Tuesday, October 10, 2006

A Perfect Storm of Reality

"Good God! With the war cover-up gone, our dysfunctionality exposed, and with the nation's Ambien supply running out, there's just no way we're gonna make it!"

How did the Dems shoot up so quickly in the polls from just a little over a month ago? The folks at Firedoglake have the correct diagnosis -- a perfect storm of reality:

Even if you're a determined pessimist like Markos, you have to admit that things don't seem quite so bad now. What happened to undo the seemingly indestructible Bush PR juggernaut? Reality happened, that's what. Karl Rove and his minions can build the Shrub-in-Chief up as a king all they want, but ultimately he can’t command the waves of reality — and whether those waves erode his sand monument to himself slowly (as in the agonizing, gradual disintegration of Iraq) or suddenly (as with Hurricane Katrina last year), eventually people can see for themselves how little substance is really there.

Over the past couple weeks, a perfect storm of reality — the Mark Foley page-stalking scandal, the official National Intelligence Estimate that we're losing ground against terrorism due to the Iraq debacle, and the revelations of Bob Woodward's book State of Denial — came together so fiercely that even largely inattentive Americans couldn't shut it out, and the Bushites' grotesquely fabricated celebrations (ghastly as it sounds, that's what they were) of the fifth anniversary of September 11th were washed away.

This turn of events is both a lesson and a (hopefully) unique opportunity. On the one hand, we've discovered our ultimate weapon against the forces of mendacity, if only we can learn to make the best use of it. On the other hand, we'd best master it quickly, since it's horrifying to think how much worse things would have to get for Democrats to win if reality doesn't do the job on its own this time.

Go read the rest of their most excellent analysis.