And the elephant you rode in on

Anti-gay ballot measures and terrorism alerts on full, throbbing magenta will not be enough to save Republicans from themselves in November.

They will lose regionally and nationally because their usual supporters are being driven into the arms of Democrats.

The incompetence and arrogance of the Bush administration combined with an ineffective, indifferent Republican Congress is pushing the nation toward divided government as a safety valve.

Message-thin Democrats will not accrue any bragging rights, because voters will not be electing them. This is entirely about getting rid of corrupt, self-absorbed Republicans.

Voters know they can rely on Democrats to challenge the White House; the GOP has not and will not. It is that simple.

Take financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration wants another $72 billion for this year. Total cost to date: somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 billion. That is an expensive neighborhood. As soon as the calendar rolls over on a new fiscal year, the White House is expected to request $50 billion more.

So how is the country covering this bill? Mostly, it is not, and the accounting is off-budget and fuzzy. Those epic deficits run up by the administration do not reflect the cost of waging war and reconstruction.

Where does the money come from? Mostly from selling debt to China and others — and from thousands of scandalous cuts to domestic budgets in the name of fiscal prudence. Take the $2 billion paid to rural communities to help cover the economic hit from reduced logging on federal land. The money is disappearing, and school districts, county governments and hospitals will feel the pinch.

The Bush administration eagerly forgoes royalty payments from oil companies and gives away scads of cash to pharmaceuticals in the Medicare prescription-pill debacle, but it has real financial and philosophical quandaries about student loans.

Hardworking Americans will not catch a break from this administration on health care, and they know it.

Republicans in Congress are mute and complacent. Time after time, they have aided and abetted the political crime.

Ask hard questions about how the administration handled intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq? No. Challenge the White House about domestic spying? Not in any credible way.

Corruption is rampant. Congressional and administration officials are under indictment. The shame of Washington state, or most certainly the 4th Congressional District, is the compliant role of Rep. Doc Hastings, the erstwhile chairman of the House Ethics Committee. Picked to do nothing, he reliably lived up to expectations. His constituents ought to be mortified. Find another Republican, but one with some self-respect.

Americans have been shamed by behaviors in U.S.-run military prisons in Iraq and Guantánamo. Even ickier things were apparently outsourced to despots overseas.

The administration mangles the Constitution as badly as the president mangles syntax. Here is a presidency that makes up the rules as it goes along, blithely arguing it meets the law. Need an explanation? Look for a note initialed GWB in an Oval Office drawer.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, I took the president's references to the war on terrorism as rhetorical flourishes. Silly me. He was purposefully articulating a view of operational independence above and beyond the influence of the other branches of government.

Ordinary citizens who might spit out the letters A-C-L-U recognize that fundamental checks and balances of democracy are crumbling as Republicans yawn.

Layer that on top of searing revelations of basic competence. Hurricane Katrina broke the civic covenant with voters. They saw an administration and Congress without the capacity or interest to govern.

Vice President Cheney will say or do anything. And deny it.

The November election is not about blindly embracing Democrats, though even true conservatives have to be honest about how much worse it could get. Are Democrats going to start a war and run up huge deficits? No way; the GOP already has that covered.

November will be a simple, full-throated repudiation of an expensive, freedom-eroding scam. Prudent, fiscally responsible, ethical, vigilant, big-government-loathing Republicans? Oh, please.

Lance Dickie's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ldickie@seattletimes.com