Runaway train.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editorial

I'm sure the world was stupefied by the choice the American people made on November 2. I was stupefied, too.

After all that Bush has done wrong--the lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the blunders of the occupation, the loss of jobs at home, the decline in wages, the trashing of the environment--it was hard for me to believe that a majority of Americans would give him another term.

For months, I'd been predicting, in these pages, that John Kerry would win the election, barring something drastic, like another terrorist attack or the nabbing of Osama bin Laden. But no attack came, and bin Laden is still on the loose.

Other events seemed to be coursing against Bush.

He lost badly in the three debates. Any impartial Rip Van Winkle who woke up to watch them would have said Kerry was the President and Bush the unqualified wannabe.

There was the flu shot fiasco.

There was the killing of almost fifty Iraqi soldiers, execution style, after they left their training area without a military escort--which even Dr. Iyad Allawi blamed on Bush.

There was the story of the unguarded arms depot, followed by the charge, unprecedented in modern politics, that the foot soldiers themselves were to blame for any looting of the 380 tons of explosives at Al Qaqaa. Rudy Giuliani actually went on the Today show four days before the election to exonerate the commander in chief and implicate the soldiers. Had such a calumny come from Howard Dean, say, rather than from Giuliani, it would have ignited a firestorm.

But Giuliani--and, by extension, Bush--barely got singed.

That was the riddle of the whole campaign. Nothing seemed to harm Bush--at least not enough.

And so here we are, with four more years of Bush to contend with.

"Now comes the revolution," said the rightwinger Richard Viguerie. "If you don't implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?"

Bush appears to be wasting little time in the...