It’s like eating your arm when you get hungry.

A public defender once prophesized before a murder trial, “In the weeks leading up to this, things will get weird.”

Elections, like murder trials, are a permanent fixture of public America. And like murder trials, elections usually end up eating a little bit of the public’s humanity in the process.

In November, all 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats will be up for grabs. And when the battered Republican majority in the House last December approved a measure that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally, impose new penalties on employers that hire illegals, and require churches to check the status of immigrants before helping them, et al, the campaign-for-votes season began in earnest (the campaign-for-cash season never ends).

Mid-term elections are usually a bore. Only people who turn out on stormy November days to cast their ballot for Position 3 on the Ruralhellhole County Mosquito Abatement District Board get too excited.

Of those who do get excited about politics, it’s the presidential election, the Super Bowl of Hegemonic Power, that gets hundreds of panties all bunched.

This November could be exciting. It could also be horrible. My guess is that it will be both.

The last mid-term that saw any real excitement was 1994, when the Republican landslide washed the GOP into their first House majority since 1952. The victory was a mixture of Democratic hubris attributable to winning the presidency after 12 hard years, and Republican outrage attributable to losing the presidency after 12 hard years.

The single victory Democrats claimed: keeping Oliver North out of the U.S. Senate. And I thank them for it.

Then again, in 1994 it wasn’t so much the campaign, but what happened after the Ascendance of Newt Gingrich that was so exciting and horrible.

In terms of pure weirdness, spectacle, and the near Satanic fondness for the world’s grim state of affairs, the 2006 mid-term election is shaping up to be something of a landmark.

There are the anti-immigration people, nationalists, with their wanna-be militias and Lou Dobbs.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of Hispanics and liberals demonstrating all over the west against something bigger than the House’s obscene proposal.

The demonstrations drove the nationalists bonkers. Hey, ho, let's go.

(Next time, my Hispanic friends, try a general strike. Just for a day. See how Lou Dobbs likes having to pick between buying a set of diamond-encrusted bread ties and a head of lettuce.)

Still, there now exists the chance BOTH chambers may be for the Democrats to lose. But if any group of talented, well-meaning people could ever strike out in a game of slow pitch, it’s the Democrats.

Howlin’ Leroy Eenk’s Official 2006 Mid-Term Election Prediction That Merely States the Obvious: The D’s may take one chamber, but not both. There is also a good chance the GOP majority will be weakened, but not slain.

If the D’s do take Congress, expect them to engage in the same kind of overstepping that undid 1994’s Republican sacking of the Imperial City.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t rein in Bush, not at all. I’d like to see him impeached, not just for spying on Americans (they say it’s for “national defense,” however, they can’t prove it, we’re just supposed to believe that this “extra-legal” program has never been used to spy on the opposition, or journalists, or ex-wives), but also for condoning torture, coddling fascists and “freedom fighters,” neglecting his duty to prosecute the perpetrators of Sept. 11, looting the U.S. treasury to bribe the rich, and not last and not least, lying to the country and instigating an immoral war to be the centerpiece of his re-election campaign (Bush is not an ideologue. He cares about power.)

When it comes down to it, the Democrats, if they do take both chambers, have to overstep. They have to take it too far and impeach lame duck Bush

The wiser move, of course, would be to hem Bush in and begin undoing the damage he caused. Two years later, in 2008, if the going is good, the D’s could beat McCain or Frist, or whoever the GOP puts up to succeed Bush.

However, that would be like Bush not stacking the Supreme Court with anti-abortion jurists. That’s what got him elected.

The D’s would have to publicly humiliate Bush, render him a shell, if they didn’t want to draw the ire of their base, the people that would elect them. That’s what we would want to see, our catharsis.

Bush with his mouth shut.

Ah, politics. It’s like eating your arm when you get hungry.