Catching up with constipated ducks

Ok, it has been about five months since the last time I posted. It has been the best of times and the worst of times, to steal a phrase from Charlie Dickens.

A true tension existed up to the election. that Karl Rove missed just shows he is not the bright boy that all have thought. I was calling it the constipated duck syndrome. Anywhere from Kokomo to Richmond, the same things were being said - people were just hanging on by their fingertips while apparently the economy was just fine. Now, constipated duck looks just fine except they cannot get off the ground.

I can say that my business showed that things were not going well for most people. It has been a week-to-week, if not day-to-day, question of whether I would stay in business. The wife has been a great help in keeping me afloat, but the question remains open.

Politics just made things worse by being so damned depressing. Bush was staying the course for the day that the Iraqis stood up until he stopped saying we were staying the course. It seems the only Iraqis standing up were shooting us or other Iraqis. The Bush phrase making machine just makes me grit my teeth. They ought to be making bumper stickers instead of political policy affecting us and the rest of the world. The phrases approach intellectual depth as much as a Hallmark card approaches Shakespeare's Sonnets. Staying the course gave me an image of Alfred E. Newman sailing towards Niagara Falls.

I could say once upon a time that the difference between Democrats and Republicans really was just a difference of opinion on how to implement the Declaration of Independence. Maybe some of that comes from being a Hoosier Democrat. We can elect both a Democratic Senator and a Republican President, and give more votes to the Senator (that was 2004, if my memory is correct). We tend to practical more than wild-eyed ideologues. (Even if Indiana birthed both Eugene Debs and the John Birch Society). Those ideas fractured a long time ago and ended with Bush's signing statements.

The Republicans' and Bush's incompetency smacked of mendacity. Even worse, it was an international embarrassment. Locally, we Hoosiers got a mini-Bush in our governor. Governing arrogantly would be a bit more palatable, if they governed well. No such luck.

So the whole of the election season from Labor Day just seemed to intensify the sense of dread and pessimism. Iraq continued to stay the course of civil war. Bush continued to say that things were improving while the Iraqi government continued its inability to provide for the needs of a civil society. Representative Foley burst onto the national consciousness as a predator of teenage boys. Books kept popping up touting the cluelessness of our President and his advisors. Polls started talking about a Democratic House. Even some Republicans started to wonder what the hell the President was doing with his signing statements and talk about a unitary executive. Even more Republicans were wondering what happened to fiscal conservatism. Iraqis killed more of our soldiers and even more of themselves. The President said he was keeping Don Rumsfeld.

Depression gripped me enough to wonder how the Democratic Party was going to screw this up. We have raised fecklessness to an art form. Yet, we did it. Hopefully, the Washington insiders can be big enough to give credit to all - to Dean, to Pelosi, to Schumer. The party picked good candidates to back and then backed them. Most surprisingly, we managed to not put our feet in our collective mouths.

Meanwhile, the Republicans worked hard on scaring the electorate to vote for them. They even recruited bin Laden to campaign for them.

Then on election night, the House and the Senate went to the Democratic Party. Now we got the pundits telling us why it happened, how it happened. All I know is that a lot of people - even those that might not favor the Democratic Party - are relieved, that a sense of tension is gone. Now there are only expectations. Oh, and, no more Don Rumsfeld.