In mid-April I decided to make a some temporary lifestyle changes, some of them economic, some of them psychic. I haven't had a beer or watched TV for nearly two months. And I've been reading more, and mostly fiction!

I haven't cut myself off completed. My daily lunchtime walk around Greenlake allows me to soak in all of the BBC News through headphones. I did read some threads like Bitt's earlier thread on WMD, but didn't respond. For a while I felt like I had developed a hectoring frame of mind with respect to the Great Iraq Deceit. I said "wait a little while, Jim. You *never* know! They might find a shred of evidence! Take a break. Wait until June."

So, it's June. I haven't been hectoring Shrub for a while. Time to get going, isn't it?

Contrary to my previous feelings of inevitable Republican doom, I am starting to think that there is a *chance* that Frat Boy may be another Bush one-term president. Why? Well, the biggest reason isn't a happy one.

OK, so maybe it is slowly dawning on "average" citizens of this country that the WMD previously trumpeted as "fact" on whitehouse.gov were primarily the fictitious alarms of self-interested Iraqi exiles looking to ride an American tank back into power in their hometowns. And for how many of the months between now and November 2004 will W yell at the press pool "We'll find 'em! We'll find 'em!", looking more and more the moron?

Still, looking like a moron does not absolutely preclude election to high office. So, what will? Well, here's where we get to the unhappy part, and it is not a situation that I am rooting to get worse, but I think it may not get better.

An Army officer interviewed by NPR noted today that the attacks on US forces appear to be getting *more*, not less, organized. OK, so this captain/major/whatever is only feeling one part of the elephant, but he's a lot closer to the elephant than me. I think they said that the count of soldiers killed since the "main" part of the war concluded is 29, with the number of wounded not noted. A lot in any event.

Sadly, I think that the country as a whole might conceivably sigh briefly, but then continue to go about its business, if we accrued one death a day for the next six months in Iraq. It's only on TV, after all, isn't it?

Where am I going? Well, let me keep going for a minute.

While many of the people watching the death toll on TV are middle-aged, well-insulated folks like myself, the people getting killed are in the main very young and many, like the She-Warrior Jessica Lynch, entered the all-volunteer forces from an unrepresentative slice of economic America for often very pragmatic economic reasons. Getting killed in a very foreign country where the population is progressively frustrated and unwelcoming was not part of the plan.

W lost the popular vote by a very slim margin and arguably lost the election by an even slimmer one. Tipping the apparent balance were absentee military votes. Absentee ballots are available to all members of the military over 18, not just lifers.

So, my thinking is that if the situation in Iraq does not improve dramatically from both a casualty and quality-of-life perspective between now and November 2004, W may well be unseated by the military. Oh, I don't mean just the votes of the troops really. All of those troops, like my dumb had-to-join-the-Marine-Reserves nephew, have a constituency at home who vote. Army censors notwithstanding, a progressive drop in morale and risng disillusionment will filter out of Iraq to the moms, dads, sisters and brothers back home. And as mindless and slavishly subservient as the electorate in the US sometimes seems to me, it is likewise impressive how fickle it can be. George H.W. Bush's one term as case in point.

Anyhow, I'm starting to feel a little different about November 2004, but the reasons are regrettable.

Leaving aside issues of protest/indie votes next year, other reasons I am thinking that the outcome is not preordained are that 1) the economy continues to suck and 2) there seems like a 14 percent chance that the Democrats may cough up somebody who is credibly distinguishable from Bush (and from Clinton ghosts of Democrats past).

I've heard Howard Dean a few times lately. He seems smart and articulate. Good Grief! Could Dean be the Son of McGovern that I have been looking for? OK, somebody go ahead. Burst my Dean bubble!