Before last year's presidential installment Matthews was getting so frenetic on the air that each night on Hardball you could see spittle running down the corners of his mouth and he was unable or unwilling to let any of his guests finish a complete sentence before barking out a new question to overlap the previous one. Lovely man. Great infotainment.

But one thing he said on air last summer finally solidified once and for all why I detest this egomaniac. He was shooting the bull with David Gurgen or similar Washington parasite when in a moment of complete self-satisfaction he blurted out "God I love this game, politics."

That was my personal moment of revelation. It's just a game to him. Even the idiotic name of his show suddenly made sense. Hardball. Ball game. Game. It's all just a f*king game to him. In his mind, he's just a spectator at a sports contest.

In Iraq last summer men and women of our armed forces, plus hundreds of civilians were bleeding in the streets. To Matthews, they are just a facet of the bigger game: Power politics in Washington.

If the reality of war ever touches Matthews, it shows only in fleeting moments of gratuitous pity, like when he dragged his camera crews into Walter Reed to make a big show of how brave some of our more photogenic casualties are on the mend and eager to rejoin the fight. He avoided those whose injuries were too unpleasant for television or whose brains were so scrambled from concussions that they would make his viewers angry and sick to their stomachs at Bush's war.

To Matthews, it's all just a f*king game.

It would be great if he got into the race. At least he would be off the air for a while.

Kudos for adding intelligent perspective to this polarizing rorshacht test of an incident.

"we can at least hope that this situation ... will stir up legal and cultural questions that needed to be asked."

Asked and answered almost daily on police blotters everywhere: What the hell are people thinking when they willingly put themselves in places where they don't belong and should know better.

If you are a white frat boy athlete on a career track, maybe when one of your peers got the bright idea to stage a party with the intent to drink and ogle naked women, wouldn't you pause for a second and think "I wonder how this might look on television tomorrow morning," and get the hell out of there?

If you are a woman who needs to earn money, wouldn't it cross your mind that maybe taking off your clothes and jiggling your junk in front of a bunch of drunken idiots, outnumbered twenty to one, in a private house with no escape route, might just be putting yourself into a place where you don't belong?

But no. You can't count on people to be rational. They do it all the time, putting themselves in harm's way and then being incensed that things took a bad turn. The frat boys are insensed that their integrity has been called into question. Ha! Where was that integrity five minutes before the stripper got there?

The woman is insensed because these drunken galoots couldn't control themselves and it wound up getting ugly. It's just disgusting the way a gang of jocks get when they are shit-faced and sexually aroused.

"Well, the moral of the story,

The moral of this song,

Is simply that one should never be

Where one does not belong." -- Bob Dylan

I wrote the Washington Post ombudsman (both the old and the new one) several emails over the past six months with a few straight forward questions, stated as politely as possible:

Sir/Madam: As a young college student and returning Vietnam War veteran, the Washington Post was my beacon of truth. I always thought that the Post's job was to expose federal government corruption and be the public watchdog no matter who was in the White House, Republican or Democrat.

I guess I thought it would always be that way and I guess I stopped paying attention for a while. So please just tell me and I'll not bother you again:

Can you tell me approximately the year and month that the Post rolled over? Can you explain why? Was it a business decision from the advertising side? Did you change ownership? Did the editorial board change? In short: What the hell has happened to you?"

I never received a reply to any of my emails. I didn't think I would. I think many people at the Post are ashamed of what has happened to their once-mighty voice.

Maybe if somebody at the Post reads this, they will feel safer, under the cover of a pseudonym to answer my questions.