With just one week remaining until Election Day, here are my official predictions as to how things may go down ... ready? It will be close. Very close. In fact, tighter than 2000. Yeah. It's going to make that whole Florida fiasco look like a petty squabble ... and Bush will win. So, uh, go out and vote, I guess. And this ain't defeatism, either; it's acknowledgment of reality. I believe Dubya will find a way to get the second term his father never had. I wish it not happen, as I do not wish to see the prospect of another four years of this guy. I don't like his policies. I have made that plain. And I do not oppose them on ideological grounds, but on practical grounds. For instance, how exactly is a $400 billion deficit indicative of a 'fiscal conservative'? Never having vetoed a single spending bill? Or having removed millions of acres of forest from federal protection and opening them up to logging and development in the name of helping business? How is any of this conservative? Or take this one: unilaterally declaring and waging an allegedly illegal war of aggression against a nation that had no operational connection with the transnational terrorist organization (al Qaeda) that did attack us, resulting in the deaths of over 1,100 US G.I.s and up to 15,000 Iraqi civilians? How about radical, not in the sense of extreme left-wing radical, but in the general definition of the term? How about irresponsible? (Joining this chorus of detractors are actual conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan, who established The American Conservative in late 2002 as war plans against Iraq began to brew, a magazine that is decidedly against what they perceive as the President's neo-imperialist agenda; their latest issue features a leading article that endorses Kerry's presidency out of default, as I do.) Well, anyway, I don't really know, but I can guess that it may well be a chaotic mess again ...