When you get right down to it, at this point it doesn't matter if they secretly wrap W in wet sheets every night and leave him screaming in that famous bowling alley in the White House basement. His mad (organically-driven or, more likely, not) policies are in place all up and down the federal government, and a culture of fear and protection has developed around them.
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And of course, it remains to be seen whether this culture of fear, which has as one of its theoretical foundations the undeniable fact of actually existing global terrorism (a fact that's twisted, unsurprisingly, to suit state sponsored terroristic ends) can be undone in short order, even if Kerry is elected and wants to undo it.
Or, as Zizek put it a little while ago...
from -
<http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm >
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
.d.