Smell of Defeat

Need an air freshener? Kerry does.

Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix reported in late July that a Massachusetts marketer of gewgaws named Blue Q tried to get the Boston Cab Company to put George Bush's Dumbass Head on a String car fresheners in its 500 taxis during the Democratic National Convention. But the cab company balked at the partisan nature of the extremely funny item.

Turns out, though, that John Kerry's dumbass head has been the one on the string, yanked around depressingly easily by Bush's puppetmasters.

The car freshener is almost as clever as Karl Rove, and as for its warning—"Don't let it touch your voter registration card"—don't let Rove touch it either.

Something is needed to clear the air. For the millions of anti-Bush Americans, the Kerry campaign is stinking up the place. Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote Sunday that the Democrats' battleground is shrinking from nearly two dozen states where they were spending money to perhaps only two key ones: Florida and Ohio.

That must make the the Bush regime chuckle, especially when it comes to counting votes. Florida's run by brother Jeb, and we all know what happened there in 2000. Ohio is the home of Diebold, one of the biggest suppliers of those newfangled computerized voting machines. Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, a major fundraiser for Bush, said a year ago, in an invitation to a GOP fundraiser in his Columbus mansion that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president." (You can read that story here, on Diebold's own website.)

Donnie Ray Rumsfeld was counting votes on Saturday's three-year anniversary of 9/11. Answering the call of "Be there! Be there! Saturday! Saturday! Richmond International Raceway! Richmond International Raceway!" Rummy took his Princeton ass to his first NASCAR race, the Chevy Rock 'n' Roll 400 in Richmond, Virginia. He led the crowd of 107,000 in the Pledge of Allegiance and got a T-shirt and everything.

Do Kerry's advisers realize that they could break some China over the heads of the Bush campaign in these Southern states that pundits have already conceded to the Republicans?

Take a look at David R. Francis's "Will China Clothe the World?" last month in The Christian Science Monitor, about the expiration at the end of this year of textile import quotas. Francis writes:

Some 600,000 jobs [of American workers] could be lost, reckons Karl Spilhaus, president of the National Textile Association. That's out of the current total of 702,000, a number much reduced in recent decades by foreign competition. Since January 2001, the nation has lost 344,300 textile and apparel workers.

Francis points out that "most remaining textile firms are located in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia."

Now there's some dirty laundry that Kerry could air out.