As I write this there are a bare few days until the election. Polls have the race too close to call. That would seem to suggest an evenly divided electorate. I took the self-indulgent liberty of re-reading my past columns, and it seems I am a fairly rabid Liberal Democrat. If I were not so, my subjective experiences of the past four years would have made me so. Still, as liberals are a group subject to intense self-examination, I went looking for reasons other than my gut (or as our President might have put it, “my instincts”) to endorse Mr. Kerry.

First and worst among my fever dreams looms an article written by Ron Suskind in last week’s New York Times Magazine. He describes a meeting he had with an unnamed senior advisor to the current resident of the White House. The aide informed the journalist that he, Mr. Suskind, and those like him lived in what he called “the reality based community.” He amplified his remark by defining that community as people who “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernable reality.”

At this point I put myself in Suskind’s shoes and found myself staring at the aide wondering what his point was. The point was not long in coming. This aide, this high level adviser to Bush, this nitwit, went on to conclude that the former seemingly rational thought process was not the way the world actually worked! He told Suskind that we are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Nazis.

There, I’ve said it. The above mind-boggling idiocy might have just as well come out of the thin-lipped mouth of Josef Goebbels. If you overextend your armies, if you send them, let’s say, to the Normandy coast while at the same time fighting on a wide front in the East, you are not a military incompetent. You are a visionary! If the world refuses to recognize your genius and persists in despising you, well, that’s because they persist in living in their fantasy world of objective reality!

The wild card in all of the above is the people who populate, finance, and cede power to these Fascists. Polls done for Newsweek reveal that 42 percent of the electorate continues to believe that Saddam was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. This despite no evidence of a connection except Cheney’s periodic self-serving delusional assertions of one. These enablers, ignorant of fact and too busy to go about the tedious business of informing themselves are the real criminals. Given all we have seen and heard in the last four years, one has to be stupid or self-destructive to grant these public servants another term. I use the term service advisedly; that is, service in the manner that a bull might service a cow, for that is assuredly what has occurred. Precious little doubt about that. I feel the pain on a daily basis.

Americans who favor Bush and his honchos might be well served to learn the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is love of one’s country, its citizens and the principles by which we try to live. Patriotism allows one to feel pride of nationality without denigrating or diminishing other nations. In short, without having to make ourselves right by making other societies wrong. Nationalism, on the other hand, is an arrogant belief in the rightness of one’s country and the moral and ethical wrongness of all other nations. The former is healthy, the latter insanity.

Our present administration is in pursuit of the latter. They have to go.

Perhaps the most telling vignette of the campaign was one I witnessed while watching news coverage of the Republican convention. The setting was a soup kitchen in New York City. It seems that some Republican delegates had volunteered their time to help feed the homeless. This, I suppose, intended to demonstrate that they are the party of the downtrodden, the protectors of the working class [I set myself a task; to try to think of a single piece of legislation that truly benefited common people that was not violently opposed by the Republican party. I worked my way from the Pure Food and Drug Laws, through environmental regulations, minimum wage, the five-day workweek, social security, OSHA, civil rights legislation, and couldn’t think of a single example]. One of these Republican delegates, a middle aged woman from North Carolina, was standing beside Betsy Gottbaum (a regular volunteer at the soup kitchen, and a long time consumer advocate as well as a Democrat) handing out greasy hot dogs with gloved hands to the homeless. She looked less than happy. The interviewer asked her what she thought of the job she was performing, and she looked even less happy. She looked around for a moment or two and said that while it was all well and good to hand out franks, beans, and Kool Aide, the real solution for these unfortunates was personal responsibility. No kidding, she actually said that. I wanted to puke.

There you go! Hot dogs are not forever. You’d better get off your lazy asses and find some work. The jobs are there. We simply cannot see them! Our mistake is that we are trying to live in the world of discernable reality; that’s why employment is not visible to us. If we’d but realize that we are an empire now, we’d be able to create our own reality…

I intend to attempt to do so this coming Tuesday.

Once again, thanks to my Megillah friends, and as always, I welcome your comments.