With precious hours left until Election Day, I've been going crazy worrying about what will happen. In 2000, I didn't even consider that Bush could win (lo and behold, he didn't really), and now I have to say his chances of being reelected are fairly good. And readers, I am not kidding when I say a Bush victory could very well compel me to leave the country again.

How on earth could Bush win this election? Well, first of all, a majority of his supporters are viciously uninformed. The Program on International Policy Attitudes has released a poll which shows that Bush supporters are likely to believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11 and/or that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program. Of course, this poll echoes their previous report on how Fox News viewers share pretty much the same misperceptions.

This is what the Bush White House is talking about when they laugh disdainfully at the 'reality-based' news community. For Rove and his ilk, 1984 is a manual, not a caution. People watch Fox News because it's entertaining and stupid, just like the people who rely on it for their news. And as Mencken said, democracy ensures we get no better government than we deserve.

But what about the rest of the news media? With the economic pressure to compete against Fox News Channel (who understand that they're running a business, not a public service) and the reflexive jingoism of 9/11 fading ever so slowly, the media establishment are trying to come around to the truth as best they can. One wonders if they would have allowed criticism of Bush if we weren't having an election to remind them that this is supposedly a democracy.

There's something curious I've noticed about TV coverage of the phone polls in swing states: when Kerry has a small lead, the words "margin of error" are never far behind, but when Bush leads are in the same margin, no such words are uttered. I beg for counter-examples, but I've never seen any.