These are especially exciting times!   In less than two weeks two enormously important decisions will have been made, the first by voters in the American elections on November 6, and the other about a week earlier -- maybe just a day or two from now -- and that one will be made by an unusual convergence of different weather events over the ocean close to the East Coast of the U.S.

Sandy, sometimes a hurricane and sometimes a tropical storm, is chugging northward over the unusually warm and therefore storm-building waters of the Atlantic toward some point that will most likely be just offshore from New Jersey -- where else? -- upon which it will either turn left and head directly for the land, where it will meet up with a trough that is waiting for it and become hybridized into a third kind of storm that will create all sorts of havoc, or it will stay out at sea while only drenching a few places as a reminder of how once it passed by.

All the models created by supercomputers predict that the former will happen -- the left turn that will cause Sandy to hit Boswash head on with storm surges, high winds, knocked-down trees galore, power outages everywhere, floods, snow farther west, two weeks of ice cream that will suddenly have to be eaten in two days, and other disruptions aplenty -- the "Storm of the Century" some are predicting, while others say that it is just a modest forerunner of even worse to come, due to climate change.

That left turn is not unprecedented but it is unusual -- there have been a number of other named hurricanes this year about which nothing much has been heard, because they've all kept leaning to the right far out into the Atlantic where eventually they've fizzled away, so that in general, for humans if not for the fish, it's been a quiet hurricane season ...till now.

One of the main things I've been wondering is whether or not the Republicans have found a way to blame Sandy on President Obama.   There can be no doubt that they've been working hard on such a proposition, and it couldn't have helped their dispositions when Hurricane Isaac threatened to disrupt their convention in Tampa a few months ago.   This is certain because they've been so unstinting in blaming Obama for everything else that they can even remotely portray as being disastrous, not only under the Sun but also even under the most distant stars.

If Sandy lets itself be pulled harmlessly out over the ocean, the Republicans will loudly and uproariously give Romney all the credit, most likely by having stood at the base of the Statue of Liberty and blowing at the clouds.   If on the other hand Sandy turns westward and goes on to violate man's works bigtime, then they will trumpet it as being not at all the work of the jet stream but all Obama's doing instead, accomplished by his having directed his admirals in Norfolk to send all their ships out to sea, under the pretense of riding out the storm but really to get behind it and push it shoreward to do the deed.

And millions will believe them.  How rotted out on the inside by their own bile are many men today!   They all live under the elephant's rump.

(Posted on Daily Kos yesterday as my fourth diary there.  Changed this version slightly.)