the new fatigue?

I've grown out of liberal rage, for now, but I think I've grown into liberal schadenfreude.

I've always had this weird journalistic desire for things to keep getting worse. Watching a hurricane barrel toward the coast, for example, I actually want it to smash into land and destroy everything, just to see what happens, how everyone reacts. On 9/11 I was secretly thrilled that I had to rework the high school newspaper to cover it, even as I staggered around trying to wrap my mind around it all.

Only in the last few years, though, has this harmless, dirty little secret become so ruthless. Like so many of my political allies I want everything in the Bush administration to fall apart. More than once in the last two years someone has admitted to me that, as much as they hate the war in Iraq, they want it all to self-destruct so Bush will have to take the blame. During the Hurricane Katrina debacle I skipped over the stages of disbelief into anger right into partisan bloodlust-- a phase I'm sure Elisabeth Kubler-Ross would have incorporated into the five steps of grieving had she been addressing national tragedies.

These days with the Bush administration it's like a schadenfreude free-for-all-- every day something else seems to just crash around the Republican party's feet. At some point I will probably start feeling bad about this, but right now I'm enjoying the ride, greeting news stories with combined glee ("Tom Delay indicted again?!?") and condescending bafflement ("Bush decided to alienate his based by nominating Harriet Miers why now?") I've got the liberal media on my side, and the rest of my college campus, so before the Democrats execute another graceless belly-flop off the political high dive, lets just take a moment to imagine what it might be like, one day, to be on top again.