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11/09/2006: "Something wicked this way comes"

So, Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House (elect), and the Democrats now control both sides of Congress. Who is third-in-line of succession? The Speaker of the House, thats who.

The Democrats are now quite close to having it in their power to force-out both Bush and Cheny, via Articles of Impeacement. Even without impeachment, after snatching the House with the closest thing to a crushing mandate ever likely in a system biased in favour of the incumbents, the Democrats now have their hands on the investigative machinery of Capitol Hill.

They can hire lawyers and detectives; they can subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify under oath; they can mount show trials - or indeed real trials - subjecting their enemies to torment under the glaring klieg lights of the world media.

This is a powerful weapon, as Bill Clinton learned when Newt Gringrich stormed the House in 1994, breaking the half-century stranglehold of the Democrats. Newt’s Republicans did not rest until they had impeached the president for perjury and abuse of office in the Paula Jones/Lewinsky saga - even if the meaker Senate later opted for acquittal.

It is an even more powerful weapon in the hands of the Democrats, who can broadly count on supporting fire from the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and the big three TV networks - mostly Beltway liberals by cultural instinct. It was this Congressional-media synergy that gave Watergate its extra bite, dooming Richard Nixon.

Every individual in top echelons of the Bush administration who has done anything wrong over the last six years in power can now expect to see every vile detail exposed in one of those menacing wood-pannelled chambers on the Hill.

While the House can file articles of impeachment with a simple majority, the Senate needs a 2/3rds majority to put them in force. Unfortunately, we probably can't get the extra 15 votes in the Senate. Otherwise, we would probably be a mere six months from the first female president of the USA. Hillary would be so... fucked.

I anticipate that the Senate will soon get a rug-cleaning, courtesy of the Democrats. If they can force 15 more seats to turn Democrat in the next year, they have a shot at taking down the entire Bush machine.

Would Teheran now be cranking up its nuclear weapons programme and supplying Hizbollah with missiles if the US now had three aircraft battle groups and a few army corps deployed against it in the Persian Gulf? Hardly likely.

Indeed, a seriously rattled Iran came forward offering pre-emptive concessions in early 2003 when America was preparing its Iraq armada. The bitter truth for George Bush is that he has unleashed the very Axis of Evil he aimed to contain.

The Democrats will harry him to his political grave for this.

And all this against the backdrop of a housing market crash, with the risk of recession in 2007 rising by the day.

The price of new homes was down 9.7 percent in September from a year earlier, the worst fall since the slump of 1981. The US Federal Reserve now talks of “ghost towns” to describe the bust flattening the once red-hot markets of Arizona and Florida.

The army of estate agents, surveyors, builders, and the like, made up 55 percent of the 2 million jobs created by the US economy from 2000 to 2005. Cash withdrawn from home equity reached 6 percent of GDP last year.

If you believe the US economy can hum along briskly for another two years as this prop is smashed away, I’ve got an ocean-front property in Arizona that I could sell you.

For better or worse, the perfect storm is gathering with malevolent intensity right above the Oval Office.


With all thy gifts America,
Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,
Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee--with these and like of
these vouchsafed to thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)
The gift of perfect women fit for thee--what if that gift of gifts
thou lackest?
The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?
The mothers fit for thee?