Bush's Downfall

Sidney Blumenthal writes a succinct script for the fall of President George W. Bush. If you don't have a Salon.com membership, get the free day pass, it's an interesting walk down memory lane, beginning with...

The unmaking of the president 2004 began on Sept. 11, 2001. By Sept. 10, George W. Bush's poll numbers had reached 50 percent, the lowest of any president at that early point in his tenure. Having lost the popular majority in the 2000 election and been delivered the presidency by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Bush operated as though he had triumphed with a full-throated mandate. "From the very day we walked in the building," Vice President Cheney remarked, "a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe 30 seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election -- full speed ahead."

And ending with...

The war president has fallen victim to his own hubris. As Thucydides wrote: "To conceive extravagant pretensions from success in war is to forget how hollow is the confidence by which you are elated. For if many ill-conceived plans have succeeded through the still greater fatuity of an opponent, many more, apparently well laid, have on the contrary ended in disgrace."

Meanwhile, the people's own mobilization has produced new voter registrations in the millions, and hundreds of thousands of activists have spread in the past week across the battleground states. The Republicans desperately cast out ploys to suppress these voters, many of them African-American. In the end, the American people refuse to be frightened into becoming an unrecognizable nation that disdains, as the Declaration of Independence said, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."