Bizarro World
With less than two months remaining and polls still showing a Bush lead, I have to admit that I'm getting thoroughly disgusted with this election.

We're looking at a basic failure of democracy here, the great triumph of smart campaign strategy over, well, reality itself.

Try to imagine if Al Gore had taken office and he had:

--racked up the biggest deficits in history

--seen poverty and the number of health care uninsured rise dramatically on his watch

--become the first president to preside over a net loss of jobs for the first time since Herbert Hoover more than 70 years ago

--gone into Iraq on the premise of WMD only to find NONE... and then mismanaged the occupation such that 1,000 Americans were KIA and most experts agreed that "victory" was a near-impossibility

--lied to Congress to pass a budget-busting and ineffective entitlement expansion, the Medicare prescription drug bill

--failed to protect the U.S. on 9/11, then failed to capture Osama bin Laden... and then tried to exploit the tragedy, and his failure, every day for the next three years?

He would be 40 points down in the polls, and the media would be (correctly) remorseless in attacking his dishonesty and ineptitude.

And I promise you that all the Bush apologists, who minimize the problems and praise the man's "godliness" and "character", would be howling for his blood.

Instead, there's a good chance that we're about to reward the worst presidential performance in American history with a second term in office, in which to dig the national hole even deeper. And yet the Kerry campaign, which is looking more and more like its Massachusetts predecessor from 1988, seems unable to redirect and sustain the focus on Bush's abysmal record. The press, meanwhile, happily regurgitates releases from both sides on Vietnam-era service and other silly "gotcha" items that do nothing to address the great national problems.

Keep all this in mind the next time you hear some chucklehead regurgitate the "liberal media" line.