THE SLEEPING GIANT…
2034 by Jeff Hess
This is my wish for Tuesday evening. That Karl Rove feel the way Imperial Japanese Navy Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto felt on the afternoon of 7 December 1941 when he said, “We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve.” I want Rove and President George Bush to see the inevitability of History before them.
The government of Japan thought that Americans were stupid and weak. It thought that the war would be over in six months. It thought that Americans were too undisciplined to resist the might of Imperial Japan. Yamamoto knew better. He was educated here. He understood. He knew the American people weren’t stupid.
But the administration of President George Bush has systematically removed voices like Yamamoto’s that told it that Iraq would not be a cakewalk. It has silenced people who knew that the intelligence was anything but. And it has systematically demonstrated that what it really believes, what is truly at it’s core of values, is that the American people are stupid sheep.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman had this to say about such beliefs:
George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you”re stupid. Yes, they do.
It would be difficult to be more to the point than that. And Friedman, like I do, hopes that the American people will deliver a message to Rove.
Let Karl know that you”re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has – through sheer incompetence – brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.
Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq – and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate – it means our country has become a banana republic.
We do not live in a banana republic. We live in the greatest nation the world has yet seen. Our nation is not some toy that the likes of the men and women of the Bush administration may toss about for their own entertainment and personal benefit.
It could all go south on Tuesday. It is possible that Richard Nixon’s silent majority will not rise up and throw the bums out. It could happen that way.
But that is too dark a reality to contemplate right now.
Because I’m devoting most of my time in November to the 
November is a light-blogging month for me as I take part in the National Novel Writing Month and pound out 50,000 words in 30 days. During this time I’m relying on a cache of emails from my dad to help fill in the space so that Have Coffee Will Write doesn’t go dark. I’ll be back full-time on Friday, 1 December. B’shalom, Y’all.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. 
Here we are five days from the election and the stories are rolling in about voting machine problems. Want paranoia? How about this scenerio: the Bush Supreme Court voids the election after no one can tell what the feck happened. All those in power stay in power and President George Bush exercises 
