corrente

Once in awhile, just for practice, do this mental exercise: Take your mind back to Election Night 2000, just as the networks called Florida for Gore and you went to bed with a happy heart.

Pretend the next 3 1/2 years had gone the way they should have, and try to picture the following speech being made by presumptive Republican Presidential candidate George Bush, who is making another run for the office he so narrowly lost after the full Florida recount.

(via the crawling-back-to-respectability-on-sore-knees NYT)

In a scathing attack on what he termed the White House's failed policies in Iraq, Al Gore called today for the resignation of six members of the Bush administration [starting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld].

"We cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team," he said.

Others on his list were George J. Tenet, the director of national intelligence, and Mr. Rumsfeld's deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, and his intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone.

The Bush national security team is "endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home," Mr. Gore insisted.

"They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point."

Resolve to go down to your county election office tomorrow and see what you need to do to sign up to work a polling place THIS November. If they tell you all the poll workers' jobs are filled, see what credentials are needed just to hang around all day as an observer.