His Imperious Cluelessness would rather lie than tell the truth. Perhaps it's some sort of contagion -- passed from one Royalist to the next like a social disease. Whatever the reason, those who would prop up the usurper can't help themselves. They lie. Repeatedly, unabashedly and in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Take Martin Frost. Once upon a time, he was a Democratic congressman from Texas. Before that (loooong before that), Frost was a newspaper reporter. It says very little about his journalistic mentors that the ex-politician, now shilling for the state-run media, can't be botherd to get his facts straight. In a column on the Internet version of the American Izvestia, Frost (correctly) warns that the Royalists are on the cusp of losing their Congressional majority. But that's where his contact with reality ends. Frost writes:

"The current page scandal is an exact re-run of the scandal House Democrats faced in 1994 over the House Bank and the House postal system, except that the parties are reversed. This year it’s the Republicans who are on the ropes and the outcome should be the same…devastating results for the party in power."

"Exact re-run", Frost assures us. That would lead the reader to conclude that the House Bank scandal involved sexual predators in the Democratic Party, and efforts by party leaders to cover-up for their activities. Of course, nothing like that ever happened. As Frost explains:

"The House Banking scandal was pretty simple. Members of Congress were permitted to open bank accounts with a special bank operated by the Sergeant at Arms. There were no service charges and, more significantly, members of Congress had unlimited overdraft protection. In other words, they could write any number of hot checks (checks that exceeded the amount on deposit) and they were given a significant amount of time to deposit funds in their account to make these checks goods [sic]."

So let's review: in the House Bank scandal, members of both parties were permitted to use an office in the Capitol Building as a sort of free-form ATM, cashing checks without facing the typical bank's pressure -- or penalty fees -- to cover them. Oh, yeah -- that's an "exact re-run" of what Mark Foley was doing. Just like the 1968 Democratic National Convention was an "exact re-run" of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Not content to make such a specious comparison, Frost then starts spinning a fiction:

"In 1994, then Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash., was slow to react to growing scandals surrounding the operations of the House Bank and the House postal system. There were early warnings that things were amiss but it took Foley and the rest of the Democratic Leadership months to respond and by then the entire matter had spun out of control. "

Only the first seven words of that passage bear any resemblance to the truth. The House Bank scandal did erupt in an election year. But it was 1992, not 1994. Then there was the Congresssional Post Office scandal, which broke in 1991 and became an issue in 1992. In the election that November, despite the largest turnover among members of Congress in 40 years, Democrats not only retained their majorities in the House and Senate, they won the presidency as well. Perhaps Frost doesn't remember, but he was one of those Democrats who got elected that year.

To his credit, the former politician does acknowledge that neither of these Congressional scandals of the 1990's is nearly as serious as the Foley page-trolling affair. But no sooner has Frost made that concession than he rolls out the biggest lie:

"Nevertheless, the House Bank scandal and the House post office scandal became big issues in the 1994 elections and were a major contributing factor to the Republican victory that year.
The Republicans in 1994 raised these scandals as proof that the Democratic leadership had lost its way and could not be trusted to run the House in the proper manner."

False. Utterly and blatantly false. And Frost, who was there when it happened, should know it.

By 1994, the House Bank scandal had absolutely no traction with voters -- largely because voters had learned in the intervening years that two of the three most egregious abusers of the House Bank were Republicans! Moreover, three members of the Republican Cabinet (including a fellow named Cheney) admitted bouncing checks while they were in the House. Even the chief flamethrower, the person most loudly screaming "corruption" as the House Bank scandal was stoked by right-wingers -- yes, Newt Gingrich -- helped himself at the "no cash - no problem" check-cashing service. He used his role in blowing the "scandal" out of proportion (and his earlier nakedly vicious attacks on the previous House Speaker) to catapult from the back benches into the GOP leadership.

From that perch, Newtie spearheaded the political guerrilla warfare that won the Republicans their congressional majority in 1994. It wasn't the House Bank scandal that energized the GOP that year. It was, in large part, the electorate's weariness with 40 years of Democratic control in Congress, coupled with its uneasiness about the ineptitude of Bill Cinton's first 18 months in the Oval Office.

None of this is news to Martin Frost. He was there for all of it. But he's pretty sure you don't remember, so he's re-writing recent history in an effort to raise the appearance of equivalency. The Democrats got their comeuppance because of a tempest in a teapot, he argues, and now it's the Royalists' turn. Those silly American voters, he's saying, they are so easily influenced by the inconsequential.

As it happens, if Frost really were trying to draw parallels between 1994 and 2006, he had no need to invent events. Reality tells the same story. In 1994, Democrats were focused only on keeping the levers of power in their own hands. They were widely viewed as -- if not corrupt -- then at a minimum complicit in a corrupt system (known as The United States Government - proving some things never change). Voters decided they would no longer be taken for granted and washed them out in an electoral tsunami. The Royalist Party of 2006 has taken corruption to new levels of avarice and arrogance. Their blind devotion to power for power's sake (including their lock-step march in the shadow of King George) appears to be wearing thin.

But Frost, having firmly fallen in line with the Royalists, has also cloaked himself in their trappings. He will, just as they, choose to lie when the truth can suffice. That tendency has always puzzled me. Why fabricate when the facts are in your favor? Even if you don't believe "honesty is the best policy", or "the truth shall make you free", it's actually more difficult to make stuff up. Especially if you do it in public. Not everyone is a slobbering moron with the memory capacity of a lobotomized gnat. Someone, somewhere, at some time, will eventually call you on your lies.

I admit I don't understand this borderline-patholigical need to concoct facts. But it occurs to me the Royalists may do it for a merely practical reason: to keep in practice.

Beware the Cornered Beast

It has been extraordinarily entertaining to watch the vaunted Royalist political machine -- which has been terrorizing the landscape of American public discourse for nearly three decades --- turn almost overnight into a circular firing squad. Following the exposure of an Internet sex predator in their midst, members of the ruling party initially responded with their typical reflex -- blame someone else. In most cases, they first blamed each other, with House of Representatives Chief Rubber Stamper Dennis Hastert (R-Denial) taking the strongest and most vigorous fragging. Proving he is no dummy, Hastert -- immediately upon understanding that bombs were going off under his feet -- pivoted the blame elsewhere. Big Denny assures us the true malefactors in all of this are not the IM'ing Royalist Mark Foley, nor the many Royalist members of the House who knew he was trolling for teenagers, nor the even more numerous Royalist functionaries in the Capitol who were sounding alarms about his habits. No, Hastert would have us believe those most culpable are those who had nothing to do with it -- the Anti-Royalists and their scurrilous bankrollers.

In doing so, Hastert is merely following the example of his Beloved Leader. For the past week, King George has been prancing hither and yon ramping up his Election Year message: "Shake in your boots, my good people, for you are all about to die -- unless you vote correctly." Oh, he hasn't been using those words (though one of his enablers is more blunt: "These are people [who] will kill all of us, any one of us.") but his message couldn't be clearer. Keith Olbermann -- who somehow managed to transform himself from a cerebral, detached chronicler of large men playing children's games into a sharp-tongued firebrand of the Anti-Royalist cause when I wasn't looking -- calls His Imperiousness to account:

"The president of the United States — unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality — has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats.
{snip}
"A president who since 9/11 will not listen, is not listening — and thanks to Bob Woodward’s most recent account — evidently has never listened. A president who since 9/11 so hates or fears other Americans that he accuses them of advocating deliberate inaction in the face of the enemy. A president who since 9/11 has savaged the very freedoms he claims to be protecting from attack — attack by terrorists, or by Democrats, or by both — it is now impossible to find a consistent thread of logic as to who Mr. Bush believes the enemy is.

"But if we know one thing for certain about Mr. Bush, it is this: This president — in his bullying of the Senate last month and in his slandering of the Democrats this month — has shown us that he believes whoever the enemies are, they are hiding themselves inside a dangerous cloak called the Constitution of the United States of America."

Olbermann is, of course, only saying out loud what rational Americans have known in their hearts and minds for years. Refreshing as it is to hear someone give voice to such thoughts, I can't help but wonder if maybe those words are too dangerous to speak. For Olbermann personally, and for the country generally.

Here's why: the Royalists are backed into a corner with no apparent avenue of escape. By every objective measurement, they are about four weeks away from losing the majority in at least half -- if not all -- of Congress. Their tried-and-true campaign message ("Vote for us or you'll all die!") has been drowned out for a week by the Foley scandal. But even before that, the red-meat message had begun to decompose. Its fetid aroma just wasn't getting the digestive juices of the electorate flowing like it did in 2002 and 2004. Too many people are starting to understand, as soccerdad at The Left Coaster puts it:

"Possibly the greatest long term threat to the Republic has been the continued accumulation of power by the unitary president."

The problem is the accumulation of power has already happened. Congress has voted to permit the Boy King to abduct, imprison, and torture -- unto death, if he deems it needed -- any American citizen he considers an enemy of the crown. Congress has voted to give him authority to monitor the phone calls, emails, instant messages and all other communications of any American citizen (with the possible exception of Mark Foley). Royal apologists will insist Congress did not make such a sweeping capitulation to the "unitary executive", and they will be lying (as usual).

With that much power in his hands, there is no way this Imperial Highness will sit idly by and watch his retainers be voted out of power. There is no beast more dangerous than one cornered. Rest assured, the Brain Trust that has brought America to its sorry current state is hard at work on ways to destroy the opposition and cling to power. Can disappearances of prominent or vocal critics be far behind? (Someone already tried to scare Olbermann into silence. Unsuccessfully.)

October Surprise, anyone?