Now, this has to be the most asinine thing I've seen since Tuesday.

We've heard all the knocks against John Roberts, he's anti-civil rights, anti-woman, anti-this, anti-that (and worst of all, has been associated with the dreaded Federalist Society), blah blah blah. But this has to be the most ridiculous, asinine, and egregious waste of perfectly good newsprint (or bandwidth): John Roberts is too perfect.

Richard Cohen, obviously at a loss to find something substantive to criticize him for (one supposes because all of the substantive arguments just haven't panned out for 'em), comes up with this example of unrivaled moonbattiness.

I wish that John Roberts had a touch of my incompetence. . . . His record is appallingly free of failure.

Appallingly free of failure. Let that one sink in for a moment.

Cohen concludes with this:

If I had a vote in the Senate, I would not deny it to Roberts based on his lack of tough times -- nor, for that matter, would I have granted one to Clarence Thomas, who had plenty of them. But when it comes to civil rights, to women's rights, to workers' rights, to gay rights and to the plight of the poor, I would prefer that Roberts had had his moment of failure. He will lead one branch of the government. I wish he knew more about all of the people.

The snottyness of liberals knows no bounds. It even extends to those who are actually better than they.

Did I not say it yesterday?!?

I said it yesterday in listing the various things I blame for all of the post-Katrina sturm und drang. I blame, in part, our "CSI" culture.


Here's Arianna Huffington making my point.

Look, if we've learned anything from watching shows like CSI, Law & Order, and their endless progeny, it's that you can't let a crime scene grow cold. You've got to start collecting and analyzing the evidence while the DNA is still fresh and let David Caruso or Vincent D'Onofrio start sweating the perps while the passions are still running high.

Spare me! A crime? Pray, what penal statutes were violated in all this (unless you want to count Louisiana's Homeland Security Department specifically preventing the Red Cross from delivering supplies to the Superdome or NO convention center)?

I just wonder (sometimes it keeps me up nights): What colour is the sky in the moonbats' world?

Mike Huckabee President 2008: Announcing 'Bloggers For Huckabee'

Mike Huckabee President 2008: Announcing 'Bloggers For Huckabee'

Well, whaddaya know.

OK, I'm down.

My blame game.

Everyone in Politicalville is talking about whom to blame for Katrina and its effects. The Lefties want all of the blame to lay squarely at the feet of President Bush, and want him impeached. (Don't believe me? Go check out the moonbats over at DU. I'm too tired to link; you can go find it your bloody self.) The Righties want most of the blame placed on Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin. I'm getting sick of it. I'll tell you where the blame truly lies, and let thhat be the end of it.

The blame lies in our instant society. Our "microwave, high-speed internet, instant communication, instant coffee, how dare you make me wait, I want it now" society. We have become so accustomed to getting what we want, and getting when we want it, and raising holy cain when we don't. Does anyone understand what it takes to mobilise the federal government in men and material (and materiel)? It doesn't happen overnight. A behemoth like the federal government can't just "spring into action" like that. That's why state and local governments are supposed to be the first responders because they can act more quickly in the face of a disaster. (That's why, I have seen reported, that Mayor Nagin purportedly told his citizens that if they chose to stay to not expect any help for the first 48-72 hours.) So when the federal government doesn't swoop down immediately and save the day like like some sort of governmental Batman, our people get outraged.

The blame lies in our "CSI" entertainment culture. People have grown accustomed to seeing teevee and movie actors do incredible (and totally unrealisitic) things with men and technology that we expect that government in the real world to do the same. (I know I've seen this argument somwhere, NRO perhaps, in the context of juries who fault criminal prosecutors for not having hi-tech DNA or other lab analyses.) "We have all of this technology and are the richest country in the world; why can't we do 'X'? Why can't we use all of our technology and know-how to make the world a utopia where no one ever need suffer again?" "If Harrison Ford can single-handedly defeat a group of armed terrorists who have taken over Air Force One, using nothing but guns and guts and flying great airplanes, and do it all in two hours, why can't we protect people from natural disasters?" Our expectations are way too unrealistic.

I blame Franklin Roosevelt and the rest of New Dealers who, perhaps unwittingly, planted the seed that has firmly teken root that government is and should be the solution to our problems; that there's no problem that the government can't fix. "Why doesn't the government do this; why doesn't the government do that?" We have created a dependency nation. We expect government to solve all of our problems and we get mad when it doesn't. Setting aside constitutional issues and our system of dual-sovereignty, people today seem to place their faith in the almighty power of government the way the ancients used to in their sun god, moon god, rain god, and no-dirty-wax-build-up god. Government is here to protect us from enemies (human enemies), foreign and domestic, and to generally keep order. Government's power is greatly diminished in the face of an immense natural disaster (that is, unless you don't mind waiting a few days and weeks and months). People no longer see "Uncle Sam," they see "Mommy" that they want to hold their hands, kiss their foreheads and make everything better. I blame people who won't do for themselves, expecting "Mommy" (or Batman) to come save them from their foolish mistakes. People who can't do for themselves will, unfortunately, have to suffer in the short-term until help can arrive unless those who can lend a hand.

I jointly blame the immediately aforementioned New Dealers, our courts, and our nation's general lack of knowledge of basic civics for being completely ignorant about how our federalist system works. The national government does not have the constitutional authority to swoop down into a sovereign state and take over, not without that state's government ceding that authority or without the president declaring martial law in the face of an insurrection. Of course people expect that the federal government can come and go and do as it will wherever it will. They've seen it happen all too often and the courts have allowed it (just ask Mr. Filburn). But that's not how our system is designed.

I blame myopic, two-faced people who want to grant government all power to do "X" and then express horrors if government takes all power.

I blame people who live in disaster-prone areas and then cry for aid when disaster hits. Do it if your want to; pay the price for your choice. I live in a tornado prone area (although we haven't had one in years, thank God). If I get whacked by a tornado, I have to make do with whatever provision I have made for myself. If I live on the Atlantic seaboard or Gulf Coast, I should expect to be hammered by a hurricane, and I should make provisions. If I live by a river bank, I should expect it to flood from time to time. If I live on a fault, I should expect earthquakes. If I live on an unstable hillside or bluff, I should expect mudslides. You get the picture. You don't want to take those risks or adequately prepare yourself for them? Go live in an area that doesn't experience those natural phenomena.

That's who I blame. Now let us never speak of it again.

William Hubbs Rehnquist, R.I.P

Chief Justice Rehnquist has died. Very sad. He was a brilliant legal scholar and was quite right in his views of federalism and the proper constitutional limits of central government power. I'll write more about him later.

Now, if you hear the news that the chief justice has died and your first thought is about impeaching the president and vice president, you just might be a DUer. Some examples from DU's thread on Rehnquist's passing.

Contact your lawmakers and demand his immediate impeachment (and Cheney's, too)

And immediately following:

GET * OUT of the Whitehouse! FROG MARCH HIM!

Then there's this gem of sheer moonbattiness:

THERE IS ONLY ONE SOLUTION SHORT OF CIVIL WAR.
Retake Congress in 2006, impeach Bush and Cheney and use a resignation and appointment strategy to get either Gore or Kerry to be Speaker of the House. One of them can then appoint the other as Vice-President. Then pack the court like Roosevelt tried to. Otherwise, it's fascism or civil war or fascism and civil war.

I thought the LLL hated war. I better check with Mother Cindy about that.

How about this:

Dems Must Fight for the Life of the Nation - NOW!
Bush has never been weaker! He is vulnerable. The Democrats must now find courage and fight against any Bush appointment. First things first - Democrats and loyal American Republicans in the Senate must demand that the entire Bush Administration resign now for gross crimminal [sic] negligence for the Iraq War and the lack of preparation and response to Katrina. The blood of thousands of Americans killed and maimed in Iraq and on the Gulf Coast is on their hands. 9/11, Iraq and Katrina happended on the Bush Administration watch - whether from ignorance, incompetence, arrogance or crimminal [sic] malfeasance, the results are the same. They must be held accountable and forced to resign in disgrace. They are killing us and the country cannot wait for a Democratic Congress after the 2006 election and possible impeachment. The Bushies,all of them, every elected and appointed member of that administration must be shown the door, NOW!

The Democrats must not cooperate, compromise or give-in to anything from this corrupt, immoral, deadly administration. We must fight them on every front and persist with resolve until they are gone!

I swear, I'm not making this stuff up.

We need to push for impeachment now more than ever. The meme should be "if a man would kill poor people in New Orleans for politics, why should we allow him to appoint TWO judges for the Supreme Court." Eben the Repubs are beginning to bandond ship, so it is possible.

Impeachment should be the major thrust of the Sept 24th protest. Forget the zillion-and-a-half issues that ANSWER brings to the fore. Impeachment due to incompetence should be the message. We have more than enough evidence.

And a moratorium on all political appointments until then. It is clear from Bush's appointmnt of Brown as head of FEMA. That guy is as useless as [teats] on a bull.

Stop it, please! Yer killin' me!

Now here's a post on a thread about the passing of the chief justice. Except this post never mentions Justice Rehnquist. It does, however, as I guess every DU thread must at some point, blame the coming end of the world on George W. Bush.

Even some republicans would vote for [impeachment] now. My only hesitation, is there a real chance of winning any election from now on? I begin to doubt it since the republicans control the legislature, the courts, the executive, and most importantly, the voting machines. Some of us have foreseen insurrection in our future for the last four years. It looms large now.

That having been said I wonder if it really matters at this point. The economy will take a possibly fatal blow from the disaster at the gulf coast. Not only NO was destroyed, Biloxi and other cities were cut off at the knees. This will certainly be a belly blow to the economy. The lack of sufficient petroleum will also have a drastic effect. And don't forget the fact that Iran is starting it's own oil market and diversifying into the euro among other currencies, so the dollar will no longer be the fiat currency of trade. And that will HURT!

Then there's global warming. With arctic ice disappearing at such an alarming rate it can't be long before the salinity of the north atlantic goes low enough that the atlantic conveyor is turned off. At that point it's Katie bar the Door. No one knows the results of that except that europe will get cold. And we can be sure that the weather here will not be the same. Those areas that we depend on for growing food won't support that anymore. Where our sustenance will come from is anyone's guess.

As you can tell, I'm not very positive about our future. And I blame it all on George W. Bush.

Some call him the Anti-Christ.

Not me.

I call him Shiva, Destroyer of Nations.

Again, I thought this was the thread about the passing of the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Sheesh.

Then there are the outright haters.

Sorry. No respect.
Spit on him and his family. You think differently?

Words cannot express.

Of course, no DU thread would be complete without the conspiracy theorists worming their way in.

How soon do we get the autopsy results to check for "carcinogens"...
Makes one wonder it [sic] his death was "hastened"... Hope they do a full checkup in detail on this and that Fitzgerald gets to see the results!

One wonders if they would say these same things outside the echo chamber.

Now I'm getting mad

The liberals are absolutely giddy over the carnage wrought by Katrina. Not for the despair it has brought to the people of the Gulf Coast, per se, but because they have yet another bludgeon they hope to use against the administration, Republicans, and essentially anyone who is not one of them.

Don't believe me? Read this.

We can justifiably criticize * [Read, President Bush -- ed.] all we want - even the MSM is on board - and we cannot be accused of being unpatriotic or not supporting our troops.

Or this.

bush gassed his own people through his malicious neglect and contempt.

The libs are as excited about this as they claimed Bush was about 9-11.

But let us make one thing clear: We WILL politicize this issue.

The Republicans did not shirk from making political use of 9/11, and we should not shirk from reminding the country that Bush turned what should have been a mere problem into Ragnarok.

Conservatives may accuse us of lacking taste if we use this sad occasion to point out sadder facts of political life. Cable news pundits will try to pretend that now is not the time for partisan politics.

If they say that, screw 'em.

If the Bush-voters want Californians and New Yorkers and other blue staters to fork over dough, then they damn well had better take our words as well. Republican policies caused this catastrophe. Force them to hear that message -- again and again. That message is the price of the charity they now demand.

The Brad Blog, another LLL site.

Andrew Waldon over at Moonbat Central was spot on with this observation:

For Moonbats, everything is about them and their politics. So it comes naturally that this hurricane is just another political prop to use in arguing for their favorite scheme or ideological “nuance.” Just as communism (and fascism) consist of self-appointed bureaucrats who impose themselves over everyone else–Moonbats out of power seek to use any and all disasters to impose their ideology on the rest of us.

Thus, we are already hearing the peanut gallery screaming, "See? Global Warming!" "See? Bush cut taxes for the rich and cut funding for the levee projects!" "It's all his fault! Everything is always his fault!"

An aside: About that middle thing. It is true that the Bush Administration cut (cut or simply reduced the rate of growth? With the way the word "cut" has been abused in Washington, you can never be too sure) U.S. Army Corps of Engineers levee project funds. But so did the Clinton Administration. It just hasn't been a high priority within the Beltway.

Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn't exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.

AP Analysis: Politicians Failed Storm Victims. Politicians of both stripes, mind you.

Anyway, the libs' desparation is clearly showing as they try to use anything, even a major tragedy, to weaken the Bush Administration. If they keep it up, they'll only end up weakening themselves.

Now I'm devastated.

Seeing the pictures out of New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport is simply devastating. Those poor blighters. While I stand by my comments re: the attitudes toward looting and all, I can't help but feel so badly for the people who have lost everything.

Look at this satellite photo of New Orleans (three cheers, lads, to Pundit Guy who had the photo first).

The big blue spot is Lake Pontchartrain. The blue areas (underneath the clouds) is New Orleans. (Click on it and then blow it up to full size and you can see better.)
I mean, Holy Pete!

That being said, I'm exceedingly annoyed by the liberals who are trying to make political hay from these people's tragedy. Surely everyone by now has read or heard of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s outrageous post over at HuffPo where he insinuated that Misssissippi suffered the enormous destruction because its now-governor Haley Barbour implored in 2001, back when he was still a Washington player, President Bush to forget the Kyoto Accords. Drudge has had it up for two days now.

The sheer sophistry of his post is absolutely astounding. His post is essentially saying that Barbour's Mississippi got its just desserts because of his actions. But it doesn't just stretch but completely snaps credulity to believe that even if Kyoto had been adopted in 2001 that any benefits that would accrue from such adoption a mere four years ago would have done thing one to stop Katrina's effects. And even if we had fully complied with Kyoto since 2001, Eurpoe hasn't done a damn thing, and let's not even get into China or India. So what good would our having adopted Kyoto have done to the thousands now suffering?

And then there's this enviro-wackaloon who essentially blames every weather pattern on global warming. This yutz states:

The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the explanation was global warming.

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

Well, isn't that special?

Then he states:

Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

Except that he doesn't anymore know that than a bag of dead rats.

I saw this guy, an environment professor at UVa, who has studied this stuff (OK, no shouts of, "Ah ha! Logical fallacy! Appeal to authority!" He's a professsor, so I 'spect he knows more about the subject than I) on one of the myriad cable talking head shows. He said that water surface temperature only explains about 10% of a given hurricane's severity. That leaves some other factors to explain that remaining 90%.

The leftists are absolutely giddy regarding Katrina and their hope that they can bully anyone who is not a similarly inclined leftist into swallowing their bugle oil. I find their putting partisanship over simple decorum galling.

You too?

I got rights to other people's stuff, I've been oppressed

Man, I am totally appalled.

Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh. What the people of New Orleans and Gulfport and Biloxi is beyond my realm of experience. I mean, I've survived a tornado, but that didn't take out an entire city, leaving virtually nothing.

And our flawed, broken nature leads usto do bad things, like taking advantage of a crisis to do some looting.

But what I read in the story linked above saddened and appalled me. Read:

NEW ORLEANS - With much of the city flooded by Hurricane Katrina, looters floated garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street in a dash to grab what they could.

In some cases, looting on Tuesday took place in full view of police and National Guard troops.

At a Walgreen’s drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers.

When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, “86! 86!” — the radio code for police — and the crowd scattered.

Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement.

“It’s downtown Baghdad,” the housewife said. “It’s insane. I’ve wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not.”

And more:

Around the corner on Canal Street, the main thoroughfare in the central business district, people sloshed headlong through hip-deep water as looters ripped open the steel gates on the front of several clothing and jewelry stores.

One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store.


“No,” the man shouted, “that’s everybody’s store.”

Here's the worst part:

Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold.

“To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it’s an opportunity to get back at society,” he said.

It's this last quote that gets me. See what he's saying? If you've been "oppressed," then you have some sort of blank check to get back at "the Man" (even if the Man's store you're looting is owned by someone who is far from wealthy and is just as likely to be living month-to-month, too).

I blame people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and the various socialists for this kind of attitude. These types have making a great living feeding people with the notion that they are "oppressed" and laying the ground work for these kinds of beliefs of "the entitlement of the oppressed" to take root.

If you've been told every day that you're oppressed and your misfortune is all the fault of someone else, society, of course it's going to lead to such acts of "getting back at society."

Major League Moonbats

It's a thoroughly sick and twisted thing on my part, but I love lurking over at the Democratic Underground boards. I know that a lot of my posts are dealing with the some of the absolute wackaloon things they say. This blog isn't intended as a kind of DU Watch (see this), but sometimes the things the DU denizens post are just so completely outrageous or otherwise moonbatty that sunshine (or at least my little spectrum of it) must be shone upon it.

For your consideration:

Apparently New Orleans police had made some arrests for looting or the Louisiana National Guard were on alert to prevent any possible looting. Now, I learned as a small child that stealing is wrong. But to the anarcho-socialists at DU, it is not only OK but even desirous that the poor in The Crescent City steal food from local markets.

Don't believe me? Read here and here.

A few of my more favourite quotes:

[A]fter a disaster like Katrina I think the rich mans rules can stand to be relaxed a bit.

quote

And A few hot plasma TV's sold at a pawn shop,could make for a couple months of prepaid existance..like food and rent an security deposit while you move out and look for work in a new place swarming with other refugees also looking for work while out of town.And in this shitty republican economy getting work is not so easy now..
Didya ever consider THAT might be a reason for stealing plasma TV's?

quote

Apparently, the form of killing whereby property owners withhold life-saving property from those in need of it is A-OK with you, by your own admission.

quote

Now, this is not to say that all of the DUers are permissivist when it comes to crime.

This is a case of some [a--holes], who are probably well fed and who can afford to buy food, using the cover of the storm to go on a crime wave.

But I mean, seriously....

None dare call them liberal

I've been avoiding posting on this Cindy Sheehan nonsense, in part because I've been so busy and in part because the target is just too easy.

But I had to chime in today, after reading this post in Wednesday's PowerLine blog.

John Hinderaker takes the AP's Angela Brown to task for her not-so-subtle cheerleading for Sheehan. The post dealt with this story, dated August 24, by Ms. Brown. Hinderaker made this observation:

The article concludes with an outright whopper:

Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war.

Hinderaker goes on to explain how this graf (paragraph in the newspaper biz) is patent nonsense.

So what does Ms. Brown do in today's installment of her Sheehan rooting, a story concerning Sheehan taking her Merry Pranksters show on the road? See for yourself (scroll down to the last graf):

Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war.

Expect to see this graf at the end of each of Ms. Brown's stories about Sheehan until her editors finally wake up.

Also, Ms. Brown adds this graf:

Conservative activists and military families also were en route to Crawford from California on a tour called "You don't speak for me, Cindy!" The caravan coordinated by Move America Forward plans to hold a pro-Bush rally in town Saturday.

I could not find anywhere in the story where Ms. Brown labels Sheehan and her cadre "liberals." No, she and her comrades are described as "A fallen soldier's mother" and the benign "anti-war activists." Nowhere is the reader told who is helping coordinate Sheehan's month-long protest (one reference is made to a Quaker-created exhibit now on display in Crawford).

The clear implication is inescapable: Ms. Sheehan is just your run-of-the-mill mom protesting the war; those who are now countering Sheehan are the dreaded "conservative activists" who are "coordinated."

Oh, hide the children and animals!

Update: It wasn't a charley horse

It was some torn fibers or ligaments below the calf muscle, causing bleeding into the muscle, which the muscle didn't like at all.

I'm still hobbling a bit, but not as bad as before.

I got a charley horse yesterday.

Still hurts today. Is that normal?

The Wife and I have been watching the Thin Man series lately. My folks used to love those movies when I was a kid. I never understood them -- then. I probably was too young to understand that Myrna Loy was a total honey.

Hate is not a family value

but it apparently is a Democratic Underground one -- against President Bush and any one who doesn't hate Bush as much as they.

Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong bicyled with President Bush yesterday in Crawford. It doesn't appear that Lance beat Bush to a pulp while screaming anti-war slogans; ergo, the DUers have decided that Lance is not fit to live and his efforts at cancer research are to be boycotted.

See the totally sick, twisted, often vulgar, hate-filled results here, here, and here.

N.B.: There are few DUers who find the visceral reaction shameful, but they are the definite and distinct minority.

Y'know, this kind of blind hatred driven by something as trivial as partisan politics can't be commented upon and have it done justice. It is something that merely has to be experienced first-hand.

Sad, truly sad. What miserable lives those folks must lead when their partisanship trumps every other human value.

RedState.org on the Roberts nomination

Who are Roberts' enemies?

By his enemies, you will know him.

If PFAW is against him, he can't be all bad.

WinRock out as Arkansas gubernatorial candidate

OK, this really sucks.

Win Rockefeller drops out of Arkansas governor's race

Possible leukemia? Man, this really sucks. I like WinRock. He is truly a stand-up guy. Not your typical, two-faced pol, but someone who just wants to try to help.

I can vote for Asa Hutchinson. But I may not be as enthusiastic about it. I can be convinced, however.

Give me a call, Asa. Let's bat it about.

Re: Judicial nominations

A Judge With No Agenda.

John Leo puts it much better than I could regarding the increasingly nasty political fights over judges. If judges wouldn't render political decisions, instead leaving them to the political branches of government, then nominations wouldn't be such a political brouhaha.

The Democrats are directly responsible. They are the ones who have single-mindedly worked to have their liberal agenda foisted on an unsuspecting, and largely unwilling, public. They knew darn well that, if left to voters to approve of such, that their radical, socialist agenda would go down in flames like so many Hindenburgs.

Hi, all!

Just got back from a week's holiday at the lake. Quite refreshing. We had The Boy 2d's birthday party on Saturday. What a hoot! Sea-Doo rides for the kids, hitting golf balls to the island (more often into the lake), tube rides, hot dogs and cake, the works. Pretty big day for a 4-year-old.

Now back to the grind.

Justice O'Connon retires

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor aanounced her retirement from the SCOTUS today and the folks over at DU have got their knickers all in a twist. Have a giggle here, here, and here (careful, DUers are inveterate users of vulgarity, so hide the children and old ladies).

Frankly, anything that gets liberals' knickers in a twist makes me smile. Their use of hyperbole knows no limits. Even Chicken Little would look at liberals and say, "Gee, over-react much?"

How truly pathetic

Some DUers never cease to amaze me.

Can you believe that the 2000/2004 elections could actually cause a marriage to break up? One DUer reported that it did.

Do you know any relationships that ended because of this past election?

Part of the whole picture. He's a Republican and I'm an Independent. He voted for Bush (both times) and I voted for Gore and Kerry. He was out of work of over a year (IT) and got a job in Florida. I refuse to go there; red state mentality, ONE Bush is bad enough, etc. Just goes against my whole being of who I am and what I believe in. True Blue Northeastern. We were married 30 years.

There had to have been more to it that that. I mean, that someone's petty, partisan political positions (there's a little alliteration for you) would cause someone to end a 30-year relationship?

That's truly sad. What a miserable existence.

Media masturbation and Deep Throat

Oh, joy. The elite media, notably the The Washington Post the others trying to garner some reflected glory, are in full self-congratulatory mood over an event that happened more than 30 years ago.

The revelation of Mark Felt, former No. 2 man at the FBI, as the infamous Deep Throat of Watergate fame, have brought the elite media out in full force and in full self-important face. After the disgraces based on "unnamed sources" in the past year(CBS and Newsweek, most notably), the elite media are now in full-court-press mode to try to convince an increasingly disinterested public that it used to be relevant and should still be considered so.

"No, really, it's true. Ask anyone. We really were important. See, we helped bring down a president. If that doesn't make us important, I don't what could. Now, you'll go back to respecting and fearing us AND LIKE IT!"

As to Felt, I am not going to accept the media's hype and whitewash that he was truly a selfless man who's only interest was rooting out malfeasance in high office. He clearly had an axe to grind, he having been passed over for the directorship when Hoover died in 1972. And, not to put too fine a point on it, he did exactly what other people went to jail for, namely leaking confidential FBI information to the media. Why is he honored and others went to jail?

Also, John Dean doesn't think Felt was the only Deep Throat because some of the information The WaPo got from DT was info that Felt, as a bureaucrat out in an agency, wouldn't have had access to. No access to the White House, no access to the presidential re-election campaign. But anyway . . . .

If there's anything more stomach-turning than all of the media navel-gazing when they do something wrong is all of the media's self-congratulatory huzzahs when they actually do something significant.