Let me, following my own roundabout route, suggest some of the factors all you political jockeys and the rest of us election-night couch potatoes might consider as we turn on our television sets.

As a start, there can be no question that this has been the year of a striking activist upsurge which has not yet taken the form of a mass antiwar movement — but may post-election, no matter who wins. To date, it remains an enormous anti-Bush electoral wave. It’s certainly reasonable to make removing this President the first task at hand, despite the less than ideal replacement team waiting in the wings. It’s difficult, after all, even to find the right words to characterize the men (and a few women) around George Bush. “Cronies” is certainly a good start — as in crony capitalism — because we already know that many of them were, are, and/or will be enriching themselves and their friends and neighbors off their governmental experience and that many of their policy initiatives at home and in Iraq have been meant to pave the way for just that.

“Cabal” catches something too. They have been the tightest-knit, most secretive group since at least the Nixon White House or perhaps simply in memory. They wrested victory from defeat in 2000 and then took that for a mandate to impose long-held private agendas on American society and the world.

“Cabal within a cabal” wouldn’t be a bad choice either, since the neocons, who took up secondary positions in the administration (especially in the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office), came to power with an agenda all their own, imperial in nature, global in scope, and managed to convert their bosses and the President himself into believers. It was, after a fashion, a hijacking within a hijacking.

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