I'll be heading home to Moab on Election Day, to gather with old friends at the local watering hole to watch the returns.

In a sense, this marks a full circle return for me, an end to a journey that began eight years ago when I sat down at the Rio Colorado in utter disbelief as the election between Al Gore and George Bush was called, then not called, then called again before descending into 35 days of purgatory that led eventually to the hell that we've all experienced as the Bush presidency.

In a very real sense, that night led me soon enough to Burlington, Vermont and the Dean campaign, and to the last five years of fighting for Democratic candidates and progressive causes.

Perhaps for a moment that night we'll all be able to pretend that the last eight years hasn't happened -- that the failure of George Bush to protect America on 9/11, the shredding of the Constitution, the senseless war in Iraq, the rape of our environment and plundering of the Treasury for the benefit of Republican cronies -- that all of it was just a bad dream.

But of course, it wasn't. It stuns me to remember that as bad as I thought George Bush would be in 2000, I truly had no idea how bad he would actually be. I knew he'd bankrupt the nation, but didn't really comprehend what that would look like. Now we know. I knew he'd be bad for public lands, but never really conceived the degree to which his policies would transform the once-vast West into a vermiculate network of dirt bike trails and drilling rigs. But one needn't venture very far outside of Moab now to see the physical damage that his administration has done to some of the last wild places in America. It's heart-breaking -- so heart-breaking that even the Governor of Utah recently protested to the Bush administration at the extent to which the Bushies have lain waste to so much of the beauty of the West.

And who could have even conceived that eight years later we would live in a country that spied on its own citizens without a warrant, that practiced torture, and that turned the rule of law into a schoolyard mockery?

But at the moment, we do, and somehow 25% of people who live in America still think that that is alright.

Years ago, Paul Shepard, evoking William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, wrote that "the only thing more frightening than a world run by children is a world run by childish adults." It's a phrase that I often think of when I think about George Bush and his supporters, and the petulant nasty crowds that have attended the rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the closing weeks of this awful era.

If all works out, the adults will be back in charge, starting tomorrow -- though of course George W. Bush will mess up the sandbox a bit more before he leaves, with the atrocious last-minute environmental actions that he has planned, which are his way of flipping the bird to God and his creation, just because he can.

There's going to be a hell of a lot of cleaning up to do, after the mess these people have made of this great country.

But for me, and I'm sure for millions around the country, I'll just be glad to be home again.

Light posting as I disappear into the canyons for a while....

Interesting:

Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale... raised the possibility that the 2008 election could be remembered as the fifth "pivot point" election in the presidency's 219-year history.

In Amar's reading, history was changed and the United States was headed in new directions by the elections of 1800, 1860, 1932 and either 1968 or 1980, depending on whether you believe the conservative ascendancy we are living through right now began with Richard Nixon in 1968 or with Ronald Reagan in 1980...

Amar then expanded the idea by arguing that the "pivot point" elections were quite similar to each other -- and to the election of 2008. Each of them, he says, was marked by the same conditions: economic decline, over-reactive wars or war talk that led to repression of civil liberties at home.

In 1800, John Adams ended Federalist rule by over-reacting to war fever and pushing through the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were the repressive Homeland Security laws of their day. The Jefferson-Jackson era lasted until the 1850s, when the country moved toward civil war because Democrats, many of them Southerners, proved incapable of finding a national policy to deal with the issues of slavery. Lincoln's party reigned until economic collapse led to the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Failed wars in Southeast Asia and the Iranian hostage crisis led to the elections of Nixon and Reagan. The Democrats managed to elect two presidents in the Nixon-Reagan years, but neither of them, Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton, ever won 50 percent of the vote...

And now 2008. The country is engaged in two unpopular and probably unwinnable wars, the economy is in dangerous decline, and civil liberties have been aggressively repressed by the Bush administration in the name of the war on terror.

Therein, historically, lies the strength of the candidacy of Barack Obama. Despite his obvious political talents, it is hard to imagine a young, black two-year senator rising toward the presidency if his Republican opponent could have preached the winning doctrine of peace, prosperity and low taxation.

But there is no peace. There is no prosperity. And, whether through taxes or borrowing, the voters are going to foot the bill for the misjudgments and mistakes of the last eight years. The next question, in Amar's terms, is how solid a coalition and how many Democratic terms might follow an Obama victory -- or, to be consistent, a Bush-Reagan defeat.

As always. Rest in Peace.

Who'da thunk it?

59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.

And in a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people for his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

Arizona Capitol Times:

"This is shaping up to be the worst landslide for a Republican since (former Arizona Senator Barry) Goldwater. I realize the irony in that," said one distraught Arizona Republican operative who asked for anonymity to speak frankly. "If I were to place a bet today, I'd say McCain loses" his home state."

Q: What's the difference between John McCain in 2008 and Barry Goldwater in 1964?

A: Barry Goldwater was a man of principle.

This country is headed for better days.

Patrick.net has an illuminating powerpoint from Merrill Lynch (opens in PDF).

The gems within the comment threads:

The last thing my father said to me prior to expiring was:

"Support the NRA. Support the ACLU. Keep. Moving. Forward. (Hand moving away from body in the air) Remember Thoreau."

Earlier this week, Eric Boelhert at Media Matters examined the declining influence of Matt Drudge:

[T]here's no question that Drudge's Web traffic remains strong and continues to grow, thanks to a burgeoning international audience. But in terms of setting the ground rules -- in terms of setting the campaign agenda -- Drudge has been AWOL since mid-September when the credit crisis erupted....

Four years ago, Drudge and the right-wing bloggers were at the peak of their political power. Today, they're pretty much watching the election pass them by, reduced to the role of frustrated sideline hecklers.

Boelhert argues that it's the economic meltdown that has primarily contributed to Drudge's reduced ability to control the narrative:

[I]t's obvious that since Wall Street's meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America's economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that's not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

Boelhert makes some good points about how Drudge's laundering of conservative talking points has failed to move the Washington press corps this cycle, as it has in the past.

In part, this is because the talking points themselves are vacuous and desperate at this point. Consider, for example, the headline Drudge has been blaring all day today:

JOE THE PLUMBER 'SCARED FOR AMERICA' IF OBAMA PREZ

What sort of reaction does Drudge expect this to elicit other than: so fucking what?

Nobody cares what Joe the Plumber thinks -- except for Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the junkies who shoot up in the conservative media echo chamber.

If Drudge has lost his influence, it is in no small part because he hasn't realized that the noise in the conservative echo chamber is making him tone deaf to the actual zeitgeist.

But it's not just his laundering of GOP talking points that is causing Drudge to lose influence, in my opinion.

While he's always been a partisan hack, he's always been a partisan hack with some pretty good news instincts, and who utilized those instincts to consistently beat others to the story.

And despite what some would say, that story wasn't always colored by his politics.

From 1996 to about 2006, he had a knack for being a good twenty minutes ahead of cable TV and other sources, even when the story was as non-political as an earthquake.

But those news instincts seem to be failing him lately, and he has become laconically slow at a time when the monopoly he once held on breaking news has been, erm, broken by the growth of the blogosphere and other internet news sources.

Nowadays, everyone knows the value of speed -- yet Drudge himself is getting consistently beaten to the break with even the most obvious of stories.

For example: when Paul Newman passed away a few weeks ago, the story first appeared early in the morning on the blogs, where it lingered for several hours before it was confirmed by reporters.

But not only did the blogs beat Drudge to posting the story: so too did CBSNews.com, the BBC, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and Yahoo! News.

Even when the headline was blaring across the net, it took another full hour for it to appear on Drudge.

Such slowness is unforgivable for a site that wants to set the news agenda.

But not only is he slow at picking up on news nowadays -- he's agonizingly slow at letting it go.

I've checked Drudge perhaps six times today, as I do most days. And the problem is not that his Joe the Plumber headline is laughably transparent and meaningless, though it is.

The problem is that, in six hours, he has neither added to the story (not that there is anything to add) nor replaced it. It just sits there, seeping in its own irrelevance.

So too have the links about the Jennifer Hudson tragedy remained equally static.

I've never cared for Drudge's politics, but anyone interested in how news travels across the Internet -- and, from there, onto TV screens and into newspapers -- has to recognize the contribution he made to Internet news and to the accelerated news cycle.

That Drudge now seems to be falling behind in the very media landscape that he helped to create -- that, to me, is the story.

Because not one of these producers noticed that the woman can't string together a coherent sentence.

Among many other reasons, of course.