The 2008 election won't be decided on the Bill O'Reilly show. It doesn't matter how much Rush Limbaugh fulminates against the Democrats. The whacko right -- by which I mean those rightists who claim legitimacy based upon some vague set of cultural values -- are at most 25% of the electorate, probably less, and they're mostly in the red states. In 2008, people are going to vote on the issues.

Pat Robertson's endorsement of Giuliani is the best thing that could possibly have happened for the Democrats, because it discredits both Robertson AND Giuliani at a stroke. Robertson is now endorsing a thrice-divorced, pro-choice politicians who would often cross-dress while marching in gay rights parades in New York City. Giuliani, for his part, is leading the pack at the moment because it is perceived by many that he is the only candidate capable of winning a blue state in 2008 BECAUSE he is thrice-divorced, pro-choice, etc. Robertson is going to say something awfully dumb during the campaign -- he always has -- and while it won't gain Giuliani any votes on the right when he does, it might convince some moderates that a vote for Giuliani is a vote to leave whack jobs like Robertson in a position of influence for another four years.

Face it -- the 2008 election comes down to the same states that the 2000 and 2004 elections did. Anyone who thinks Giuliani will carry New York is drunk. Giuliani almost certainly would have been unable to carry New York -- the city, not the state -- in 2001, if he'd been able to run. When he tried to run anyhow, claiming the 9/11 emergency warranted it, not even the right-wing media supported him. The only blue states he has any hope in are the bedroom states of New Jersey, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, where the affluent might vote for him because of his combination of cultural liberalism and anti-tax positions.

On the other hand, a Democrat now sits in the state house in Ohio instead of a Republican Party hack who did everything he could is disenfranchise Cleveland voters, the rust belt is four years rustier, an awful lot of Ohio sub-prime mortgages are going to get foreclosed in the next 12 months, and Giuliani's only answer for all of this is going to be...bombing Iran??? New Mexico is almost certainly gone as well, and Colorado has been in play for awhile now. The GOP electoral college majority has depended upon the solid South, a solid Rocky Mountain west/southwest, plus Ohio and Indiana. I don't think any Democrat will do well in most of these states but it has to be a lot easier for them to pick up red states than to lose blue ones. If there's a recession next year, which all the economic indicators point to, it gets even easier because a recession will ensure that the Republicans lose the bedroom states, too.

The only way Giuliani can win is if we're in the situation we were in during the 2004 election -- in the midst of a red-hot war whose outcome is in doubt. No, not Iraq, silly. Everybody knows that war is over and lost. I mean Iran.

If Bush and Cheney time it right, they can have us in a war with Iran during the 2008 campaign and can then take to the hustings to support Giuliani as a surrogate "don't change horses in midstream" candidate, and squeak out another electoral majority. It is their obvious strategy as the only way to prevent the tidal wave of indictments that a Democratic Attorney General will be returning against almost every corporation that profiteered in Iraq, and also the only way to preserve the American Way, which is their minds is that the rich pay taxes at a much lower rate than everybody else. To Bush and Cheney, even one day out of office cannot be afforded, because the resulting uncovering of Iraq War scandals will ruin them for decades.

Rudy's their only hope -- and they're prepared to kill American soldiers and God only knows how many innocent Iranians to bring him home.

While I doubt a Republican can in in '08, and part of that has to do with the fact that there are (at last count) no real charasmatic candidates for them to choose from, here's how they could do it. Terrorism, silly. For Christ''s sake don't you know there are people commited to killing us and destroying our way of life? Do you remember September eleventh? These are evil people who could get their hands on nuclear weapons, or biological agents, and they would use them to kill us. Now in this time of peril we need a firm hand to secure our country. We need someone who's not afraid to do what we must to make this a safe place to live.

The republicans won in '04 not just because Iraq hadn't hit the s**tter yet, it was also because they convinced people that the democrats were sissies. This is fully evidenced by Guiliani being the front runner so far. He's not anti-gay, he's pro-choice, he wasn't faithful to his former wife, and he's one dress away from being a closet drag queen. But he was tough on crime in New York, and he was the mayor that got NYC through that infamous September. He did show great leadership in getting the city through that tragedy, but the biggest win for his campaign has been how he's been able to link being the mayor on 9/11 with being tough on terror. The republican candidates, mostly, aren't stupid. If you see their talking points, its tough on terror, tougher on terror, man you didn't think I could get any tougher on terror than I just was but BAM! They're saying things that by themselves aren't popular ideas; Guliani seems to think there's nothing wrong with a little waterboarding between friends and several candidates expressed positive attitudes towards Gitmo (Romney said he wanted to double it). The fact is all these sentiments echo the same idea. Sure people may be against torture, but these candidates are all trying to shout that at the end of the day their the guy that'll stop you from getting blown up.

The race isn't lopsided. The republicans are playing to our fears, and that should never be underestimated.

A snowball in hell has a better chance then Rudy getting the republican nomination.

Rudy already has proven that he is nothing more then a greedy, lying, back stabbing sack of crap. Ask any of his ex wives.

You're right to a large extent, and a terrorist attack in October would help him tremendously. But bear in mind that Bush barely won in 2004, even though at that time it was far from clear where Iraq was heading (at least, to most people). If Ohio goes Democratic, which seems very likely now that Democrats will be watching the voting machines, where will Giuliani gets the electoral votes to offset that? The only states I can think of are NJ, CT, NH, possibly OR. NM is VERY likely to swing into the Democratic column as well.

In other words, red states are red because they've bought into the "Democrats are wimps" bullshit but blue states have not, and the balance is close enough so that the Republicans are unlikely to survive the defection of either Ohio or Florida, and Ohio is likely to defect.

People need to make up their minds, either the candidates are elected by the people's votes or they are selected behind the scenes via media control, arm-twisting and vote rigging techniques.

In my 40 years of political consciousness, I have not witnessed the former. I have never seen a populist and even mildly 'radical' candidate fail to get torpedoed along the way. and i've never seen a candidate elected that wasn't patently establishment chosen and their actions while in office have never strayed far from that line, except in rhetoric.

My understanding is that it has gone on for much longer than 40 years, and considering this, why do a large portion of the electorate still get into a frenzy over their candidate, campaign for him, argue for him, and even send them their money? Is it a stubborn hope/belief, like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, that this time it will be different?

True, only about half of the electorate bother to go through this ritual, which i think reflects the very common sentiment that the political process is a farce, but it's still a lot of people....why do they bother?

"To Bush and Cheney, even one day out of office cannot be afforded, because the resulting uncovering of Iraq War scandals will ruin them for decades." oh please. the scandals that have already been uncovered would already have ruined them, IF there was an opposition party. the war itself is the greatest scandal in 100 years...and the Democrats were on board, lockstep, with full knowledge that it was illegal and have made no effort to investigate or even challenge anything of importance in changing the course. the two parties are one, they are coke and pepsi. they are both serving the needs of Empire. is that not obvious?

...who's in the White House. It doesn't matter a LOT for the most part -- you've got that right -- in that the nature of the system doesn't change much. But there are times when it matters a good deal. Examples:

1. Replace Abraham Lincoln with any other politician of his day and the slave states remain in the Union and the Republican Party almost certainly morphs quickly into accomodation with the Democrats over slavery. It did anyhow, after 1876, but only after the slave states had been marginalized as a national force and permanently blocked from establishing slavery (real or de facto) in the West). Essentially we'd have gotten post-Civil War politics without the Civil War, which is to say without the ability of the northern industrial states to dominate the country's direction. Only Lincoln, simply by winning, forced the Civil War to start and only Lincoln had the political mandate to fight it to victory.

2. Franklin Roosevelt -- as establishment a figure if there ever was one -- was in spite of this the primary factor in introducing what measures he could get through Congress during the 1930s to alleviate the trials of the Depression. More importantly, when WWII broke out, he went into the war totally, whereas as we have seen in this century does not always happen when the United States is attacked on its own soil. In this century, Bush and Cheney have cut taxes and limited the sacrifices made for "victory" to about a tenth of the population at most. Roosevelt got EVERYBODY involved in sacrifice, and in the process got the Depression ended via the massive government taxing and spending which had been politically impossible before Pearl Harbor. There is some reason to doubt that a Republican would have risked WWII by antagonizing the Japanese as Roosevelt did, and there is a LOT of reason to doubt that a Republican would have undertaken the massive tax increases and massive borrowing which FDR undertook. We won WWII because we had a Preisdent who DID believe in using government power without qualm; we might not have if we'd elected someone who did not.

3. Curtis LeMay openly baited Kennedy at their conferences during the Cuban missile crisis and had bombers fly 100 miles past their fail-safe points in an attempt to provoke the Russians into a response and start WWIII. Since the planned retaliation would have been far past the level needed to initiate a nuclear winter, we are alive to write these missives only because Kennedy refused to be bullied. Would Nixon have been either inclined or even able to do the same? He was, we do know, among those who wanted to use nukes at Dien Bien Phu and both he and Dulles favored assisting the French -- with plenty of troops if need be. Eisenhower, whose military knowledge was beyond challenge, refused to do either. We would learn, only a few years later, how wise he was to do so.

4. Lyndon Johnson's action in Vietnam were those of a war criminal, but it's not only hard, it's flat out impossible to imagine Barry Goldwater giving the civil rights movement its key victories from 1965-68. Nor would we have Medicare today if Goldwater had won.

5. The undoing of the Warren Court's decisions on civil rights and civil liberties would not have happened without the elections of Reagan and both Bushes. And the landscape for women's rights, gay rights, and affirmative action would also be very different.

6. While we can be sure that Al Gore would have gone into Afghanistan after 9/11, we can be equally sure that he would NOT have gone into Iraq. And there would be a trillion more dollars on the US balance sheet, not to mention the other dollars which would not have gone to the super-rich in the form of tax cuts. Oh yes, and about 3,000-4,000 more of America's soldiers would be enjoying the sunshine.