The black cloud from Mordor has lifted. Life has reappeared.
We've pulled back the curtain. The Wizard of Odds is revealed as just a man. Fallible. Defeatable.
We believed in the Wizard.
We believed that with a wave of his wand he could convince the whole world—or at least the United States—that black was white and day was night.
With good reason. After 9/11 he sold the delusion that failure was strength and that hysteria was courage. He conjured up a "War on Terror," and all of the mainstream media, most of the House and Senate, and a majority of the electorate actually believed that there was one. And that he was waging it.
He had convinced many of us that torture is necessary, useful, and good. At the very same time he maintained that Americans absolutely don't torture anyone.
We believed that he could raise up vast armies of homophobic Orcs every election day. Even though he was ripping them off from Monday to Friday and on weekends and holidays too.
We believed that he had vast sums of corporate money, a ruthless organization to transmit lies and other ones to purge the voter rolls. That even the Supreme Court would put in the fix for him. And if all of that failed, he could reach into the voting machines and change the numbers.
Reality caught up.
In the contest between salesmanship—illusion, true believer belief, a con job—and reality, the salesman always has the opening advantage. Once the sale is made, and you've bought the lemon, reality always wins.
The recent election was not about Conservatives vs. Liberals. It was the True Believers vs. Reality. The Democrats were running on the side of reality.
They won now because there was a perfect storm.
Which began with Katrina.
An American city was destroyed on live TV. The winds that tore the roof of the Superdome also tore the cloak of patriotism off the Bush Administration and revealed the idiocy, indifference, and incompetence.
The media woke up. CNN suddenly started doing great and serious journalism. The New York Times editorial pages turned against the lies, deceits and failures.
Republican house Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay was indicted for money laundering. Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, was accused of insider trading. Randy "Top Gun" Cunningham was caught taking bribes from defense contractors and pleaded guilty. Bob Ney, of Ohio, pleaded guilty to felony corruption charges and then refused to give up his seat in Congress so he could keep on collecting his salary on the way to prison.
Then came Mark Foley.
Followed by Ted Haggard, senior pastor of the New Life Church, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, doing crystal meth with a gay hooker—in a political movement whose success depends on hysterical homophobia.
Rush Limbaugh making fun of Michael J. Fox was the cherry on top of all that whipped cream. It revealed that beneath the hearty Republican "har-har," there was a bully who would kick the crutch out from under a cripple.
Enough of wallowing in the good news. What's to come?
Here are my predictions for the coming year.
There will be no bipartisanship from the White House.
That's not really a prediction. It's already a fact. The first thing Bush asked Congress for after the election was a bill to authorize wiretaps without warrants.
Next he asked for confirmation of John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN. Bolton was a recess appointment because Congress wouldn't confirm him in their previous session.
That was followed by a set of judicial nominations:
Michael Wallace, the first federal appeals court nominee in nearly a quarter century to be unanimously rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association.
William James Haynes II, part of the group that recommended torture and circumventing the Geneva Conventions.
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