The Hippopotamus in the Room
Now Playing: "Before They Make Me Run" by the Rolling Stones
Although there's no chance that the self-investigation launched by CBS News will hold Dan Rather culpable in any way for his pushing of the Killian Forgeries, the old man announced yesterday that he is leaving his anchor's chair next March.

It's a small punishment, though, as he will continue to contribute to the 60 Minutes franchise --- with his usual agenda affixed firmly to his sleeve.

Rather would rather not have you think that the scandal that he and producer Mary Mapes started with their bullshit lies is what's precipitating this departure, but I am pleased to have it so believed. Rather, contrary to what his apologists claim, knew full well that the documents he used in a story meant to bring discredit on President Bush's National Guard service were fakes ---and he went with them anyway.

Be sentimental all you want (I will; Dan Rather is a face and a voice I grew up listening to in some of our nation's most important hours), but don't forget: he disgraced his profession because of his own political biases. That is a fact.

CBS News will now probably give the anchor's spot to the nauseating John Roberts, who is every bit the Leftist tool that Rather is. Which means that CBS News' authority (and ratings) will continue to circle the bowl until the whole organization is disbanded in favor of even more of their network's stupid fucking "reality" shows.

Glade Plug-Ins? Are the Work of the Devil
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: "Nature's Way" by Spirit
I work in a small office. When I came in last night, the office smelled like a combination of melting plastic and watermelons or maybe some other fruit or flower. Instant nausea. Instant fucking headache. Where the fuck was it coming from? Nobody knew. And every ten minutes or so, when I could no longer stand it, I would go sniffing everything in sight: phone books, desk drawers, trash cans, chair backs ---everything. But no luck.

So I come in again tonight and that same disgusting stench of synthetic fruit continued to poison the air. Goddammit! I was going to have to put up with it again. This time, though, the guy who was going off duty casually mentioned that the smell must be coming from a Glade Plug-In? that was beneath the counter.

Oh? Is that so?? Goddammit! I didn't even know there was a wall outlet down there, much less one of those disgusting electrified stink-dispensers plugged into it. Who the fuck did this terrible thing? No one knew. Or, better put, no one claimed to know.

And about sixty seconds later, the fucking thing was resting on the side of the road that runs past our building.

Now I'm not much of a hippie, but I know what's right about the natural world ---and goddamned Glade Plug-Ins? ain't it. Can you imagine plugging a plastic container full of fucking chemicals into an electrical socket so that it heats them up and pollutes the air you're breathing? And for what reason? To make the room smell better? Well, say, I've got a better idea: keep the room you're in clean so that it won't start stinking to begin with. Jesus! I wouldn't allow that shit in my home for money.

I also don't get fabric softeners, which not only smell unnatural, but leave your clothes feeling like they've been Scotchguarded?. Why do people do that? Why would you take a freshly-washed load of clothes and throw what is essentially a sponge full of chemicals into the dryer with them to bake in that greasy, Teflon?-like quality?

These are the billion-dollar industries that keep our society humming right along: weird chemical solutions to problems you don't really have. Don't look into it too closely. Just keep walking and whistling.

Kevin Sites' Open Letter to the Devil Dogs
I don't know what the status is on the young Marine who killed the rat in that Fallujah mosque earlier this month, but this is an open letter from Kevin Sites, the reporter who filmed the incident, to the Marines with whom he was traveling. There are few a facts there that will make it worth your while to read.

I can't attack Sites for being an uninformed Big Media craphound because he is most definitely there and in the shit.

Basically, I think Sites did the right thing. He's not a rat bastard just because he's not Ernie Pyle. But I'm not going to shake his hand and buy him a steak dinner, either.

I just wish our military could know now what History will prove later: that they are doing important, world-changing work and that all the uses the propagandists make of their darkest moments will matter for nothing in the end.

Seething
Bill Clinton was enjoying the canonization that came with the dedication of his Presidential library last week until he sat down for an interview with Peter Jennings, who accused the former President of caring what the history books will say about his tainted legacy. Clinton rejected the very idea, visibly seething at Comrade Jennings' impertinence.

And, being the first black President (which, remember, was never an epithet his admirers meant to be condescending), Clinton told Jennings that he really didn't "want to go there." Heh, heh. That's good stuff. Very colloquial.

Bill Clinton may have been a political genius and a brilliant man, in general, but let's be clear about this:

If cheating on your wife with an employee in your place of employment is not a big deal, then why even bother to lie about it or obstruct its legal discovery? Does everybody get that? Clinton's defenders said it was just about sex and was nobody's business. Okay. So why lie about it? If Starr's witch hunt was unjustified, how much more justified was it to subject this country to that scandal for months on end? Clinton endangered his own Presidency over what he and his partisans said was irrelevant. Is that supposed to make sense?

Getting a blowjob from an intern while taking a call from a Congressman about troop deployments in the Balkans is not behavior worthy of the President of the United States. Getting your staff and cabinet to whore themselves out to the media and the public for your personal benefit is unacceptable. Clinton moved them all to lie for him so that he could keep his fucking job. But if he had been a one-star general in the Army or a dean at some college or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, what he did would have ended his career in any of those fields and brought on a large civil lawsuit. And why's that? Because the same liberal women's rights activists and opponents of the patriarchal society who apologized for him were the same ones who routinely call for the heads of such sexist pigs. They are the ones who (rightly, I believe) instituted such agencies as the EEOC and the laws against sexual harrassment in the workplace.

As I've said before, the liberals and the women's rights activists lost a lot of their credibility the very day they sucked it up and stuck it out for Bill Clinton. Only they're too stupid to realize how completely he used them. And what did they get in return for their loyalty? Nothing.

(Oh, and one more thing: the Clintonistas say that Bill Clinton will be remembered for having "created" 22 million jobs. Is that so? What, is he the fucking General Secretary of the Politburo? A college student 50 years from now isn't going to give a damn about the economy of the 1990s; all he's going to know is that Clinton was the second President to be impeached and that the country was on an eight-year vacation from the realities of the post-Cold War world.)

Unipolar
Constant sobriety is not only unhealthy, but immoral. So is constant inebriation. Right now, it's the former state that bothers me most.

Dropped
Mood:  cool
I've been blogging now for about 18 months, although maybe the first six of those consisted of little more than posting the occasional equivalent of a teenaged girl's diary entry. I'm not in any sense a popular success at this, but writing and opining are a few of my life's small affirmations, so the traffic end of this endeavor is not as important as it might be to others.

Which is to say that some blogs are important in the broadcast or popular sense and have acquired a wide readership of usually very well-informed people. Look at the blogroll to your left: I read these people as regularly ---and depend on them as certainly--- as most people do the daily rag or watch the evening news. And it's these same sites that have shown their mettle in this past election. That shouldn't be doubted for a moment. The blogosphere is ---and I don't hesitate to say this--- a revolutionary communications phenomenon, and its influence will only continue to grow. Because it is purely democratic and unfiltered and immediate. Because it is a thriving, throbbing, real-time rebuke to every corporate-run media shitmill and every incompetent editor, copywriter, and proofreader who ever worked on any paper or at any station anywhere.

But because of the blogosphere's fitful growth and immaturity, it is especially susceptible to a lot of crashes and burnings. Bloggers that we come to depend on for our fixes sometimes drop out. After all, they are often one-man shows with no real overhead, no brick-and-mortar existence beyond their own offices or living rooms, and occupy no more than a relative handful of pages in a cyberspace of many billions of pages. But these people will usually give their readers a heads-up and explain why they are dropping out. Usually.

But one of the best and most interesting blogs of this past year has obviously seized up and dropped out. No warnings that I know of. Maybe the guy behind it just freaked. I'm not going to say who he is, but he was certainly an influence on me. And he was certainly a major player in one of the scandals of the election season.

I am disappointed in him. He should have put a 30 at the end of his story. When he did this same thing earlier this year, I wrote him and told him to buck up. He gave a good explanation for why he had burned out ---and was soon back in the game with a vengeance. But not this time. Maybe I just don't know what happened; maybe now he's writing under his own name or another assumed name or he's in a group blog or something else.

Anyway, he's off my blogroll.

Next!

Dumbassery Everlasting
I caught a few minutes of New York Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman talking to CNN's Paula Zahn last night and he said something that every dumbass anti-war politician says: if we meant to go after the Axis of Evil, we picked the wrong country because Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

Well, no one really believes that Iraq was free of WMD ---it's just that we couldn't pin the charge on them with sufficient quantities of such weapons to satisfy the hyperlegalistic assholes who didn't want to attack the Saddamites, anyway. That would be because we wasted months dancing around with Chiraq and his asshole accomplices before doing what we should have done earlier. This gave the Saddamites the time to move their stockpiles and their scientists to places where we haven't gone yet. (Think "road to Damascus.")

But none of that is my point. My point is that Ackerman doesn't think deeply or far enough ahead to acknowledge the corollary to his own statement, which would be, if attacking a non-nuclearized Iraq was a mistake, would attacking a nuclearized North Korea or a near-nuclearized Iran have been correct? I don't recall how Ackerman weaseled out of this problem, but it must not have been especially memorable. Nevertheless, it is an entirely typical assertion for these rat bastards to make, but without any sense.

Yes, North Korea has nuclear weapons, but it is for that reason that we didn't plow across the DMZ and set off a conflagration. Why don't these numbnuts Democrats understand that? Kim is isolated like no one has ever been isolated. He wanted bilateral talks to screw the Bush Administration like he succeeded in screwing the Clintonites back in the 90s; Bush told him to sod off and try again when he was willing to hold sexpartite talks. And guess what? That's what's going to happen. Because it's right that the other players in that region be on board to keep this nutjob's feet to the fire. John Kerry didn't want that. He wanted to give in to Kim's demands. And Kerry would have gone all the way, too, using the same stupid logic that Clinton and Albright and Richardson and the other tools used, which got us what? A nuclearized North Korea! Goddammit!

Could it be that the Bush Administration isn't going to make the same mistakes? Could it be that the way to a peaceful situation on the Korean Peninsula isn't through giving the Kimchi Pot the means to enrich uranium? Hmmm. May be.

And as for Iran, we have every interest in integrating that society into the community of peaceful nations. But we don't need to attack them if we can move them from within. We have many millions of allies inside that country. They're called the Iranian people. Lots of young, pro-Western, democracy-craving young men and women who don't want to be ruled by the mullahs, but who want true civil and human rights and democratic reforms. They will have that soon enough, I am sure. But we Americans have so many cards to play there that it is stupid to suppose, as Ackerman ostensibly does, that we should have attacked Iran or North Korea first.

Iran is a special case. Aren't they all? But I hope you Democrats don't cry too much if History records as one of the greatest achievements of the Bush Administration the bloodless Iranian Revolution, circa 2005.

Tell It to This Marine
Mood:  special
An old high school buddy of mine named Jeff Laird dropped me a line the other day after having found out about this blog. He is a Marine and a Gulf War veteran. The following are his observations on the recent shooting of a terrorist by a Marine in Fallujah.

I think you're right about the impending "Abu Ghraib-like scandal" over the dispatch of the terrorist in the mosque by the Marine. I know the bleeding-heart freaks among us will lament the poor, unarmed victim, who, if he had been allowed to live, whould surely have gone on to win the Nobel Prize for his profound contributions to world peace. But alas, we will forever be without him.

It's far too easy for people in their living rooms to criticize our troops. It is simply nauseating that the beneficiaries of this Marine's bravery will sit in their recliners, see a video clip, and self-righteously judge the correctness of the decision made by one of the world's best fighting men after 6 brutal days of continuous combat. People who have never been in combat, never been shot at, never held a buddy as he died, and then re-lived the moment days later as you pause to wonder what the stain is on your clothes (you've somehow misplaced the knowlege that it was the warm blood of your friend), have not earned the right to judge the actions of our Marines.

No one except the Marines and terrorists in the mosque know what happened, but my understanding is that the mosque was being used as a fortification from which Marines were being fired upon. The Marines took the mosque, and left survivors inside to be cared for when it was practical. Later, Marines again took fire from the mosque, and upon re-entering, who should they find? Why, only a few, poor, injured and helpless citizens of Iraq. Give me a break. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the terrorists who were left behind waited until they had an opportunity to kill more Marines, and they took it. Although the terrorists were shown quarter, and they violated that by re-engaging the very people who had spared them. But maybe if they play dead when the Marines come back, no harm will come to them, and they can do it again, right? Or, at the very least, they can booby-trap their bodies so that they blow up those who return to check on them.

As a country, we laud the Marines, are proud of them, and even drop their name as a threat (remember the "Tell It To The Marines" posters of WWII?). We expect the Marines to be the "First to Fight," and celebrate their nickname "Devil Dogs," without thinking much about it. The Marines earned that name not here at home, but in WWI at the Battle of Belleau Wood in France (the first time we saved the French). Who gave them that name? The Germans they were fighting. Was it because the Marines fought a kinder, gentler war? Of course not. It was due to the ferocity with which the Marines fought and killed the Germans. War is not pretty, kind, or fun, but if you''re going to fight, you might as well be good at it.

We, as a country, expect the Marines to be the equivalent of a big, tough, snarling pit-bull and the end of Uncle Sam's leash, and then we are aghast when we see them bite. We demand that they are ready and able to protect us at a moment's notice, yet smiling and friendly every Christmas at the Toys for Tots barrel. In war, we can't have it both ways. Would we, as a nation, prefer to see footage of Marines running away, slipping into civilian clothing, and acting as cowards? It doesn't matter - it will never happen.

The Marine who shot the terrorist did his job. He did not torture the terrorist. He did not cause him pain. He did not put him in front of a camera and slowly saw his head off. He shot him one time in the head. The terrorist's brains were on the wall before the sound of the shot even reached him - he neither suffered nor knew it was coming. As far as battlefield death goes, this was as humane as one could hope for. Had the Marine been the vicious, torturous villain the press is making him out to be, believe me, he could have truly made the terrorist suffer. The Marine did his job and moved on. While ugly to see, that's war, and his actions probably saved the lives of other Marines.

Semper Fi

Thanks for this, Jeff. Thanks, too, for your service to our country.

Head Traumas
Mood:  suave
I found a link to this story over at Jeff Goldstein's blog and I must assume that it's not a joke. It's from the Boca Raton News website. Enjoy.

Mental health officials in South Florida blasted Rush Limbaugh on Monday, saying the conservative talk show host's offer of "free therapy" for traumatized John Kerry voters has made a mockery of a valid psychological problem.

"Rush Limbaugh has a way of back-handedly slamming people," said Sheila Cooperman, a licensed clinician with the American Health Association (AHA) who listened Friday as Limbaugh offered to personally treat her patients. "He's trying to ridicule the emotional state this presidential election produced in many of us here in Palm Beach County. Who is he to offer therapy?"

The Boca Raton News reported last week that more than 30 distraught Kerry supporters in South Florida contacted the non-profit AHA following their candidate's Nov. 3 concession to President Bush. AHA officials have diagnosed the disorder as Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST) and have scheduled the first of several free group therapy sessions for just after Thanksgiving.

Oh, for fuck's sake! Grow up!

The Invisible Colossus
Wretchard at The Belmont Club has hipped me to this interview of Paul Wolfowitz at the Prospect magazine. It's very interesting throughout, but one thought in particular stands out:

One of the things about this moment in history is that nobody really thinks they can produce an army, a navy or an air force that can take on the US. That should channel human competitiveness into more productive and peaceful pursuits.

Read one way, these are the supremely confident words of a major mover in the world's "last superpower." Read another way, it is a somewhat arrogant observation. Ultimately, though, Wolfowitz is being simultaneously realistic and idealistic.

If, tomorrow, our country had to fight for its own survival against an onslaught from every corner of the world, we would prevail. The world would be bloodied and hundreds of millions would be dead or dying, but this country would survive somehow, even badly hurt. But the countries in the axis of evil? The countries that oppose us? The countries that look at us the wrong way? They would all be under glass if we chose to put them there. But we do not so choose and never would.

America is not an empire in any precedent sense that I know of. We are, as Lincoln said, "the last, best hope of Earth." We do more than represent the potential of liberation; we often realize it. We'd sooner have clients and creditors interested in their own prosperity ---and ours--- than a world full of an annihilated and irredeemable humanity. Thus, we facilitate the mental and material commerce that changes and improves the whole world on a daily basis because that is how we get ahead. There's nothing wrong with that. Someone has to be on top and it may as well, for the sake of all, be us. Better that we get ahead than the Islamofascists or the Nazis or the Communists, right?

But, maybe if you can't agree to that, you should submit yourself to their way of life and find out the difference for yourself. Go on. No one here will stop you.

The Washington Post Cans a Traitor
Mood:  a-ok
At long last, according to Editor & Publisher, the anti-American piece of shit Ted Rall has been dropped from the Washington Post's online site. Remember that this is the cartoonist who insulted the late Pat Tillman as a dumbass who deserved to die.

WashingtonPost.com is no longer running the cartoons of hard-hitting liberal Ted Rall.

Rall said he thinks the site dropped his work because of a Nov. 4 cartoon he did showing a drooling, mentally handicapped student taking over a classroom. "The idea was to draw an analogy to the electorate -- in essence, the idiots are now running the country," he told E&P.

"That cartoon certainly drew a significant amount of negative comment from our users," said WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Doug Feaver when contacted by E&P. But he added that the decision to drop Rall was a "cumulative" one that had been building for a while.

Rall is garbage. "Hard-hitting liberal" garbage. Let him call it censorship all he wants. He got what was coming to him.

(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)

"Apologevents"
I didn't know Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban had a blog, but he does ---and has a great post on what a bunch of nonsense the FCC is. Cuban calls them a "marketing partner" to networks that broadcast the doings of sports franchises like his.

Ok newspapers, radio stations and shows, cable networks, any and all entertainment related news shows, listen up. Im with the PR department of the broadcast network. We all know that the FCC is getting persnickety (bet you havent used that word in a sentence recently), about nudity and language. Let us first say, we cant thank them enough.

The environment is perfect for both of us. We want as much media coverage of our programming as we can possibly get. You need things to cover. So here is the deal. From our end, we are going to create "Apologevents".

An Apologevent is where we plan an event that we know we will have to apologize for. The Apologevent will be designed to entice all the "Im shocked by anything" viewers to call their local stations, their newspapers and of course Inside Edition, The Insider, etc to remind them of how inappropriate the Apologevent was and how shocked they are.

Read the whole thing. It's pretty clever. And plenty cynical.

Championing the Muj
In the "Middle East Editorial Weblog" of The New Standard, Brian Dominick is doing his part to defend the murderers and Islamofascists of Fallujah against the Amerikkkans. On the question of the incident in which the young Marine shot the half-dead terrorist in a mosque last Saturday, Dominick says:

Advocates of looser rules of engagement have argued all day that one must leave open the possibility that the Marine thought the wounded man was actually a booby-trapped corpse, as this same unit reportedly discovered the previous day (the hard way). The rigging of corpses is a fairly common guerilla warfare tactic, and [NBC reporter Kevin] Sites dutifully reported that "possibility" in order to cast doubt on what his videotape actually shows.

But, if that were the fear, seeing that the prone man was in fact alive would, in such a case, have been cause for relief, not urgent suspicion. I haven't seen that logic employed in any commentary on the situation, though it seems self-evident. I just searched somewhat extensively and could find no accounts of a living mujahideen booby-trapping his own body in Fallujah.

Well, then, it's settled. So long as this dhimmi can't find another such example in Fallujah, there must be no cause for alarm. Never mind that the one thing we know about these jihadi psychopaths is that they look upon their own suicide as a certain path to paradise. Never mind that the rat the young Marine shot was slumped against a wall where an IED or a grenade might very easily have been concealed behind its back or nestled in the robes or under the corpse next to it. What really matters is that the anti-war Left desperately needs to manufacture another Abu Ghraib-caliber scandal to undermine our military's work in Iraq.

But don't let them do it. If you hate this war and want to see it end, the best thing to do would be to grit your teeth and see it through. A little unity in the face of these battles would go a long way, but the war will drag on beyond its time if the Left keeps giving the enemy the benefit of its disapproval of our own military.

70,000
Have you been enjoying, as I have, the Dhimmicrats' claim that the President doesn't have a mandate because, if 70,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way, we'd now be talking about President Kerry?

Sure. This is the same party that insists that Bush was never the legitimate winner of the 2000 Election because the Gorebot won the popular vote by half a million. Not only does this reveal the Dhimms' ignorance of the Electoral College, but it also proves their hypocrisy. Using their own logic from before, Kerry didn't lose by 70,000 Ohioans' votes; he lost by some three and a half million popular votes nationwide.

As it is, Kerry lost both ways, as he deserved.

Let's review:

John Kerry lost the popular vote.

John Kerry lost the Electoral College vote.

John Kerry's party lost even more seats in both chambers of the Congress, including that of its own Senate Minority Leader.

By the same measures, the President won everything, including a majority ---not a plurality, which twice put Clinton in office--- but a majority of the popular vote. That hasn't happened in 16 years.

Call it a mandate, ladies, and get over it.

For God's Sake, Please Don't Moan
I can never remember (honest!) which channel or what time Nigella Lawson's cooking program comes on, but I happened to stumble across it again this weekend (honest!) ---and I have to say I just can't take it anymore.

How can a woman eroticize the preparation of a shepherd's pie? Good God Almighty ---this one can! It just isn't right. Lawson is an audiovisual narcotic to poor saps like me, with the sexy English accent and the dark eyes and the hooters. And, then, of course, there are the hooters to consider. Oh, man. I feel like I need a cigarette after watching her make a mess of porridge.

And for God's sake, woman, please don't moan like that when you take a taste of the brownies you're whipping up. It's just food. Probably. Although I get to thinking that there's some sort of hidden message that's pinging my lizard brain.

Insanity.

Lightening the Load
According to a report in the Boston Globe (emphasis added):

FALLUJAH -- US forces dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs early yesterday morning on a bunker complex believed to be an insurgent training facility on the southern edge of this city, where the most dedicated and best trained rebel fighters are making a last stand.

The bombs shook the ground of the former insurgent stronghold and set off secondary explosions that went on for 45 minutes but could not be seen above ground, persuading officers of the Army's First Infantry Division that there were large stockpiles of weapons underground.

I know that the term "weapons of mass destruction" has a specific legal meaning, but when we're setting off that much ordnance, it seems to me that we are preventing some sort of mass destruction from happening further down the road.

Call this one an intelligence bonanza.

(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)

Jarheads and Craphounds
I hope I'm wrong, but we're probably on the verge of another fucking Abu Ghraib-like scandal in Iraq with the killing of a terrorist in Fallujah by a Marine this past Saturday. Why does this incident have that kind of potential? For the same reason Abu Ghraib did: someone's got it on tape.

I saw what little the networks would allow to be shown yesterday. It looks like the guy who gets shot is just about dead, anyway. But as the camera pans to him, you can see that he's breathing. The Marine doesn't care, though, and fires a round into the guy's head. Okay. One less terrorist in the world. What else do you want to know?

To look at what happened without knowing the full context is probably a whole lot like the infamous photo of the VC soldier taking a slug in the head from the South Vietnamese police chief. Which is to say that, as cold-blooded as it looks, it might help to know why this young Marine made the decision to shoot.

At the end of their report, CNN mentions, very briefly:

About a block away, a Marine was killed and five others wounded by a booby-trapped body they found in a house after a shootout with insurgents.

Yeah? These people are booby-trapping their own dead? That's not in the Koran, is it? Aren't they supposed to get the dead buried as soon as possible and not exploit corpses like that? Maybe after knowing that a buddy got killed and several others were injured by some "dead" terrorist, this young American didn't want to take any chances. And maybe he knew that a even a "dying" terrorist is fully capable of rigging a grenade or IED under his own sorry ass to go off when someone tries to move him.

I say bully for our guy.

It should also be noted that this happened in a mosque. Got that? These animals are using mosques as ammo dumps and redoubts and snipers' nests ---and the world is demanding that we respect their holy sites and apply the Geneva Conventions to these pieces of shit? Try again, comrades. These are unlawful combatants our boys are going up against. The only thing to do is exterminate them. Period.

Time to Shut the Fuck Up, Olbermann
Mood:  irritated
Looks like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is flaking out with all this nonsense about voter fraud costing Kerry the election. Why doesn't he just shut the fuck up and get over it? Bill Steigerwald at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review would like to know, too.

[Olbermann] never directly charged that Republicans stole the election or demanded that Karl Rove should be picked up for questioning by the U.N. But for 15 minutes on Monday, Olbermann pointed to a "small but blood-curdling group of reports of voting irregularities and possible fraud" from across the country, topped it with some vague partisan innuendo from Democrat Congressman John Conyers, and acted like he deserved a Peabody Award for Civic Journalism.

On Tuesday I checked out some of Olbermann's claims. Using a high-tech personal communication device professional journalists refer to as a "telephone," I called an elections bureau person in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (greater Cleveland), where, as Olbermann pointed out, 93,000 extra votes had been inexplicably cast Nov. 2.

It turns out the votes were "a computer anomaly" that didn't affect or reflect the official vote count. And those 18,472 votes Olbermann said were counted in Fairview Park, a Cleveland suburb that had only 13,342 registered voters? Absentee ballots from many precincts had been grouped together by the computer and credited to Fairview Park, where 8,421 voted.

And so on and so forth.

Here's my deal for Olbermann and his Countdown guest hosts: every time they bring up these lies about voter fraud, I vow to continue being a dick about this election for one week more. Because the only thing that ever had the potential to defeat President Bush wasn't Hanoi John but the fucking Big Media machine with all its lies and distortions. Those bastards deserve to be ruined every hour on the hour.

Oh, and Courageous Dan? I haven't forgotten about you, either, you forgery-pushing sack of shit.

Gots Ta Maintain
Now Playing: "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman
I just don't know why these young people can't get along:

U.S. forces fighting in Fallujah found the bodies of 20 foreign fighters Friday in the southern part of the city who had been killed execution-style.

The men were described as foot soldiers with Monotheism and Jihad, a guerrilla group headed by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that now calls itself al-Qaida in Iraq, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Please pay no attention to the new name of Zarqawi's group. See, the important thing is that there were no terrorists in Iraq before the Chimperor invaded.

But residents said the U.S-led offensive opened strains between the local insurgents and the foreigners. When a senior Zarqawi commander was found dead of a bullet to the head during the battle, many interpreted his death as the result of an insurgent execution.

Y'all won't need them fancy resumes in Paradise, you wretched animals. Not if the boss won't even give you a good recommendation.

The Auxiliary of the Abortion Industry
By way of the indispensible RealClearPolitics, here is a very interesting opinion piece in the Rocky Mountain News by Francis X. Maier, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver. Maier does a very good job of explaining the Democrats' recent losses from the perspective of Democratic Catholics everywhere. See if this resonates with you (emphases added):

I met my wife before I had returned to my childhood faith. One day I made the mistake of poking fun at those neanderthal Catholic views on abortion. What I got for my ignorance was a kindly but memorable tutoring on the sanctity of human life.

For my wife and her family, being a Catholic meant being a Democrat, and being a Democrat meant fighting for the little guy - literally. That included the poor, the homeless, racial and ethnic minorities, and the unemployed. It also meant defending the unborn child.

For my wife, arguing whether an unborn child was a "full human person" or a "developing human being" was irrelevant - or worse, a kind of lying. The dignity of the unborn life involved was exactly the same, whatever one called it.

Now, in virtually every respect, I disagree with the Catholic Church's view of human sexuality. I disagree with its notions of a celibate and marriageless clergy, contraception, when life begins, masturbation, homosexuality, abortion, and anything else you can think of. But what interests me in Maier's article is to see how far removed faithful and practicing Catholics are from political coherence in their support of the Democratic Party. This is especially true of Latinos, who seem to me to be poised between the conservatism of their Latin/Catholic culture and the expectation that they should support the Democratic platform by virtue of their socio-economic interests.

If the Democratic Party thinks that such a dilemma is tenable and resolvable in their favor, they are setting themselves up for disaster.

Maier goes on:

Robert P. Casey, governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995, embodied the deepest ideals of the Democratic Party: pro-worker; pro-minority; pro-economic and social justice; and also thoroughly pro-life, from conception to natural death. In arguing for the rights of the unborn child, he worried that the Democratic Party was becoming "little more than an auxiliary" of the abortion industry.

For his candor, the Clinton machine publicly humiliated him at the 1992 Democratic Convention. Other prominent "Catholic" Democrats - including fellow governor and media darling Mario Cuomo - looked the other way.

In his 1996 autobiography, Casey warned that:

"Many people discount the power of the so-called 'cultural issues' - and especially the abortion issue. I see it the other way around. These issues are central to the resurgence of the Republicans, central to the national implosion of the Democrats, central to the question of whether there will be a third party . . . [The] Democrats' national decline - or, better, their national disintegration - will continue relentlessly and inexorably until they come to grips with these values issues, primarily abortion."

Read the whole thing. Although I disagree with Maier's Catholicism in a hundred different ways, I think his analysis is very shrewd and deserves to be understood by the nihilistic Left ---before they reduce themselves to permanent irrelevance.