One wonders about this whole omnibenevolence thing.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is anxiously anticipating tonights game four of the World Seris. There will be much rejoicing in Beantown (and across the Red Sox nation) if they Sox should pull it off. Your Maximum Leader believes that they Sox can do it and will do it. The Card’s pitching has just come apart in the World Series. Your Maximum Leader looks at the games and wonders how the Cards even got to the World Series with pitching like this… This could be the game to do it.

But then again… A long-time Sox fan told your Maximum Leader yesterday that if there is a curse it will work out this way: The Sox will lose the next four games to the Cards. Then the Sox’s accomplishments against the Yankees will be forgotten. And the woe that is being a Red Sox fan will be compounded 100 fold.

But really, your Maximum Leader thinks the Sox will pull it out tonight. Go Sox!

Your Maximum Leader wonders how he could have forgotten to link to this week’s TMQ column? Gross negligence on his part. If only members of the 101st Airborne Division had been sent to the Villainschloss to secure your Maximum Leader’s computer from misuse by Mrs. Villain the link would have been posted yesterday.

The Packers did well last weekend. That is a good thing. For many different reasons. But the main one is that your Maximum Leader has always disliked the Dallas football franchise. He can’t put a finger on why this is. It is an irrational dislike he’s sure. But your Maximum Leader is comfortable in his dislikes.

Speaking of the Packers… Your Maximum Leader has learned that he has just scored tickets to see the Green Bay Packers take on the Washington Redskins this Sunday at 1pm EST. He’s told the tickets are very good. (Mrs. Villain thinks the seats are the very posh ones where you have real people come up to you and you order á la carte food which is brought right to you in your seat!)

These tickets have caused two dilemas for your Maximum Leader. The first is should he wear his Brett Favre jersey to the game. Your Maximum Leader believes in supporting his team, but he is torn about this game for completely irrational reasons.

You see… The AirMarshal and your Maximum Leader were talking on the phone the other day and the conversation went something like this:

AM: You know that in Presidential election years when the Redskins win the game immediately preceeding the election, the imcumbent wins.
ML: Really?
AM: Yup. And when the Skins lose, the incumbent loses.
ML: Really?
AM: Yeah. So if you really want Bush to win, you’ll have to root for the Skins against the Packers.
ML: Humm…
AM: How’s that for irony? Sucks to be you.

Okay. That may not be a true transcript of the conversation, but it does summon up the essence of the dilema. So let us see if your Maximum Leader has this down. Skins victory = Bush re-elected. Packers victory = Kerry elected.

Damnation. That is a tough choice. On the one hand, your Maximum Leader almost feels as though he should wish the Packers to “take one for the nation” and lose. But on the other hand, if the Packers don’t win this game making the playoffs becomes so much harder and this could be Favre’s last chance to win another Super Bowl.

Of course, there is no emperical relationship between Redskins victories in games preceeding Presidential elections and the outcome of the election. It is just an interesting coincidence. This has been a year when all sorts of long standing records appear to be being broken. (i.e.: No team coming back from being three games down in a series and winning the series.)

Well, your Maximum Leader will have to keep thinking this one over.

Should he wish for a tie?

Carry on.

UPDATE: Here is a Washington Post peice on exactly what the AirMarshal was talking about. Wow! What a statistical coincidence. Since 1936 when the Skins have won at home on the Sunday efore the election - the incumbent wins. And from the article it seems as though your Maximum Leader isn’t the only one with a funny feeling about the game.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader presents you with a sign that beer can do strange things to a man. Or even to a monk. Buddhist Monks Fall for Beer Girls.

Let us just hope it all works out and isn’t just a bad case of celibacy mixed with beergoggles.

Carry on.

I had a rather disconcerting experience last Friday.

I decided to stop in Staunton to visit Vater Smallholder and see how his colonoscopy had gone. Assuming that things had all checked out, I was planning on delivering a bit or ribbing too. Rectal examinations are always humorous as long as the snaky pipe is in someone else’s rear.

When I pulled off 81 at Route 275, there was a heinous accident just ahead of me. I didn’t actually see the hit since I was on the turn of the exit, but probably would have heard the screams of shearing metal if I hadn’t been jamming to the Black Eyed Peas. Three cars up, a driver pulled onto 275 without looking and was hit at about 50 or 60 miles per hour. The cars crunched, slipped across two lanes and slipped into a narrow ravine. As I completed the exit turn, the car wheels were still spinning.

One car had flames coming out of the engine compartment.

I slid my trusty F-150 into a ditch and ran across the highway. I was the first person to reach the burning car and pulled the driver’s door open. The woman inside had a broken nose and was spewing a bit of blood. She was also obviously dazed.

I hesitated. If the flames were rampaging around the car, I would have pulled her out without a second thought. But now that I was standing next to the vehicle, I could see down into the engine block (the hood was accordion crumpled up against the windshield. Looking back, I’m not quite sure how that happened - the whole front was crumpled, but the hood was crumpled more than the body of the engine compartment). The flames were just little flickers and what had at first appeared to be smoke turned out to be a cloud of escaping steam.

So I hesitated. If the fire wasn’t that bad, did i still justify pulling her from the vehicle? What if she had a head or spinal injury? Would moving her cause more damage?

This hesitation lasted maybe five seconds while my brain wrestled with the best solution. Then a voice behind me said: “I’m a nurse. Let’s get her out.” Grateful for direction, I followed orders.

The nurse had been in the car behind me. When I looked around, there were over a dozen people pulling over and running to help. I had one of those “God bless America” moments - all these people were rushing to help total strangers.

The careless driver was in worse shape. He was bleeding profusely, his nose was airbag mush, and he was clearly incoherent. He was rolling from side to side in his seat and moaning. We decided that we had to stabilize him until help arrived (several people had dialed 911 on their cell phones). But we couldn’t get to him - the impact had crushed in his door and we couldn’t pop it open. The other doors were locked.

A couple big truckers and I grabbed the edge of the doorframe that had bent outwards and pulled it back just enough for a skinny teenager to reach his arm in and unlock the back door. We jerked it open and the teenager crawled through the car to open the passenger door. Another nurse had arrived at the scene and crawled in to administer first aid with an EMT kit. We tried to tell the man to sit still but he kept flailing around so someone sat in the backseat and held his head against the headrest.

I’m glad his car, crumpled side and front as it was, did not catch fire - we couldn’t have gotten the man out of his vehicle because the engine has pushed the dashboard back into the passenger compartment, trapping the man’s right leg.

Help took fifteen minutes to arrive, but when it did arrive it arrived in force - two fire trucks, two ambulances, an EMT vehicle and a fire sedan. When it became obvious that all the helpers who had stopped were getting in the way, I said goodbye and continued on to my parents’ house.
Driving away, the adrenaline drained away and I began to get the shakes. I kept thinking about that moment of hesitation.

My brain often stops to consider the pros and cons of each situation. This is generally an asset, but in a crisis situation it is a liability. What if the nurse hadn’t been right behind me? I probably would have ended up pulling the woman out of the car anyway, but what if she had had a neck injury? I don’t think she did because by the time I left she was sitting up and talking to the paramedics, but it was a possibility. How bad would you feel if, trying to be helpful, you paralyzed a spinal cord victim?

Thinking about that critical moment hesitation, I had to stop and thank God that my military hitch ended before I had to make any decisions more important than who would get a three day pass. I imagine that in a combat situation, there will always be several possible courses of action. Good leaders make decisions instantly and carry them out. Would hesitation to consider the pros and cons of each action end up getting soldiers killed? Thank God I will never have to find out.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wanted to write this yesterday; but he was too tired to blog in the evening. So, we return to our ongoing discussion of the Electoral College today. (Is this still “Part the First, Subpart(b) or have we moved to (c)?)

Your Maximum Leader will first comment on why he thinks “Anti-Faithless Elector” laws will not withstand Constitutional scrutiny. To address the Smallholder’s point. Your Maximum Leader believes his position is sticking with a strict construction of the Consitution. Historically, states have been able to manage the terms and condiditons of election (except in matters expressly defined by the Constitution). But, as you can imagine, the federal courts have been more activist in their attempts to redress real (or imagined) greivances. Thus, the states have less authority to regulate how elections are conducted. Your Maximum Leader would like to see states be able to (if they so desired) set up a situation in which pledged Electors for all political parties on the ballot are slated. And those Electors are pledged, and perhaps pledged under penalty of law, to vote a particular way. It is a little nonsensical to believe that a state would be keeping with the letter and spirit of the Constitution if they slated one set of Electors to vote a particular way regardless of the outcome of the popular vote.

As this type of restriction (pledging under penalty of law that an Elector will cast a vote in a particular fashion) is not explicitly allowed (or prohibited) in the Constitution, your Maximum Leader feels that should a court ever review a “Faithless Elector” law they will just make up some decision to suit their purposes. Given the way courts have ruled over the past 60 or so years, it seems likely that a federal court would want to take descretionary powers away from states and give it to some federal entity.

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t believe that “Faithless Elector” laws should be unconstitutional. He just believes that federal judges would make them so if such a case ever came up.

Just your Maximum Leader’s feeling… Anyway…

So, after our little posts of last week, your Maximum Leader got some messages from others concerning our Electoral College discussion. Loyal minion JohnL of TexasBestGrok (still the best blog on the internet for aircraft cheesecake and Sci-Fi babes polls) writes:

You can pass along to the Smallholder that I really meant no offense to Molly the Democrat. I admire gun-toting Democrats, a sadly endangered species. I am in fact unaffiliated with either major political party here in Texas.

While it’s no secret to readers of my blog that I will vote for President Bush this time around, it has nothing to do with Party affiliation. It has everything to do with war and taxes. Bush will fight to win the war and seek to make tax relief permanent. Kerry? I’m not sure about the details of all his “plans,” but in short I’m sure he’ll surrender to the Islamists and raise my taxes to boot. I disagree with much of the Republican Party platform, and even more so with the Texas Republican Party platform (which is quite a bit stronger on social conservatism than
on general principles of individual liberty). I guess I’m a South Park Republican, or, under my own terminology, a “clothespin” Republican (see here) who would likely be voting for the Libertarians this year if they hadn’t nominated an anti-war moonbat.

My pointed words were aimed at puncturing the righteous indignation of the Democrats (whom I perhaps unfairly conflated with Molly), who so recently ran a ruthless party machine in Texas. Doesn’t mean I approve of the Republicans’ tit-for-tat, but I do find irony a delicious snack.

Yours in free-market villainy,

JohnL

Your Maximum Leader mut tip his bejeweled floppy hat and say “hear, hear” to JohnL’s love of savory irony in the Texas Democrats being upset that the Texas Republicans learned a thing or two about redistricting from them. The Texas redistricting fight is a perfect illustration of the lesson that neither party really seems to learn. The great wheel of Karma spins around and sometimes you’re on the winning side; and sometimes you come back as a dung beetle. Texas Dems should feel nothing but embarassment over the behaviour of their elected representatives in the Texas House. It was pathetic.

And from what your Maximum Leader knows of Texas Democrats (and of Molly) he feels he can say that Molly does appear to be a rare bird in the flock. And we all here don’t think you meant any offense by lumping Molly in with other Texas Democrats. Really, how were you to know?

You know, your Maximum Leader does think of himself as a conservative. It just so happens that the primary conservative party in the US right now is the Republican party. This does not mean he blindly votes the party line. He can say that while he hasn’t ever voted for a Democrat for President or the House of Representatives; he has voted for Democrats for US Senate, State Senate, State House of Delegates, Mayor, County Supervisor, and Sheriff. Your Maximum Leader does measure the candidates as a whole and votes for the one most aligned with him. He has never felt as though a vote for a third party candidate was a good move. Mainly because as much as I might favour a party like the Libertarians in the abstract, they are oftentimes a bit too wacky for serious consideration.

And, interestingly enough, shortly after JohnL wrote his e-mail your Maximum Leader received an e-mail from the Divine Minion Molly. She wrote:

Dearest Maximum Leader,
I’ve come out of Astro mourning briefly to respond to your wonderful post on the Electoral College. You truly did it justice. Thank you for taking up for me. I’m not a “whiney Democrat”. I just wanted a nice discussion on the Electoral College without the snide goose references. I hadn’t even thought of the redistricting fiasco when asking your thoughts on the Electoral College. I could go on a good rant about Tom DeLay sticking his nose in everything but I won’t.

To JohnL- I’m a 7th generation Texan so my ancestors were probably in the Democratic Party machine after Reconstruction so I’ll take full responsibility for it. Also, he needs to add Claudia Black from Farscape to his Sci Fi Babes.

To Smallholder- I loved your diagram on the filtering between the people and the presidency. I think this is important. The Founding Fathers set it up this way because they didn’t trust the “common people”. Also, I don’t have a concealed handgun permit, so my gun stays at home unless I’m going to the shooting range.

To clarify my position, I favor the proportional allocation plan that is trying to be passed in Colorado. I think more people would vote if they thought their vote would count.

One of the reasons I do like your site dearest Maximum Leader is that you welcome all views on any subject. Plus, you’ve just gotta love someone who speaks about himself in the third person.

Sincerely,
The Divine Minion M
(Not Molly the Texas Democrat)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah-dy, blah. It is nice to know that you favour proportional allocation of Electors Molly. But your Maximum Leader really wants to know if you own some mules, t-straps, kitten slides, or strappy sandals? Really now… Let us not get off track talking about the Electoral College or redistricting when we can consider footwear!

Okay… Moving on… The first comment your Maximum Leader must make to Molly is this, “What good does your gun do you at home?” (But if it is there unattended, your Maximum Leader hopes it is in some locked container.) Anyhoo…

Molly, your Maximum Leader is pleased that he lived up to expecations in the Electoral College discourse. He is also sure that the good Minister of Agriculture has as well. Also, Claudia Black does seem quite attractive. Click here for work safe pic. Perhaps JohnL will have a women of Farscape poll. (Alas, your Maximum Leader has never watched Farscape. But he hears that his Villainous Sibling does.) And your Maximum Leader thanks minion Molly for the kind words about writing in the third person. It is much harder than it seems.

As for Tom DeLay’s nose, your Maximum Leader does believe that a US Congressman who doesn’t stick his nose into redistricting in his state is not deserving of being a Congressman. Admittedly, DeLay had a larger role than your Maximum Leader would have thought appropriate in the whole matter. But nonetheless, the problem appears to be with the Democrats not liking the taste of sour grapes.

But back to the matter of the Electoral College…

The more your Maximum Leader thinks about it, the more he believes that moving to proportional allocation of Electoral votes is not something to which we as a nation would look forward. The more your Maximum Leader mulls it over, the more he believes that widespread adoption of proportional allocation would: 1) increase the already insane amount of money candidates spend on elections; 2) would not actually increase the number of candidate visits to out of the way places in an effort to court votes; 3) would result in narrow popular vote/electoral vote outcomes to lead to more polarized politics (lack of mandate); 4) send elections to the House with terrifying freqency; 5) not improve the nature of or character of the national debate.

Well. That seems to be all the pithy commentary your Maximum Leader can summon up right now. He supposes we are back to talking fashion again. (BTW, the lovely Annika wrote your Maximum Leader and said she might come up with a women’s footwear primer for our edification! Yay!)

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader the NTSB has officially blamed pilot error for the crash of American Flight 587 in November 2001. You remember this one? The one that crashed into the neighbourhood in New York? The one everyone feared was a terrorist act just a few months after September 2001?

Well, according to the news wires, it was the pilot applying too much pressure to the rudder. Sadly now, Airbus and American are duking it out over who, ultimately, is going to pay.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader can’t believe his luck. Knowing that the Minister of Agriculture is a “clothes horse” and can pull off just about anything; your Maximum Leader thinks it is time for the M of A to trade in that John Deere cap he wears around the farm for something more stylish. Ah yes. This should do quite well.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minons. Your Maximum Leader sees today becoming one big fashion statment. Heh. Your Maximum Leader will direct his loyal minions to the House of Mirth to read recent posts on unmentionables (or knickers, or undergarments, take your pick).

First read Will’s post on female undergarments.

Then read CellieB on male undergarments.

And where is Sexy Sadie in all this discussion? Why she and the Smallholder are chewing on the same article. Humm…

Carry on.

I am surprised that the Maximum Leader did not turn to his trusty Minister of Agriculture for fashion advice. For those of you who only know us from the blogosphere, I am known for being quite the dapper clothes horse. I’m sure that Mike, Greg, Rob, Dave, and Kevin would all attest to their feelings of fashion inferiority when confronted with one of my tasteful ensembles.

I was unaware that your style of Jeans made a statement about your political philosophy.

I, like the Maximum Leader, used to be a 501 buttonfly guy. I always chuckle when I hear that term because it reminds me of a bad pickup line contest from college. A group of guys were sitting around the dorm room trying to figure out the absolute WORST yet successful pickup line anyone had used. One guy actually had had success by calling a girl and asking if she wanted to come over and “test fly the button fly.” Ah, true love in college.

Now I’m a Kirkland guy. What does that say about me?

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader must make a confession. He reads the lovely (and ideologically pure) Annika’s site every day. (Do you? You should. Here’s a link for you.)

Anyway…

Something has been bothering your Maximum Leader for WEEKS now about Annika’s site. That damned Fash-ism poll near the top of the sidebar. What the hell are some of those things?

Your Maximum Leader knows they are all footwear. He understands basic pumps and boots. But what for the love of your Maximum Leader are: Mary Janes, d’Orsay pumps, t-straps (which sound quite sexy btw), peep toes, slingbacks, strappy sandals (which sound sexy in a granola-crunchy-Greatful-Dead-chicka way), kitten slides, and mules (which don’t sound sexy at all).

Your Maximum Leader probably could have figured all these things out for himself had he wanted to spend some time googling these terms. But instead your Maximum Leader chose to continue to let his ire grow. Finally this past weekend, your Maximum Leader asked Mrs. Villain and his Villainous Sister-in-law (who by the way used to be a buyer for Lee Jeans, and Liz Claiborne - and has lots of experience in couture) what the heck these footwear items were.

Your Maximum Leader now knows what a Mary Jane is. (It turns out that the Princess Villainette likes Mary Janes.) And they could also help with a Mule. (It seems as though the Princess Villainette also has a pair of Mules. As does the Villainous Sister-in-law.) They couldn’t help with the other stuff.

So your Maximum Leader asks you… What are these other things?

Your Maximum Leader will inquire of Annika as well. But he is befuddled.

And while your Maximum Leader is on the subject of Fashion. (A subject of which he admittedly knows little.) For how long has there been some sort of cosmic divide between “Levi’s People” and “Wrangler People?” Great Jeezey Chreezey people! They are just jeans! Your Maximum Leader got a lecture from a minion over the weekend the jist of which was that one couldn’t be a good conservative and wear Levi’s too. Wranglers were the jeans of conservatives.

Well, your Maximum Leader had never heard this before. Your Maximum Leader, by the way, is a Levi’s man. He doesn’t own but two pairs of jeans, and they are both (and have always been) Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans. ALWAYS. (Okay, maybe not always. But certainly since your Maximum Leader had a say in what clothes he wore this has been true.)

So could someone please clue in your Maximum Leader on the whole jeans issue here too? Throw your Maximum Leader a frickin’ bone here. He is Maximum Leader afterall. How can your Maximum Leader allow a seemingly crucial issue to the great masses of the unwashed minions go un-noticed?

Anyway… If some minon(s) care to opine on this, they have your Maximum Leader’s attention.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader had the opportunity to talk to some old friends on the phone over the weekend. All of them, for purposes of this blog, happen to be long-time Democrats. What follow are anecdotal stories about people your Maximum Leader happens to know.

With all of them your Maximum Leader chatted and caught up before politics came up. In most cases, your Maximum Leader didn’t bring up politics.

The first one is a late 50’s, female, resident of Ohio (of all places). She mentioned if your Maximum Leader was tired of the election yet. Your Maximum Leader said he was getting tired of it; and asked her if she had seen enough of the candidates to make up her mind. He even suggested that she didn’t need her mind made up. Your Maximum Leader then got an earful! And what a surprising earfull it was. This intelligent woman (who hasn’t ever in her life pulled the lever for a Republican nationally) said that she was going to stay home. John Kerry made her feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Your Maximum Leader pressed a little and wanted to know why. She said that while she cannot abide by Bush, Kerry worried her because, “All he knows how to do is talk.” She said that if a chemical/biological weapon were set off by terrorists in the US (which, by the way, she doubted would happen) she was convinced that John Kerry would talk with everyone in the world about what to do and equivocate until it was too late to do anything. That is what got her goat. She didn’t trust him to act when called upon to act.

This was interesting because no fewer than 4 or 5 hours earlier, your Maximum Leader was talking to one of Mrs. Villain’s relatives (a Democrat, male, resident of VA) who indicated that he planned on voting for the President for the same reason. He didn’t trust Kerry to act even if we were attacked. (This man in a veteran with no great love towards the President.) But he said he couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for Kerry.

The third Democrat your Maximum Leader spoke to was the most interesting of the bunch. She is a liberal (communist practically) living in Florida. (She is a 30-something mother of two living in South Florida with her “husband.” She likes to call him her “Partner” because “husband” is a sexist term which suggests submission to male authority.) In 2000, this woman called your Maximum Leader nearly every day after the election telling him how the Republicans were going to caught in their dirty little tricks to steal the election and how the power of the Bush family would be broken. Anyway… This woman informed your Maximum Leader that she was voting for some odd third party group of which your Maximum Leader had never heard. He asked why she wasn’t voting for Kerry. She informed him that, “If I wanted to vote for some pandering bastard murderer I’d vote for Bush.” Your Maximum Leader felt the likely follow-up question to that statement was, “Pandering bastard is understandable, but where do you get the murderer from?” “Look,” she said to your Maximum Leader. “If I wanted to elect some assult-weapon wielding Nazi I’d vote for Bush. It disgusted me to see that footage of Kerry out where ever he was in his outfit boasting about killing that helpless bird.”

The conversation then trned to Thanksgiving plans (or non-plans as the case of your Maximum Leader’s friend might be).

So, for what it is worth. Three Democrats your Maximum Leader knows. None of them voting for Kerry.

Of course, do these stories mean anything in the grand scheme. Probably not much. They are just anecdotal evidence of some people being dissatisfied with their candidate. But if there is non-anecdotal evidence of something going wrong for Kerry, it seems to be coming from Hawaii. Your Maximum Leader has read a number of articles about this poll showing Bush and Kerry neck-in-neck in the Aloha State. If Hawaii goes for Bush… Well… Your Maximum Leader would be gobsmacked. Just the prospect of it is as likely to your Maximum Leader’s thinking as would Saddam Hussein winning a popularity contest at a neocon cocktail party.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just read that Chief Justice Rehnquist is in the hospital for thyroid cancer treatment.

Your Maximum Leader seems to remember reading something not too long ago about the Chief Justice’s failing health. Well, we need to call the people who gave Dick Cheney his bionic heart and see if they have a thyroid for the Chief. We need to have him stick around for a while longer yet.

Carry on.

Wow. I feel rather foolish. Not a week after I post about my amazement at the way that the Republican party puts aside its internal conflicts in order to unite around their candidate, it seems some major conservatives are declaring war on the Bush administration.

Republic Switchers chronicles conservatives making the switch to Kerry.

Scott McConnell of The American Conservative Magazine has endorsed Kerry (as the lesser of two evils):

Kerry’s the One
By Scott McConnell

There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge-the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry-seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002. But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.

It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s perfect foil-its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their cuntries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliche about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal-Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it-and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East.

Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do.

It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security. These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists-indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to providefull, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.

I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?

The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidencyv=and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency-and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.

If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past-and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naive belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies-a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies-temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election-are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just couldn’t wait until tomorrow to blog on his World Series thoughts. Are you ready for the one big thought? Here it is… (Although your Maximum Leader hesitates to touch the keys to spell the word.) Sweep.

Yes, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader thought last night that it is possible for the Red Sox to sweep the Cards. Now, having typed the unthinkable, your Maximum Leader must tell you what led to this idea.

Factor 1: Cards pitching. The Cards starters are now no longer playing at the level they were at the end of the season and through the first two rounds of playoffs. They are tired. They don’t seem to be controlling the ball. They are the reason that the Sox have been spotted two or more runs in the firstinning in both games.

Factor 2: Sox pitching. The Sox pitchers have been great. They have been better in starters. In middle relief. And in closing out the game.

Factor 3: Momentum. The Sox have carried their momentum from the ALCS into the World Series. The Cards have not carried their momentum from the NLCS into the World Series.

Last week your Maximum Leader said that the Cards would have to split the first two games in Fenway to have a shot at winning the series. They did not. Game 1 was the game they could have taken. It would have been hard, but they were, a few times, poised to make a run on the lead. But they didn’t. That will likely prove to be their undoing.

You see, the Cards are great at home. And they have lots of advantages over the Sox when they play in St. Louis. No DH. Homefield crowd. etc. But there are only 3 games in St. Louis. The Cards could win all three games in St. Louis, and then have to go to Fenway to lose two more games. Your Maximum Leader was sure that if they didn’t take one of the first two against the Sox they wouldn’t win the series. Now the Cards may just prove your Maximum Leader correct.

Of course, what makes this funny is that the only reason the Sox have homefield advantage in the Series is because the AL won the All-Star game. How funny would that be? The Sox win all their home games and thus the Pennant because of the All-Star game.

Well, we’ll have to wait until Tuesday to see what will happen. But your Maximum Leader wouldn’t be surprised if the Sox came on strong and won the first game at Busch Stadium. If they do… Well, your Maximum Leader will not type it again…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader makes it a point to visit the Acidman’s site once or twice a day. Your Maximum Leader loves reading his thoughts and observations on goings-on and life. Well, it seems he’s had an “encounter.”

Now your Maximum Leader is sceptical. No mono-breasted, prehensile tail sporting alien babes have ever come to the Villainschloss and offered to mow the lawn or do the dishes for him. (He has enough trouble getting Mrs. Villain and the Villainettes to do that stuff for him.) So, either the Tall Dog is the luckiest man on the face of this planet… Or he had a tipple too many from ye olde bottle…

Carry on.