Quitters never win, do they?

After losing his bid for the governorship of California in 1962, Richard Nixon told the world we wouldn't have him to kick around anymore. 6 years later, he was elected president. Granted, the refusal of LBJ to run for another term and the Chicago Democratic convention riots made Nixon's ascent that much easier, but you get the idea.

All through the mid-1970's, Ronald Reagan's presidential aspirations were considered a joke. No one, it was said, as extremely right-wing as The Gipper could ever get into the White House without buying a tour ticket. I mean, look at how badly Barry Goldwater got trounced by LBJ in '64. Anyway, thanks in no small part to the Ayatollah Khomeini, on November 4^th, 1980 then-president Jimmy Carter became a lame duck, and the eighties - AIDS, yuppies, Iran-Contra, Michael Jackson and all - began in earnest.

Between the highly-questionable circumstances surrounding the 2000 election, the most frontal assault on civil liberties seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the worst economic trashing of America since the 1920's, everyone expected George W. Bush to be a one-term wonder. Except that for some reason, perhaps a few bugs in those newfangled electronic voting machines, he got re-elected in 2004.

Sarah Palin is a presidential candidate for the 16^th Century. Under her administration we could expect fornicators to be publicly flogged (with the best spectator seats going to the biggest campaign contributors), and intensive drilling in Genesis and Leviticus to replace all of those heretical math and science courses in our public schools. Now, most of us are probably thinking that as ignorant, regressive and dangerous as the rabble-rouser Sarah Palin is, there's no way she could be elected, though to our credit those of us who wished to live in the 21^st Century saw to it that her running mate, John McCain ended up giving the concession speech in November, 2008. But deep in our hearts, most of us know that she still has a shot at becoming president. Those of us whose brains aren't owned by Fox News strongly suspect that she's probably attempting a Nixonesque comeback. Why else would she intentionally resign from office halfway through her first term when she probably could have been a 10-term governor without breaking a sweat? Granted, Alaska isn't California and her program was rather strikingly repudiated by voters last fall. All it would take is for health care reform to fail (that's one of the things swept Republicans into congress in 1994) or for the economic policies of the Obama administration to fail, as dittoheads across America are hoping for between doses of OxyContin. Even if President Obama gets to serve out two terms as Bill Clinton did, he's outta there by 2016. If the Dems don't have a suitable opponent to face her down, we could all be living in Alaska, so to speak, by the following year, with officially-sanctioned ignorance blanketing this country like an ice-fog, and McChurches becoming the new town halls as many of them now are.

Remember, eternal vigilance, blah blah, yada, yada.

Why should Republicans have all the fun?

Dear Governor Spitzer:

How could you?

I'm not talking about your dalliances with a call-girl. As certain Republicans and other professional moralists have demonstrated time and again, that kind of thing is par for the course these days. No, I'm talking about how you ignored your better judgment and took the advice of the gubernatorial assistant in your pants.

Back when you were The Sheriff of Wall Street, you should have known that you had some very powerful enemies who would want nothing more than to get revenge on you. When you became governor, with a mandate to dismantle and reconstruct New York's notoriously dysfunctional state government, you should have expected that those who have benefited from the status quo for decades would stop at nothing to frustrate and discredit you. You should have behaved accordingly, refusing to give your enemies any easy opportunity to strike. Instead, you literally bared your flanks.

At least you didn't insult our intelligence by telling us that you did not have sex with that woman. I personally hope that you do survive this incredible blunder. There have certainly been people in Albany and Washington who have done things many orders of magnitude worse than what you've been accused of. And unlike some, I do not wish to see you cop out and resign from office. After over three decades of watching my home state sink further and further into decline, no thanks at all to certain governors who went before you, you were, and in my humble opinion are still, a breath of very fresh air.

Don't screw up like this again, OK?

ADDENDUM - Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks that someone in Washington's not merely prosecuting wrongdoing here, but is actively trying to smear Governor Spitzer.