I've been saying for a while that victory over these dimestormtroopers depended on the regime's being less unscrupulous than we suppose (cf Diebold). I'll modify this, and suggest that we will prevail because they were less competent than we supposed, and that this ineptitude proves to be as bound up with giddy overconfidence on the campaign trail as the Debacle in the Desert is grounded in the visionary fantasies of the Pentagon neocoms who thought that we could subdue Mesopotamia on the cheap and transform Hussein's two-bit Stalinist state into a docile satrap adorned with ornamental totems of popular mandate, to be resold here labelled "Made in Philadelphia, 1787." In each case they were unprepared for the ferocity of the resistance that tardily coalesced behind their initial triumphs. That there was no "Plan B" in Iraq is now painfully apparent even to many of last year's cheerleaders. It is heartening to see that the Great and Powerful Rove is perhaps likewise caught unprepared by late reverses, without a rabbit to pull out of his ass at the eleventh hour.

So we might win big on Tuesday night. The oppo may have assumed for too long that they would not have to exert themselves, if at all, beyond a bit of discreet Diebold-tweaking in selected precincts, virtually undetectable behind the signal-to-noise wall o' static. Certainly the eleventh-hour feints and tactics have about them a whiff or more of desperate improvisation, a casting about, a grasping at topical straws difficult to reconcile with a confident controlling intelligence. I think it possible that a tsunami of elevated turnout will swamp the RNC's strategems and cheats. This will not stop them from screaming fraud in the wake of the defeat, nor from falling back on the tried-and-true 1992 playbook of attempting in opposition to make the country ungovernable from next year forward.

Still, we know more than we did 12 years ago. Previous fantasies of a fascist takeover of the US of A generally framed it in terms of a third force muscling in rather than what we have seen over the past generation: the stealthy takeover of one of the existing major parties, with all its institutions and apparatus intact, and with the reflexive and unreflective loyalty à la Hoffer's True Believer of a large portion of its installed base. These people will remain out there, hostile, largely uninformed save by the criminal conspiracy the GOP has become, and ready to make mischief in their small and, we may hope, largely ineffectual ways. We for our part must, alas, remain politically engaged, resisting the temptation of factionalism, extending the hand of reconciliation to such Bush supporters as might eventually come to their senses and beating the others like redheaded stepchildren. Thank you.

cordially,