I’ve thought about this quite a bit lately, how to maintain sanity if the princeling of darkness gets elected (can’t say “re-elected,” as he wasn’t elected the last time). Yeah, it’ll be hard and it’ll be sad and it’ll be heartbreaking. But there really is a serious reason for wanting to see shrub get stuck for another 4 years in the White House: He’s screwed things up so horrifically that they are literally unfixable, and whoever takes the prize is guaranteed four years of pure hell.

Another pundit stated this argument nicely today:

BUSH HATERS FOR BUSH

Once you’ve absorbed the chutzpah, it’s a pretty powerful argument. It’s a bit like Bush saying, after bankrupting our fiscal future in three short years, that we cannot afford Kerry’s big spending instincts. No shit, brother. So we’re torn between holding Bush accountable and re-electing him. But here’s another brilliant Bush counter-argument: wouldn’t we actually be holding him accountable by re-electing him? For the first time in his entire life, Bush may actually be forced to take responsibility for his own actions if he is re-elected and becomes the LBJ of the Iraq war. I wonder why Bush-haters haven’t thought of this: that the way to punish Bush is to force him to live through the consequences of his own policies. Why, after all, should Kerry take the fall? If he gets elected, can you imagine what Fox News and NRO are going to do to him the minute he brushes his teeth in January? He’ll be destroyed by the chaos in Iraq, whatever he does. The right will give him no lee-way at all. Maybe this is simply another version of the notion that we shouldn’t change horses in the middle of a cliche. But there’s an upside: if Bush fails in Iraq, at least he will be punished for his own failures; if he succeeds (and, of course I hope he does), we all win. Am I persuading myself to endorse Bush? Or am I finding some kind of silver lining in the increasingly likely event of his re-election? I blog. You decide.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Iraq I don’t think bush can succeed. Success in Iraq — at least the kind of success we were promised before the war, the beacon of democracy — is no longer an option. I also disagree with Sully about a bush victory being “an increasingly likely event.” I almost believed it last week, when the warbloggers were going at fever pitch about Kerry’s “implosion” and “collapse.” And now, surprise, he’s actually ahead again.

So let’s not write him off. And even though we shouldn’t wish the next presidency on our worst enemy, let’s hope Kerry wins anyway. I can’t see surviving four more years of this.