Well, I don't know about that. Sun Tzu's Art of War is a very serious
book. You can learn and read it at www.sonshi.com


And yes, this is the time
of election-year political tactics coming from the increasingly
anxious Right that will make Sun Tzu's "Art of War" look like a
cupcake cookbook.

Do you feel it? Can you smell it in the air? The sensation that the
Republican party, though various tentacles, will stop at absolutely
nothing to maintain power in the White House? It's true. It's the
feeling that, during the next few months, it's all about to get very
shrill, and very surreal, indeed.

How about another, "imminent" terrorist threat? Pretty much a given,
really. Followed, of course, by another. And then another. And then
another and another until every other day the newscast features a
thick-necked, panicky Tom Ridge saying yes, oh my God yes, we now have
definitive proof that terrorists are more or less sort of maybe
planning to strike the U.S. maybe very soon and disrupt our shopping
and screw with our TV reception and blot out the sun. We just don't
know, you know, where, or when, or how, or what the hell to do about
it. P.S.; Vote Republican.

Look, times have changed. Of course politics has always been a truly
ugly business, and each party's strategy to gain or regain power as
election time rolls around has always become increasingly low-down and
nasty and mudslinging and soul-cringing and borderline illegal.

But this time it all feels, somehow, different. Uglier. More sadistic.

There is a sense of lawlessness, of desperation, among the Republican
party right now. It is no longer a question of simply which party will
run the show or which platform will have the most influence on policy.
Rather, it's about a radically polarized worldview: are we going to be
an aggressive macho globally disrespected isolationist nation who has
burned all bridges and molested all foreign relationships and mocked
all global sympathy, or are we, as the GOP wants you to believe, going
to become some liberal namby-pamby country where gays can marry each
other and sexually deviant women can have abortions every day and
everybody speaks French?

Because there is no middle ground. This is the GOP message. You are
either with us, or you are a terrorist. You are either on the side of
the "patriotic," pro-war party of WMD lies and homophobia and violence
toward the global community, or you're a liberal hippie 'Nam protester
like that jerknose Kerry.

What else could they do to guarantee a November win? What are they
capable of, in the wake of 2000's stolen election and the rigging of
the Florida recounts and a sneering, despoiled Supreme Court? Just
about anything, really.

How about a nice "October Surprise" of suddenly finding Osama
somewhere in a remote Afghani cave, as the news media receives an
"anonymous" delivery of a big glossy photo of Dubya himself standing
outside said cave in a manly flight suit and lookin' all tough in his
cowboy boots and confused smirk as he waves an American flag in one
hand holds Osama by a chain in the other? What, too obvious?

Well, then, maybe something a bit more devious? How about the
thousands of electronic, touch-screen voting machines now installed in
the nation's polling places, most every one manufactured by
corporations run by staunch Bush-supporting Republicans, many of which
don't allow for recounts or paper trails or any means of
double-checking their completely programmable results. An obvious
recipe for election-rigging? Is that Katherine Harris, giggling
through her Botox?

Look. This much is clear. It's not merely going to be dirty politics
as usual. It's not going to be mudslinging and name-calling and
finger-pointing and policy-wonking, childish little claims of "fuzzy
math" and aww-shucks dumb-guy cowboy shtick to appeal to the lower
intellects.

It is not going to merely be BushCo spending millions of its enormous
war chest, as he already has, to launch incredibly vicious attack ads
against Kerry and Edwards that dare to question the veracity and
validity of Kerry's many Vietnam war medals or of Edwards' political
experience, as Bush himself is the least-qualified president in U.S.
history, one who ducked military service and went AWOL and makes all
military service people wince in embarrassment.

No, it's going to be far worse. And more nauseating. Who, for example,
isn't sighing in appalled disgust as the Pentagon suddenly discovers
that, oh my goodness, Bush's own military service records were
"accidentally" destroyed? How amazing! And would you believe it, but
the records in question just so happened to be the exact months of
just those exact years that Bush was supposedly to have "served." What
a crazy coincidence! Now we can never really know if he even bothered
to show up for duty at all! Gosh, what a shame.

Another possibility: ditching nasty, wan little Dick Cheney entirely.
Rumor has it the Angry Puppeteer could be dumped from the ticket very
soon, swapped for a less slimy and more human candidate. Maybe a nice,
crusty war hero like John McCain? Or a strange, lonely, friendless
woman like Condi Rice? A bitter, emasculated Colin Powell? Anything to
galvanize the ticket, make it, you know, less ugly and old and
warmongering, more palatable and sassy and Edwards-like. This is the
new rule: If it might force a victory, the GOP will consider it.

And finally, if all else fails, well, why not just postpone the whole
damn election itself?

That's right, simply invent some (non-specific, unsubstantiated)
terrorist threat of sufficient hysteria so that BushCo simply has no
choice but to delay the vote. The result? Give you gullible, timid
voters more time to reconsider your choices and maybe vote based on
your fear instead of, you know, your heart, or your soul, or your
ethics, or your brain, or your general sense of universal humanitarian
progress.

Could it happen? Well, no. Most experts say such a delay is
impossible, ridiculous, flagrantly anti-democratic. Doesn't matter.
What matters is the galling fact that the GOP even floated the idea in
the first place.

So then, let this be a warning. Get ready. Expect the unexpected.
Watch the skies, scrutinize the headlines, dust off your stash of duct
tape. Because Karl Rove and the cutthroat BushCo war hawks and
corporate cronies who run the show aren't about to go down without a
screaming, sickening, fiery fight.

And if BushCo has proven anything in the past four violent,
budget-gutting, honor-molesting, nearly unbearable years, it's that
there ain't no international law that can't be broken, no fear synapse
that can't be hammered to death, no fraudulent power tactic that can't
be abused. Anything is possible. You have been warned. God bless
America.