I’m not sayin’ anything, I’m just sayin’ . . .

Before I trudge out to the fire station and cast a futile vote against Don Young, my chronic pessimism obliges me to remind everyone that November 7 is the six-year anniversary of the Worst Election Ever. I don’t know how I maintained my sobriety that night, but my girlfriend at the time nearly had to be loaded onto a tarp and dragged back to our apartment from our friend’s house two blocks away. While she spent a most un-blissful night of sleep with a bucket by her head, I burned through at least half a pack of Camel Lights and watched the insanity unscroll until 4 a.m., when I couldn’t take it any longer. The next morning, I sat on the stoop of the apartment building with a handful of our neighbors, who were at that moment some of most depressed people I’d ever seen. All of us were smoking, and nearly everyone was hung over. We didn’t have much to say, until someone finally offered a few words of nervous reassurance.

“Well, if Bush wins,” she asked, “how bad could it possibly be?”

It’s too late to undo most of the damage that’s been wrought by this administration, and we missed our opportunity two years ago to flush this band of malefactors back into the corporate world, where they will flourish until their black hearts explode. The United States has never really recovered from the Nixon presidency — whose undisguised criminality was extended to a second term thirty-four years ago today — and so it’s worth reflecting at some point on the enduring, irretrievable harm that the last six years have caused for us and the rest of the planet. Today, though, is about blackjacking the bag-men and getaway drivers for this administration; today is about rolling them up in an old carpet, weighing them down with stones, and tossing them off a lonely bridge.