…says the days are running short for the regime: “The White House has spent four years creating a fantasy world around Bush. Win or lose on Tuesday, the mistakes Bush has made in Iraq have caught up with him.”

…Fahrenheit 9/11 online.

The SeaTimes reports a national GOP-affiliated group just might have massively cheated its own constituency, by running fund-raising mass mailings whose proceeds almost all went to the direct-marketing contractors that sent the letters. Some of the donors were old-age pensioners who sent in most everything they had.

This sort of junk has long occurred throughout the fundraising sphere, not just in political solicitation. Sometimes the supposed recipients are overseas child-feeding programs, or domestic environmental groups. The perpetators sometimes try to get away with it by claiming the solicitation letters contained “voter education” or “public awareness” content, and were hence legitimate beneficiaries of their donors’ money.

One of the most famous direct-mail copywriters is Herschell Gordon Lewis, better known to us in the pop-cult community as a former B-movie director of classic carnival-showman sensibility and sometimes gory storylines. When the big studios muscled in on the splatter-film genre, Lewis took his gift for carny-style theatrics and applied it to direct-response selling.

Lewis was apparently not involved in this particular set of mailings, but it’d be appropriate if he were. With no one left to cheat and lie to, the right has turned to cannibalizing its own base.

…in a little invective entitled “Get Out And Vote And Scream,” suggests we imagine a happier time in the near future:

“We know that 20 years hence, there will be no Reagan-like legacy for Shrub. There will be no renamed airports or honorary expressways or revisionist rose-colored history books arguing the good and the bad of his epic much-loved presidency, because there is so little good and so very, very much bad and there is absolutely no love anywhere.We already know that history will look very, very unkindly upon this most booblike, lie-torn, appallingly underqualified of American presidents. Of this we can rest assured. Of this we will only look back and be incredibly grateful it didn’t last all that long….

You simply have to get out and vote and scream and then roll up this ugly hunk of living history into a tight little ball of hot gelatinous goo and hurl it at the wall of time and see what sticks.”

…GOP voter-suppression attempt. The first few times, it was an outrage. Now it’s just a pathetic farce.

…describes vote fraud as “The Last Refuge of Republicans.”

…strikes a note of reassurance: This campaign’s mudslinging is “not as dirty as 1884, or even 1988.”

…Oct. Surprise® be a massive assault on Fallujah?

…where you can watch Fahrenheit 9/11 online, if you have the right computer setup and broadband connection etc.

…are not only engaged in voter-suppression attempts, they also want to prevent your right to sue to protect your voting rights.

This is the party of “moral character?”

…a rare lucid interpretation of the bin Laden video, noting that “it is bizarre that a mass murderer who helped run the Taliban state is talking about ‘liberty.'”

Remember, kids: This man is still around, not in spite of the Administration’s actions, but because of them.

…”Do we not care that our president lies, cheats, and steals as long as he bullies the rest of the world and the weakest amongst us at home? I hope not.”

…one of the last Bush-capaign mass mailings uses multiple images of the burning World Trade Center to instill fear.

…distributed a suspicious flyer in Milwaukee, trying to scare away Af-Am voters.

…the first “Hollywood president,” two decades prior to Reagan. (JFK was Marilyn Monroe’s pal; his dad founded the studio that became RKO; he consciously nurtured his own screen image.)

But NY Times arts-section vet Frank Rich we’ve now got another administration-as-screenplay at work:

“No president has worked harder than George W. Bush to tell his story as a spectacle, much of it fictional, to rivet his constituents while casting himself in an unfailingly heroic light. Yet this particular movie may have gone on too long and have too many plot holes. It may have been too clever by half. It may have given Mr. Kerry just the opening he needs to win.”

Rich contrasts this image with that of Kerry, whom Rich characterizes as a long-winded policy wonk who threatens to lull audiences to sleep. Rich doesn’t get that we’re on the cusp of what I’ve called the long-attention-span generation. Yeah, Kerry appeals to all-day C-SPAN viewers. But his nuanced, carefully-paced language might also appeal to those who buy the extra-extra-long Lord of the Rings DVDs, who listen to interminable guitar solos by “jam bands,” or who’ve embraced poker as the fastest-growing TV sport.