Voted mid-morning.  In the rain.  Turn-out was good, per the workers.  Came home.  Read some blogs.  Flipped on the tube.  MSNBC & CNN.  And have started to get an amazing feeling of deja vu.

Flashback to ’04.  Great turnout.  Better weather.  All the early signs sounded so good.  We were about to retire the Bat Shit Loopy Prez.
And then it all went bad.  The smiles on Democratic talking heads turned sour.  Republican spin-meisters gloated about their GOTV operations, and about the silent Republican hordes, and about the faulty polling.

I can just hear echoes of ’04 in the MSM voices.  Hyping the Republican surge.  Hyping the GOTV.  Despite the anecdotal accounts that turn-out is high, particularly in Democratic leaning places.  And the stories about voter suppression.

About 7:00 p.m., if this sense of deja vu holds, Rovian predictions that everything will break right for the GOP will start to filter through the airwaves.  They will hold the Senate.  Probably pick up a surprise victory in Maryland or New Jersey or Rhode Island.  Get all the close ones.  And the house will come up Red.  Lose some seats.  But not the majority.

We’ll get a weeks worth of explanation how the machines worked, the polls were wrong, and the Republicans just “beat us on the ground.”

And we’ll get two more years of this shit.

Can’t you just hear this story leaking out between the seams of the mainstream press.  Like a fire extinguisher being sprayed upon a country burning.

In Mexico, people take to the streets.  A university becomes a sanctuary for a people’s revolution.  People, upset that their votes are not counted, actually bomb the symbols of oppression.

In the United States, we’ll order some pizza, because we’re worn out from work, and our illusory efforts to change the course of our history at tin-horn ballot boxes.  We’ll watch a seemingly familiar story.  We’ll wonder what is the truth, and realize that we will probably never know.

I’m hoping this deja vu is just my imagination.  But I’ve got this creeping feeling in my skin.  It tells me that the first clause of the last line of the National Anthem needs an immediate rewrite.  It tells me that without serious election reform, I will never again lose an election and feel satisfied that the voice of the people was heard.

This is perhaps the single greatest damage that the Preznit has done to this shell of a great country.  He has destoryed any confidence in the process of democracy itself.  He of the smug grin, who confidently said just six years ago, “My brother tells me we’re gonna win Florida,” just weeks before the Supreme Court of our land annointed the village idiot king.  An opening act which killed the belief by many that their vote counted, followed by a second act where our democratic ideals were burned like a funeral pyre in Ohio.

“Let’s wait and see,” Arlen Specter says over my shoulder at 2:04 p.m.  “Maybe things aren’t all that bleak (for the GOP) in Pennsylvania.”

A scripted message, brought to you by GE (via MSNBC), written by Rove months ago.  To salve us.  To prepare us for what will happen later tonight.  To make us question our own sanity.  So that we can enjoy the pizza, and quietly get up and go to work on Wednesday.

Tell me I’m wrong.  I’ll be happy to hear it.  “We’ll have James Baker, and a new direction,” Specter says.  There will be change.  Just not democratic change.

Update [2006-11-7 16:37:9 by BostonJoe]:Just watching the 4:30 p.m. Interview with Mehlman by Blitzer. Mehlman — “Exit polls were wrong in ’00, ’02, and ’04. Just ask Gore. Kerry. We are in for a long night.” Smiling like a Chesire cat. Blitzer — “We’ve worked out the kinks in our exit polling.” I paraphrase — but they are just setting up the theft. Either that or Mehlman is high, high.