Bad news, bad news, whatcha gonna do?

I'm scared to think what Rove's October/November surprise might be, now that the media is even doing bad-news metastories, like this one from AP and today's Krugman column. The thing to remember here is that very little of the bad "news" this week is, or should be, news. Al Qaqaa was clearly looted after April 9, 2003, and before June 2003. The administration knew this all along. The report of 100,000 civilian deaths since the war began is new, but those people have been dying all along, not just this week. Osama got away 2 1/2 years ago. The fact that more money would be needed to keep Cheney's "remarkable success" going was obvious, even if not reported until this week. Halliburton has been an ongoing scandal since well before the war. Enlarging the time frame to a month instead of a week, it should have been obvious to everyone a year or more ago that Iraq had no serious WMD's or programs, but that only became common wisdom with the Duelfer report earlier this month. Attempts to disenfranchise voters and steal votes through electronic voting machines have been going on for years, but they've only made the front pages recently.

So far, the October Surprise this year has been the media finally doing their job reporting on the disaster that is the Bush administration, after three years and nine months of neglect or worse. As I've said before, it seems as though the wealthy people who really run the world have decided that the Bush presidency is just too dangerous to continue. And that is why John Kerry will be elected president on Tuesday. Karl Rove may still be planning his own surprise, and it might be awful. Then again, Karl may well have gotten a call from his controller telling him to back off if he ever hopes to get that seat on the board of the Carlyle Group.