Mild Card

Earlier this week, the L.A. Times had an article extolling the blessings of the wild card, citing the exciting pennant races in this year’s hunt for October. But is the wild card really responsible for the excitement? Hardly. Here’s the way things look in the current three-division format as of 3pm PDT on Sept. 22.

The Yanks lead the Red Sox by half a game in the AL east, Chicago’s up by 2.5 over Cleveland in the Central. One of these four teams is going to win the wild card, and one is going to stay home. In the west. the Angels lead the A’s by 2.5 games.

In the National League, St. Louis has had the central wrapped up since May, Atlanta is about to clinch the east, and San Diego is battling itself for king of the sub .500 teams in the west. The wild card is a three-way battle between Houston, Philadelphia, and Florida (Washington at this point has no more than an outside shot at it, from 6.5 games back.

Now here’s how things would look if there were two divisions and no wild card.
In the AL East, Cleveland would lead the Yankees by half a game and the Red Sox by a full game. In the West, Chicago would be up by five games over the surging Angels.

In the NL East, St. Louis would still be running away with the division. But the NL West would be a dogfight between the Braves and the Astros, two games back.

To be sure, fewer teams would be playing meaningful games in the last week of the season. Philadelphia, Florida, and Oakland (three teams that are still very much alive in the wild card format) would be mathematically eliminated by now, and the Angels would be close to done. But there would still be plenty of playoff-level excitement. I love the idea of a three-team race for the AL East. Best of all, San Diego, at 76-76, would not be in contention for anything. That’s how it should be.

There’s no arguing with the wild card. It’s here to stay. But let’s hope it doesn’t lead to interminable NBA-style playoffs. Four teams is plenty.

The Undecideds Have It

The votes aren’t all in, but the early polls are muddled. Fully half of the 10 people who’ve responded so far have vigorously supported the rule of law. The remaining half are divided among support for the junta and undecided. In a bizarre way, this probably reflects the American electorate in 2000 and 2004: half the country supported W and the other half was divided between those who held their nose and voted Democratic and those who voted for Nader or didn’t vote at all because they were so disgusted with their options.

Draw your own conclusions about what this means for 2006, 2008, and other opportunities for change that don’t involve elections.

It’s time for me to weigh in. I guess you can count me in the undecided category. I don’t favor a junta, for sure, and I don’t favor a French-Revolution-style beheading of the elite classes. As horrendous as this administration is, I don’t see things being ameliorated by a decade of Robespierre and Danton, followed by the ascension of another Napoleon (can you say Rudy Giuliani, a dictatorial midget with popular wartime appeal?).

And besides, armed revolution won’t work because the left doesn’t have nearly enough guns.

That said, I don’t see the ballot box as the solution either. Hand-wringing, arguing, money-raising, op-ed writing, and ribbon-wearing aren’t getting the job done for two reasons.

First, the Democrats have no spine. Despite everything that this administration has done, nobody on the other side of the aisle has done anything to stop them. They pretend to ask tough questions, but go ahead and confirm losers and criminals like John Ashcroft, Condescending Rice, and Alberto Gonzales. We have no equivalent of an opposition leader in this country because there's barely an opposition. Look for John Roberts to win approval easily, and the Supreme Court to shift even further right for a generation. But naming justices to the Supreme Court is a right Bush "won" by taking the 2004 election.

Second, and more important, I believe the game is rigged. There's too much evidence of vote manipulation for me to believe that either of the past two presidential elections were won fair and square. The 2000 Election was obviously stolen by Florida Republicans on the payroll. And the evidence from Ohio in 2004 is just as disturbing. And as electronic voting increases nationwide, the opportunities for vote stealing are multiplying. Since the main companies that make the electronic voting machines are all heavy Republican contributors, you can guess which way those votes will be rigged.

That’s why I don’t put much faith in voting. When we went to Washington in 2001 to protest the inauguration of a thief president, I was interviewed on TV about why we were there. At the time, I was optimistic: I said it was a great sign of a free country that people could go to the capital and express their opinion.

Four years of this administration has changed that opinion. There’s little right to protest in this country now that anybody who disagrees with the party line is fired, quietly reassigned, denied access to future briefings, put on hold, or made subject to a vicious smear campaign. And even those who aren’t silenced by the administration have been ignored by a media that is owned by defense contractors, Republican sympathizers, or giant corporations that benefit from the fascist policies of this government.

That was something we learned in four hours in Washington. Despite the presence of at least 20,000 protesters at the inauguration, the media coverage was almost nil. Ordinary citizens converging on Washington to protest the stealing of an election was something that had not happened in over 100 years (unless I’m ignorant of a large anti-Kennedy contingent in 1961), yet most national newspapers either wrote nothing about it or buried a story on page 17. The news networks covering the event live simply ignored the protesters as Bush’s motorcade sped by them.

Katrina has exposed the mask of Bush. But we won’t be voting for or against George Bush in the next two elections. Congressional candidates will distance themselves from him in 2006, and he won’t be running in 2008. Bush isn’t the problem; it’s the entire fascist state that has appointed him the Grand Wizard. When he’s gone, they’ll simply anoint a new leader.

The only way I see to end the fascism is to find a Democratic candidate with a backbone who will call these guys on the carpet, and then make sure that he or she (please, not Hillary; she'll lose by Mondale-like proportions) wins by a tamper-proof landslide.

I don't see that happening in the next three years. So I'm looking for other solutions that won't condemn us to decades of debt, generations of oppression, and rolling back of New Deal programs. A military coup isn't the answer, that’s true, but what is?

I wish I knew.