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And I don’t mean the Republican Party and/or Goldman Sachs, for a change. No, I mean bedbugs.

Ewwwww, bedbugs. They’re here. They’re there. They’re everywhere. Really, they are: apparently it’s not only unsafe to stay in a hotel, it’s also unsafe to go to a movie theater, or bring home a library book, or sit on any sort of upholstered furniture, which pretty much rules out waiting rooms, or public transportation, or going to work.

I’ve been reading the occasional bedbug story for years, now, and it seems to just get worse and worse. I’m not sure what’s more upsetting about the latest news: 1) that library books are unsafe, 2) that in addition to risking my life commuting through snow storms I’m also risking bedbugs, by working outside of the home, or 3) the price tag for extermination which, so far as I can tell, does nothing to prevent the little horrors from just moving right back in a month later.

I do have to wonder about the suggestion that “bedbugs are going to be the pest of the century,” though. I mean, how long are people going to put up with something like this, particularly when it seems likely to push all of America’s buttons in a context of general anxiety about national decline?

How long before people start suggesting that we really ought to give DDT a second look? Bets? (more…)

Let’s say, just hypothetically speaking, that rising oil prices cross the arbitrary discomfort threshold for Americans, again, in 2011 and return to the forefront of what passes for our national conversation.

Which of the following responses seem likely?

1. “Let’s spend even more money on various boondoggles like ethanol, shale oil or converting coal into liquid fuel.”
2. “Drill, baby, drill!”
3. “How did all our oil end up underneath those damn Arabs’ desert Latin Americans’ dirt?”
4. “It’s China’s fault! We need to get tough with those Chinese, already!”
5. “WAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! Someone fix this!! Why isn’t the government fixing this??!!?” etc., and other expressions of a generalized infantile tantrum.
6. “Wow, apparently oil really is a finite resource which doesn’t just go on gushing out of the ground forever, after all, and we should have ignored the reassurances of Republicans, car companies and oil executives and instead actually listened to all those liberals, progressives, environmentalists, sandalistas, greens, treehuggers, peakers and smelly old granola-eating hippies instead of dismissing their warnings and suggestions as ‘Chicken Little’ whining.”

I wonder whether PolitiFact and other such sanctimonious “fact check” features will ever get around to addressing this matter, eh? I’ll not hold my breath.

I see that the other day, friend Paul posted an item indicating that Democrats’ polling numbers have actually turned back toward the light, of late, with of course a corresponding slump in the Republican “surge.”

Wishful thinking? Actually… probably not.

I mean, come on. It’s as though no one in America has ever lived through a general election before. How often does election coverage not only begin with months of expectations for a completely one-sided outcome, but then continue those expectations throughout the last several weeks of the campaign?

I realize that I’m going dangerously far out on a limb toward making predictions of my own, but it is not and never was likely that the “GOP, GOP, GOP” drumbeat was going to remain the only noise heard from our political punditocracy between July and November. Consider:

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