Rainy Days

The last few months have been phenomenally bad for the Republican Party, and also for the entire country. Spurred by the Katrina and Rita disasters, Bush's approval rating has gone through the basement. His Supreme Court nominee is hitting a wall of resistance from the left and the right, and it looks like she won't be confirmed. The special prosecutor investigating the Valerie Plame leak is about to return inditements. And this bad news has somehow managed to relegate the other bad news about Iraq (it's not getting any better) to the back seat. In a day or two, we're going to pass the 2,000 dead mark.

A lot of people on the left side of the aisle are taking this as cause for celebration. Specifically, the country seems to be making the connection that it failed to make in 2004- that the president's reactions to everyday events are causing the problems we're seeing. Maybe the war in Iraq wasn't such a hot idea, everyday people are saying. Why are we still there again? How did this Katrina thing happen? What the heck is going on with the CIA and that investigation?

The Bush Administration and the Republican Party have suffered a steady diet of bloody noses in the last few months, and I would ordinarily be happy, especially with the 2006 elections coming onto the radar screen. The Democrats will probably do well in that election, and that is very, very important.

I'm not thrilled, however, that it took this constant barrage of bad things to force America to hold their president accountable. It's obvious to me that if it weren't for Bush's reactions (no, I don't blame him for 9/11 or the hurricane) to the bad events in the last five years, they wouldn't have been so bad. But it took a lot of really horrible things for the country to figure that out, and I had been hoping that America would be able to do that without such a high cost.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Bush's approval rating is tanking and Red America is looking a little less red, but unlike MoveOn and Howard Dean, I don't have the heart to capitalize on it. Despite what the right might tell you, it's not worth your country getting beat to shit to be proven right.