For all the big talk by the leaders of the Christian right, Bush was not re-elected by the faithful, as there were nowhere near enough of them to pull it off. Nationwide, there were 4 million evangelicals who hadn't voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000, and Karl Rove wooed them. Even if he got them all, however, that triumph would not explain the miracle of Bush's picking up 11 million more votes than he'd allegedly won against Al Gore. This insufficiency is clearer still when we recall the incumbent's record disapproval ratings. Hovering in the high mid-40s, Bush's negatives were worse than Lyndon Johnson's in 1968 and Jimmy Carter's in 1980. On the other hand, Democrats were extraordinarily united. At registering new voters, they trounced the GOP by as much as 5 to 1 in big swing states. By contrast, Bush's party was divided, with many eminent Republicans, both moderates and hardcore conservatives, either coming out for Kerry or for neither one.

Bush's evangelical advantage was further diminished by the heavy national turnout on Election Day: 60.7 percent, the highest in thirty-six years (and it was no doubt even higher, as there were thousands of reports of Democrats who couldn't vote because their names had somehow vanished from the rolls). High turnout tends to favor Democrats. In any case, the Christianists' peculiar brand of "moral values" drove few voters to the polls: Pew found that only 3 percent had been incited by the specter of gay marriage, while only 9 percent named "moral values" as their main concern.

A CREDIBLE PRETEXT—In short, Bush/Cheney was not swept to re-election by a national surge of theocratic zeal. And yet Bush's most fanatical supporters were essential to his "victory," which they enabled by providing a persuasive-sounding rationale for it. Because there was, and is, no reasonable explanation for that win, it was efficiently explained away as having been effected by the non-existent multitude of True Believers. Providentially, their votes came pouring forth late on Election Day, especially in Ohio—a propaganda line without a shred of evidence to back it up. (The late-day turnout in Ohio's rural districts was, in fact, quite light.) And yet that notion soon became gospel, as the media, and the Democrats, mechanically echoed the mere say-so of the Bush team and the Christianists themselves.

For the subversion of democracy, some such convincing rationale is just as crucial as computers, ballot "spoilage," Jim Crow laws and party goons—and the regime now needs a sturdy pretext more than ever, as the Republicans have reached new lows in popular esteem. Thus the two T's are now all-important; and, to complicate Karl Rove's project even further, only one of them remains as feasible as both appeared to be in 2004. Since then Bush's Christian-right support has been eroded by the war and the economy, BushCo's accommodationist stance on immigration, the party's failure to stamp out abortion, same-sex marriage and "obscenity," and, not least, the low farce of Foleygate.

"Terrorism" is now the one and only argument whereby the ravaged GOP might arguably validate their next amazing win. This explains why Rove has had the White House stick so closely to the "terrorism" script, even though the White House has itself conceded that this script is not so credible: Bush admits that there's no evidence of links between Al Qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam Hussein—and yet he continues yawping at the links between them, most startlingly in his anniversary speech a few weeks ago on September 11.

That oration kindled broad astonishment at the psychotic fixity of its key thesis: i.e., that U.S. troops are in Iraq to halt the spread of global terror (and not themselves a major stimulus thereto, as Bush's own intel establishment has bluntly noted). That line has been disdained not only by the media but also by the GOP's top pundits and Congressional candidates, more and more of whom, the New York Times reported on September 3, "are disregarding Mr. Rove's advice."

That Rove won't give it up attests to its essential function as pre-propaganda: Bush et al. shout of "terrorism" not because they think it will win votes. They don't care whether people vote for them or not. Rather, they've been hammering at "terrorism" in the hope that it will fly as a convincing reason why the GOP retained its grip on Congress, even though the party has no mass support. The strategy reflects, in part, on the immense credulity (and, to some extent, complicity) of the political establishment, which cannot, will not, does not want to see that this regime has never even been elected.

Such terror-obsessed pre-propaganda also tragically portends an imminent "surprise" deployed, before Election Day, to make Bush's empty, crazy argument seem suddenly believable. Whether it's a second 9/11, or a huge "defensive" strike against Iran, or a paralyzing combination of the two, a move like that would serve to make the recent Bush/Cheney line on "terror" sound prophetic rather than insane.

"COUNTING" THE VOTE—However they may seek to validate the electoral fraud, the Bush bunch are now in a superb position to effect it. First of all, computerized voting and vote-counting are today far more extensive than they were two years ago, thanks to the relentless efforts of the GOP, the e-voting manufacturers and not a few compliant Democrats.