FunctionalAmbivalent

Let Me Be the First To Propose This Particular Conspiracy Theory

When Bill Clinton won the Presidency in 1992, he did so in a three-way race, defeating both George Herbert Walker Bush and Texas businessman Ross Perot. Perot waged one of the more vigorous and promising third-party Presidential campaigns in history -- at least until he went publicly nutty and started talking about the CIA ruining his daughter's wedding -- and received more than 18% of the popular vote. Much of that vote came from disaffected conservatives who otherwise would have voted for Bush. Those protest votes in effect delivered the election to Clinton, who won with only 43% of the vote.

Fast forward to 2008. Democrats have done what Democrats do, which is to fail to come to their senses. The net result is that they've nominated Hillary Clinton, the one candidate who can unite the feuding social and fiscal conservatives of the badly shattered Republican coalition. It looks, once again, as if the Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, until newly declared independent Michael Bloomberg steps up and announces his candidacy.

The media are going nuts. This is the greatest three-way cage match since the Thrasher, Andre the Giant and Blackjack Lanza squared off in the old Spectrum in Philadelphia.

Bloomberg wages a vigorous but ultimately doomed campaign. It's ultimately doomed by the fact that the political system is rigged in favor of the two established parties, because the election laws have been written by the two established parties and the one thing both Republicans and Democrats agree on is that the political system doesn't need outsiders coming in to screw things up. You've got to keep out the riff raff.  Plus we're all conditioned to thinking about two parties and only two parties, and it's hard for a lot of people to vote for a third party because voting for a third party in a Presidential election is in many ways the very definition of being a crackpot.

So Bloomberg wages a vigorous campaign and raises all kinds of serious issues and gets about 20% of the vote, most of which comes from disaffected fiscal conservatives who don't like the expansive role of government the control-freak social conservative Republicans favor, but who just can't bring themselves to vote for Clinton.

Now 20% is pretty impressive -- maybe Bloomberg even picks up a handful of electoral votes -- but all it really accomplishes is throwing the election to Hillary Clinton. It's almost a replay of 1992: Clinton gets 43% of the vote, the Republican draws 37%, and Bloomberg goes back to New York where he's photographed having a bury-the-hatchet dinner with his friend and fellow New Yorker Bill Clinton.

And everywhere people start wondering: Was Bloomberg in on it from the beginning?

Of Course, My Predictions Are Always Wrong

WIthin 90 days Imus will have a satellite radio contract. That gives him 60 to negotiate his severance with MSNBC and -- more lucratively -- CBS, both of which contracted with him to do exactly what he did that got him fired, so they're going to have to pay up. Then, after the severance agreements are final, Imus has lunch with a couple of lawyers and his agent and signs a...oh, I don't know, something like a $30 million, 6 year agreement with Sirius Radio.

He's back on the air September 4, which is the Monday after labor day, without exec producer Bernard McGuirk, who will be thrown overboard as the instigator of the whole thing.

But then, I'm cynical.

UPDATE: A friend who knows a thing or two about showbiz law notes that Imus' severance may include lots and lots of money, but may also include some kind of non-compete in exchange for that money.

Pass It On

The hot rumor is, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is going to resign and President Bush is going to nominate Harriet Miers to take his place.

You heard it here first.

What's Going To Happen at the Wedding

A look forward to the highlights of the Prince Charles/Camilla Parker Bowles wedding:

• Mother-of-the-groom refuses to attend wedding after disagreement about reception seating arrangements.
• At bachelor party, groom vomits on stripper, pays $500,000 tip to "keep things quiet."
• Best man Prince Andrew sneaks into dressing room, writes "Help Me" on the bottoms of the groom's shoes
• Groom, standing at altar, can't find the ring.  Must have left it back at the castle.  As a stand-in, makes do with 16 carat Star of Nairobi retrieved from junk drawer by Lady in Waiting.
• During the ceremony, an audible argument breaks out as Princes Margaret insists that guests shower the newlyweds with birdseed instead of rice.  "Birds eat the rice and it explodes in their stomochs!" the Princess shouts.  "I've seen it happen!"
• Reception delayed for 16 days as bridal party has to stay behind at the church to pose for oil painting.  Guests waiting for the bar to open visibly disturbed.
• Cash bar not a good idea, either.
• Drunken mother-in-law-of-the-bride arrives at the reception, gives weepy, unintelligible toast, leaves.
• Sound of cans dragging behind getaway coach scares team of horses, which panic and run out of control across the countryside.

I Guess, In Retrospect, the Remarkable Thing Is That Someone Thought Halftime Entertainment Ought to Be Edgy

Sir Paul McCartney, officially recognized member of England's stodgy establishment, exerted his powers as The Cute One.  He sang four harmless 30 year-old songs, single-handedly calming the nation's fears and returning halftime to its traditional role: A period during which the television is ignored.  I do not recall a time when "Live and Let Die" played that I did not leave the room.  Man, that's a bad song.

I'll make a prediction: Next year, Barry Manilow will sing his most familiar advertising jingles while America finds something else to do, probably including the slicing of ham and fishing the tiny, broken pieces of potato chips out of the bottom of the bag.

Here's How I Know Bush is Going to Win

I don't. In fact, I'm seeing a glimmer of hope. To be honest, I see a lot of things breaking Kerry's way, and darned if the big galloot hasn't looked down-right Presidential.

But I'm going to keep saying Bush will win because I'm a jinx. When I pick a lane of traffic, it moves slowly. When I pick a sure thing at the track, the horse falls asleep in the starting gate. My line at the grocery store inevitably stops while someone waddles to check a price.

I felt really good about Kerry in August and talked freely about a Kerry victory. Kerry had a terrible August.

So, for the record, Kerry's going to get trounced. Not even close. Barely even necessary to hold an election. Bush by a landslide. The whole panic thing is just a ruse to make Kerry overconfident, and then the President is going to swoop in with some devastating October Surprise ("Look everyone! I'm sentient!") and Kerry's a goner. Toast. Roadkill. A grease spot on the sidewalk of life. Dukakis II: The Sequel.

Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue: The Sequel

I've been thinking about all the things I believe about this election, and wondering how they would all look if I added them up into a single narrative about the years to come. So that's what I'm going to do, right here, operating without adult supervision. I'm going to use logic and fear and instinct to describe my post-election world, based on what I believe.

Admittedly, what I believe changes from day-to-day. I talk to people with interesting ideas, read interesting things, and eat foods that unsettle my stomoch; inevitably, they all have an influence on what I think is going to happen. (Burp if you're optimistic!) But right here, right now, pretending that I believe everything I believe 100%, I'm going to postulate the future. Smoke 'em if you got 'em; this may take a while.

First of all, I believe President Bush is going to win. I hate believing that, but I believe it nonetheless. For two years after his re-election -- until the mid-term elections of 2006 -- he and his Republican friends will have unfettered control of the U.S. Government.

More importantly, for the first time in his life W doesn't have to worry about re-election. I believe that everything he has done as President has been notivated by his desire to get re-elected. I also believe that his desire to get re-elected has been powered by his neurotic need to out-do his father, who only served one term. So here we have a President suddenly freed of both his primary motivation and his ultimate goal.

Suddenly liberated, W could do just about anything. He could become a moderate, convinced that his legacy lay in being a great healer of our political division. He could become a righteous warrior of conservatism, remaking the country in Jerry Fallwell's image.

My guess is that he's going to try to become a pragmatist, of sorts. I honestly think he's aware of the mess he's made, and that his current Little Mary Sunshine routine is political posturing. What else does he have to run on?

But after the election, with his eye on his legacy, I think he's going to think: "Oh, shit. Rove can't control history. I'm going to look like an ass hole."

He's going to look like an ass hole, in his own mind, for two reasons: Iraq and the deficit. So those are the things he's going to attack, and then as a kind of frosting-on-the-cake he's going to try to reform Social Security.

On Iraq, he's staring at a fork in the road. In one direction lies a revived draft and a larger war; in the other there is a pipe-dream victory. He's promised time after time that a draft is not even a possiblity, and he has to know that if he goes back on that promise he's going to look out onto Pennsylvania Avenue and see an army of mothers bearing pitch forks and torches, calling for his head.

So he'll take the other fork and find a way out of Iraq. All that talk about hard work in the debate...the lack of enthusiasm even Republicans show for the war these days...the increasingly accepted assumption that he screwed it up...if he could throw a switch and make it go away I have no doubt but that he would. So that's what he's going to do: He's going to find a way to declare victory and pull out. It'll be some face-saving way, but he'll find it and he'll cut Iraq loose. Look for a big victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, but no "Mission Accomplished" banners.

Maybe Iraq will hold together and maybe it won't. My guess: Civil war and the country splits into at least two, and more likely three, independent states. An awful lot of people who believed the President when he said he was commited to Iraq have second thoughts. Dissatisfaction builds.

As that's going on, President Bush will attack the deficit. I believe that President Bush has no idea how easy he's had it in life, and that his base worldview is that people who aren't rich and pretty like him are morally flawed. Fat people are undisciplined; poor people are lazy; the mentally ill are whiners. His attack on the deficit will reflect those basic beliefs. He'll cut everything he can that supports anyone who's not already fortunate. He'll do it out of his sincere belief that government help enfeebles people, secure in the belief that what he is doing he is doing out of an admirably tough love.

Among the cuts will be things that people notice. With $400 billion to cut and no tax increases, it's not just waste, fraud and abuse. It's national parks. It's meat inspections. It's potholes on Interstate Highways. It's probably even homeland security. All stuff that people notice, and all stuff that makes people mad.

A series of terrorist attacks strikes the United States from coast to coast: Machine guns at shopping malls, a car bomb at a federal building, an un-accounted-for Exocet into the side of a cruise ship.

With no Clinton Administration to blame, President Bush has no where to hide. Though he is safe from voters' wrath, his friends in Congress aren't. The 2006 midterms are a bloodbath. With DeLay on trial, several of the latest terrorists traced back to what had been Iraq, and years of drastic government cutbacks having serious quality-of-life impacts on the middle class, the voters rebuke anyone who has ever posed for a photo with the President. Republicans lose...I don't know, 100 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate. A new generation of socially liberal and fiscally conservative Democrats come into power promising to straighten-out the financial mess and get the government out of people's private lives.

In the two years after the midterms, President Bush accomplishes exactly nothing. Social Security reform becomes a Democratic initiative, and the final compromise involves both partial privatization and means-testing benefits. The United States, gun-shy after a war that is now widely accepted as having been without positive effect, learns to live with new nuclear states: Iran, North Korea and Egypt, which reveled its nuclear program in 2007.

Three years after leaving office, former President Bush and his wife split up. It's handled quietly, and the media respect a zone of privacy around the Bushes.

"It's with great sorrow," says a written statement issued by the former President, "that Laura and I have decided to go our separate ways. I will always hold her fondly in my heart."

In 2014, two years after the divorce becomes final, former President George W. Bush marries writer Ann Coulter in a private ceremony. Photos leaked to People magazine show the ex-President at his wedding reception, smirking and staring down at his new wife's surgically enhanced cleavage.

What We're All Going To Do When the Election Is Over

After perusing Blogword to see what everyone is talking about, I find that everyone is talking about the election. This is, of course, no surprise. But being the emotionally evolved person that I am, and having resigned myself to both a Bush victory and Cub defeat, I have moved on. I am now the self-appointed advance scout for Blogworld, exploring the far country in search of The Next Big Thing that we're all going to be talking about after November 2.

Here's what I predict we're going to do:

1. Analyze the crap out of the election. It's a deep rut we're all in, and it's going to take time for us to climb out of it. Our political half-way house is recrimination of the Kerry Campaign and crippling waves of nausea as the TV punditocracy's insider-debrief on the campaign reveals all kind of things they really should have brought to our attention before the election. For example: Karl Rove gets the President pumped-up for campaign appearances by reading to him from The Little Engine That Could, and Laura Bush smokes Swisher Sweets at night on the Truman Balcony.

2. Stare in wonder as President Bush unleashes holy hell on rebel strongholds in Iraq. Lefties will complain that, if amping-up the violence in Iraq is something that needs to be done, Bush should have had the stones to do it before the election. Lefties will make this self-defeating complaint despite the fact that they disagree with the policy, thus making the debate about timing and not the policy itself. The actual policy will never be discussed, because the media will be all ajabber about the plans for the Inaugural balls, which they get invited to but you don't. Righties, on the other hand, will simply stick their tongues out.

3. Watch the rats leave the ship. Secretary of State Colin Powell is, for all practical purposes, already gone. SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft are the next to go, "seeking other opportunities" after embarrassing and ineffective tenures that have screwed this country up, but good. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has already announced he's leaving. His reason: He can't make ends meet on $175,000 a year. Lefty bloggers will make rude noises about Ridge abandoning his country in its time of need, and doing it for money. They will be right, but no one will care. Lefties will camplain about Ridge's departure despite the fact that they don't like Ridge and should be happy to see him go.

4. The Dan Rather Deathwatch. Rumor has it that the almost 700-year-old Rather will decide to "retire" in January. Here's an inside scoop: My parents, who live down the block from Rather's home outside of Austin, report a step-up in landscaping activites at the opulant Rather estate. Regular Autumn gardening, or preparation for the Master's return?

5. Massive Budget cuts. Post-election, Republicans suddenly discover the federal budget deficit. Yikes! Where'd that come from? The first solution to the $450 billion a year shortfall offered by Republican "leadership": Zeroing-out the National Endowment for the Arts' $140 million budget and making it legal for corporations to avoid paying taxes by having their CFOs turn counter-clockwise three times while chanting, "I know better what to do with my money than the government does." While this may be good sorcery, it's bad policy, so the Repubs will go into conference and emerge with a document proposing 10% across-the-board cuts for everything but the stuff they feel the country needs if it's going to continue to elect Republicans. Look for: Cuts in programs for crippled children and increases in golf course subsidies. Metaphorical blood will flow in the streets of Washington, D.C., and the anecdote-oriented media will file fill-in-the-blank stories of telegenic and hard-working single moms whose adorable children are threatened by the government's sudden abandonment of some federal program or another.

6. Hurricane Zelda rips into Miami. The 11th hurricane to make landfall on Florida this year causes President Bush to declare Florida a Triple-Disaster Area. That make residents of the state eligible to be moved, at government expense, to inland areas not prone to hurricanes, like Kansas. In a related development, the EPA issues a report stating that the increased volatility of tropical storms has nothing to do with global warming. "Our best thinking at this time," says the newly appointed head of research for the EPA, former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore, "is that the storms are God's retribution for Forida leaving homosexuals uncaged in South Beach and Key West."

There's also the possibility, albeit small, that once the election is over bloggers simply won't have anything to talk about at all. After a few days of linking to each other's links about how little is going on, we'll get bored and seek new hobbies. My prediction: Building models of the Starship Enterprise in empty 1.5 liter wine jugs and throwing rocks at passing freight trains, which don't even notice we were there.

Here's the Feature Story Tidbit You'll Be Hearing a Lot About Over the Next Couple of Weeks

I'm going to go out on a limb now and predict the factoid-based news featurette of choice for local TV stations and newspapers the next couple of weeks: Americans give lousy birthday presents.

That might seem a pretty random prediction, but that's because you don't read P.R. Newswire, a website that is nothing but press releases.

This morning, the newswire led off with a release from the crafty P.R. folk at Star Stories, a company that exists to sell the public astrology-based hooey. Star Stories is using a time-tested publicity strategy almost guaranteed to lure local news people into giving people with something to sell free and highly credible "news" exposure. (Flacks, by the way, don't call it "free" media, because it's hard to bill clients for something that's free. They now call it "earned" media.) The strategy: Conduct some kind of poll on a topic that will appeal to local television news producers, and then post it on P.R. Newswire where infotainment-oriented news people start their days.

If I'm any judge of rip-and-read news, here's one you'll be hearing about soon:

"Americans are wasting millions of dollars buying unsuitable birthday gifts which are never used. Even gift vouchers make you look as though you have not gone to any effort to choose an appropriate birthday gift," said Shlomo Shaul, publisher of Star Stories personalized horoscope books.

The core of the press release -- the thing news directors all over the land are going to latch onto -- is the list of most-hated gifts. It's the kind of teasable "feature item" that keeps people glued to their sets over increasingly long commercial breaks.

Just out: A list of the ten worst birthday presents. Are your friends laughing behind your back at the gifts you're giving them?

Of course they are. They always have been and you just don't know it. They call each other at night to talk about what a wad you are for giving them presents. They have a secret museum of horrible gifts you've given in someone's basement.

TV news people understand that middle class fear is a powerful motivator. Appeal to the viewers' ingrained fears and depart for commercials assured that the audience isn't going anywhere.

To save you that nightmarish experience, here are the top ten bad birthday gifts:

1. Scented candles
   
2. Cheap cologne
   
3. Bath salts
   
4. Decorative plates
   
5. Tight fitting clothing
   
6. Cuddly soft toys
   
7. Artificial flowers
   
8. Socks
   
9. Boxed handkerchiefs
   
10. Novelty mugs
    
    

With the possible exception of tight-fitting clothing, the items on the list are, indeed, crap. (Husbands everywhere know that tight-fitting clothing can be a fun gift.) News featurettes will be built around this water-cooler fact: According to Star Stories, the average American family will receive $400 in unwanted gifts this year. The figure will be attributed to StarStories.com. Publicity will have been accomplished in the guise of news.

And for those who realize in horror that the scented candles and novelty coffee mugs that have for years formed the basis of their "gifting" strategy but must now face the fact that they are loathed by those around them, Star Stories has a perfectly delightful solution:

Our astrology books for adults and teens are the perfect gift for yourself or for your friends. Learn to know yourself through our in-depth, personalized analysis of your traits, strengths and weaknesses. Have fun with this entertaining book that is all about you.

Our books are beautifully designed and illustrated by world renowned artists, and are exceptionally bound in hard cover. Star-Stories have created various designs to meet the personal tastes of teens and adults.

Works out great. Star Stories sells a little more crap to gullible rubes, and the guys at the newsdesk get to do just a little bit less work.

Makes an easy blog entry, too.

Unintended Consequences of the Future: You Heard It Here First

Science is about to bring to market vaccinations against illegal drugs. According to Reason Online, the vaccines work in the bloodstream to:

...stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies that bind with drug molecules, making them too large to pass the blood-brain barrier and thereby neutralizing their psychoactive effects.

The Brits are apparently considering making vaccinations against illegal drugs mandatory. The process is described by the unfortunately named Dr. David Nutt.

People could be vaccinated against drugs at birth as you are against measles. You could say cocaine is more dangerous than measles, for example. It is important that there is a debate on this issue. This is a huge topic - addiction and smoking are major causes of premature death.

The road to hell, as my grandmother used to say, is paved with good intentions. This is one government good intention that is going to cause more problems than it solves.

There will always be people who want to get high and people who want to make money selling drugs to them. Vaccinate against cocaine and heroin, and surely people will stop taking cocaine and heroin. But they won't stop wanting to get high.

Drug entrepreneurs, sensing an emerging market, will create new and untested drugs. (Why do conservatives understand the free market when it comes to legitimate business, and not when it comes to vice?) Those drugs will be completely untested, and some, at least, will have unforeseen side effects. Just what side-effects we can't tell. A whole new generation of Thalidomide children? Sudden outbursts of psychotic violence? Hideous, lingering death?

Whatever, we won't know until the problem is large enough to break out of the drug underground and into the public eye. After a brief period of overconfidence and billions of dollars spent, the drug problem will be deadlier than ever.

This is a really dumb idea.