Most of us get an extra hour tonight, which I can certainly use, but, damn it gets dark early enough as it is these days – do we have to give it any more help? I’ve always thought that it should be “spring ahead, fall forward,” personally. Who the hell needs it to be light in the morning, when you have to go to work? I want it light in the evening, when you can actually go out and do something. And don’t give me this nonsense about kids going to school. That’s what headlights are for (besides, once they go from fetuses to people, who gives a crap, except for the ones we’ll eventually ship off to war, of course, but getting run over a few times just toughens ’em up, and the tougher they are, the less we have to shell out for body armor and all those other frills).

Today would have been my parents’ 59th wedding anniversary, which means my oldest brother’s birthday is nine months and nine days away (hey, it was right after the war, so everybody had to get busy in a hurry). My mother would have despised George W. Bush (my dad, too, who could never figure out why they called Reagan the “great communicator,” since he sounded like a stammering idiot most of the time – Reagan, that is, not my dad). She (mom) always hated Nixon with a passion – I mean, to an Irish Catholic broad, it just didn’t get any better than JFK, and this shifty, sweaty weasel needed to get the hell out of his way.

It must have been quite a time, really, back in the first few years of the sixties (if you were white, anyway), to have gotten past the war, and elected one of your own generation – one that not only didn’t shirk military service, but actually served with distinction and heroism. Somebody with a young family, just like yours. A president that sounded intelligent when he spoke, and that the rest of the world (for the most part) didn’t hate. Somebody (as it turned out) that you could at least count on not to get the goddamn world blown up.

And here, 46 years later, we find ourselves saddled with an ignorant, incurious, lunatic with an Oedipus complex and his finger on the button, who thinks God is telling him what to do. Enabling this dark farce of a president is every branch of the United States government – enabling and cowering before him, going along to get along, and to get a slice – even just a few crumbs – of the pie. Of course it’s a pie made from the rotting flesh and severed limbs of men, women, and children – Iraqis and Americans, soldiers and civilians, whose lives have been destroyed, both in armed combat, and from the reprehensible policies this wretched, filthy, shameless government has foisted upon the citizens of this world.

That’s what this election that’s coming up is all about – taking at least one branch of this government away from these morally bankrupt demons (yes, I too smell the sulfur), and at least stop them from making things worse.

I mostly agree that if you vote for the lesser of two evils, you still get something evil, except it really does make a difference just how evil the greater evil is, and the effect of the aggregate evil. In isolation, these people are bad, but let them come together, achieve critical mass, and rise to power, and the next thing you know they’re invading Poland (or Iraq) and building concentration camps and secret prisons where they claim the “legal” authority to hold and torture anyone, at any time.

Those that pull the strings right now really are evil. Their enablers have no shame. I am under no illusion that a Democratic majority in one or both Houses of Congress means things suddenly will all be OK again (truth be told, things were never “all OK”), but if the Republicans remain in complete control of this government, then Bush and his masters will take it as a mandate to escalate the rape and pillage of our planet (and frankly, I have no desire to be subject to the whims of George Bush’s “higher father”). They need to be stopped, and, all bravado, righteous indignation, and idle threats aside, that can only begin to happen if we take away their rubber stamp on November 7th.

Afterwards, well, I don’t know. With any luck, we can start worrying about that on November 8th.