Quote of the day: Is Chimpy pulling the plug, promising justice for "this regime"? (Plus: Paul Krugman lays out the stakes for the election)

"Today the victims of this regime have received the justice that many thought would never come."
--President Bush, presumably announcing:

(1) his own resignation, and that of all the other criminal conspirators serving in his regime;

(2) a legally binding commitment from all of his profiteering friends and cronies to return every cent they've plundered from the U.S. Treasury, and to pay fines and begin serving prison sentences that will be determined by a nonpartisan panel of judicial experts;

(3) the commissioning of another panel of nonpartisan judicial experts to draft a comprehensive legislative agenda that will be ready for presentation to the new, reduced-scum Congress, intended to undo all of the legal shenanigans perpetrated by his regime in violation of the U.S. Constitution (and of course the immediate voiding of all of the "signing statements" that he has attached to bills he has signed)

(4) the immediate disbanding of the Republican Party, with the hope that any sane and civil people still lurking in it may take steps to form a new political party that respects SOME of the principles and ideals of the United States of America--and with the direction that all assets of the disbanded party be used to compensate as many victims as possible of the regime's authoritarian crusade

Now, we didn't actually hear Chimpy mention all these particulars, but they follow automatically from the initial statement, don't they? What else could he possibly have meant?


ALSO TALKING--Paul Krugman lays out the stakes for the election

"The feeding frenzy over John Kerry's botched joke showed that many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle. . . .

"But here's the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush's ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on GOP control of Congress."

--from Paul Krugman's NYT column today, "Limiting the Damage"

Not surprisingly, Krugman's final column before the election sets the stakes in starkly realistic terms. Although his name isn't on the ballot, the election is "all about" President Bush, he says. "The question is whether voters will pry his fingers loose from at least some of the levers of power, thereby limiting the damage he can inflict in his two remaining years in office."

I can't imagine anyone not wanting to read the whole column (which as usual is appended in a comment). To tantalize you, and drive his central points home, here are portions of the conclusion:

[I]t's still possible that the Republicans will hold on to both houses of Congress. The feeding frenzy over John Kerry's botched joke showed that many people in the news media are still willing to be played like a fiddle. And if you think the timing of the Saddam verdict was coincidental, I've got a terrorist plot against the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.

Moreover, the potential for vote suppression and/or outright electoral fraud remains substantial. . . .

What if the Democrats do win? That doesn't guarantee a change in policy.

The Constitution says that Congress and the White House are co-equal branches of government, but Mr. Bush and his people aren't big on constitutional niceties. Even with a docile Republican majority controlling Congress, Mr. Bush has been in the habit of declaring that he has the right to disobey the law he has just signed, whether it's a law prohibiting torture or a law requiring that he hire qualified people to run FEMA.

Just imagine, then, what he'll do if faced with demands for information from, say, Congressional Democrats investigating war profiteering, which seems to have been rampant. Actually, we don't have to imagine: a White House strategist has already told Time magazine that the administration plans a "cataclysmic fight to the death" if Democrats in Congress try to exercise their right to issue subpoenas--which is one heck of a metaphor, given Mr. Bush's history of getting American service members trapped in cataclysmic fights where the deaths are anything but metaphors.

But here's the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush's ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on GOP control of Congress. That's why many Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends tomorrow.