Bush and Cheney to appear on Hannity

According to The Note, both Bush and Cheney are scheduled to be on Hannity this week, Cheney on Wednesday (it was taped on Tues) and Bush later in the week.

Now on one level this is obviously unsurprising. Bush was on O'Reilly before the debates, Cheney has been on Limbaugh within the past few months, and, as we all know, these guys need compliant media running dogs like Fox/Sinclair/Drudge to survive.

But this does strike me as actually somewhat important, and suggestive of the state of the race at the moment, and can maybe point us to a sense of what the Bush/Cheney endgame is going to be.

If they have to go on Hannity, the most rabid and dependable of the rightwing media mouthbreathers, just two weeks before the election, that tells me that BC04 has given up on the swing voters and is now betting the whole game on squeezing out every last vote from the troglodyte base. At this point, you'd have thought the Hannity-watching base should be all sewn up and taken for granted, and they should be looking to land those precious few independents still out there. Since Hannity's audience will clearly give them no new moderate voters, it seems to suggest that the intent is to rev up the base, and only the base, from here on out.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think this tells us things aren't going that well for BC04. All they have left is the base and a prayer (they've got lots of those). And I'm betting that Rove is betting wrong on this. I think our fired-up base, and the persuadable middle, kicks their base's wingnut ass.

Or, to put it in geek-speak, all their base are belong to us.