Let's see: I have Perle, Frum, swine.

As I was hurrily getting ready for work one morning several days ago, I caught the tail end of an interview with David Frum and Richard Perle on NPR's Morning Edition. Perle and Frum are busy promoting their new book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. This is the kind of book (and interview) that would leave me snorting and rolling my eyes in a typically narrow-minded, liberal fashion.

The authors encourage broadening the Patriot Act, getting the US out of the United Nations, and generally controlling any country with oil because, hey, that country can't be trusted. But there was a moment near the end of this interview that chilled me to the bone.

Juan Williams (interviewer): David Frum, if there was one prescription that you would say we have to act on immediately, what would it be?

David Frum: I'm tempted to say it's to re-elect President Bush, because if that doesn't happen, everything else falls apart. But I would say my first recommendation would be ....

And I didn't hear the rest of his answer. I didn't need to. I felt like I had just been hit with a January Chicago snowball, hard-packed with icy realization. Up until now, I was floating along on this idealistic notion that we were going to nominate a viable candidate to go up against the Bush administration, and that we'd fight valiantly and there would be another exciting finish, perhaps even with a new man in office. But something about the way Frum tossed off that first part of his answer -- it made me realize exactly how driven the men currently in power will be to make sure that they stay there.

This doesn't feel like a game anymore where one side gets to be king of the hill for awhile, and then next time the other side wins the national thumb-wrestling competition that is the general election, they get to be on top and the first party has to follow their rules. Suddenly I sense that the Bush administration -- not the Republican party, mind you, but the specific men that make up the power of this leadership (Cheney, Perle, Rove, Wolfowitz, etc.) -- believe it is their destiny to sit behind the wheel, and they are prepared to go to any lengths necessary to make sure that their version of "Life In America," which they've been cooking up for the last decade, will be brought to complete fruition. No matter what.

And since that moment, I've felt almost defeated, with more than nine months still to go in the race. The very fact that they're in control gives them unfair access to the controls -- the media, other governmental departments, and gobs and gobs and gobs of money -- makes me worried that they couldn't possibly be unseated, short of a scandal of Watergate-like proportions. And since that's already happened once, I don't get the sense that anyone (Democrat or Republican) is going to be stupid enough to let that happen to them again.

Laura and I should have acted on our notion to move to New Zealand in 2000.