The first bloodletting is about to occur. The second needs to follow in 2010. We need to purge Congress of the WTDs: Weaseling, Triangulating Democrats who stand for nothing except carefully taking the least objectionable position in public. It's past time to return people of passion and principle to elected office. I know that sounds quaint and a bit naive, but it's also the only way to return our country to the path of ethical, courageous decision making.

That wasn't me saying that, even though you caught it on audio. That was the liberal media either controlling my mind or Dan Rather creating a convincing fake of my voice...whichever you'll believe today!

It's amazing how revealing your words can be, congressman, when you think they're only heard by your fellow rabid lunatics. Well, I, for one, am sick of being demonized for my liberal/progressive views. So I propose a new meme to spread far and wide:

Conservatives Hate Freedom.

Think about it. Based on their actions, they hate free speech, free expression through books they don't like, freedom of religion if it's not Christianity, freedom of reproductive rights, freedom from imprisonment, freedom for anyone to marry, electoral freedom based on the GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters in past elections...shall I go on?

The only freedom conservatives appear to like is the free market, by which they mean a market where greed runs unchecked so their rich donors can get fat and happy while millions lose their jobs and savings.

Conservatives Hate Freedom. They hate anybody who doesn't live the way they approve of and anybody who doesn't think like they do. Spread it around. Fight fire with fire.

Well said, bravo.

I suggest that the only thing conservatives are actually trying to conserve is a bucolic past that never existed. You know, when you could call a black man "Boy", beat the crap out of your wife, drive a 438 Chevy with death spewing from the tailpipe, smoke Luckies like your old man and discriminate against Hispanics and Asians all you liked without those pesky liberal laws interfering.

As Archie and Edith sang, those were the days.

...the final bullet in McCampaign will be the ad featuring that Vietnam vet and fellow ex-POW who talks about what a loose cannon McCain was in the Navy and how he'd be afraid to have McCain's finger on the button.

The Obama campaign may not need such an ad, but if they do, you can bet it's ready.

Ah, there you have it (bonking my forehead with the heel of my hand).

I stand corrected. Now you'll have to pardon me. I need to go to my John Birch Society meeting.

Glenn, I have made this argument for the last four years: that the sole benefit of the repugnant Bush years would be to finally awaken the American electorate to the horrible dangers of demonization politics, simplistic thinking about complex issues, and an apathetic "let my fearless leaders fix it while I go shopping" attitude toward democracy. While I still chafe at the Messianic treatment we give our presidential candidates these days (especially Obama, whom I support), I think that perhaps this sea change you write of represents something more significant: the first signs of our emergence out of our national adolescence.

For decades, we have carried on in this country like hormone-soaked 16-year olds: reckless, blind to our faults, aggressive, driven by passion rather than reason. But now we're faced with a plight equivalent to the 18-year-old who's graduated at the bottom of his high school class and has no college acceptances, no job prospects and whose parents have handed him his suitcase. We have a lurching, bleeding economy, a titanic debt, two disastrous wars, climate change, failing energy supplies, and a major political party that believes it can sway our votes by jumping up and down and shouting, "Terrorist! Muslim! Liberal! Nigger! Anti-American!" over and over again.

They say you only make fundamental change when you hit bottom. Thanks for taking us to the gutter so fast, Bush & Pals. Now, finally, we're starting to shed our blindness and stupidity and realize it's time to grow up, put away childish things, and become more of the nation our founders envisioned.

Don't you know that there's an entire subgroup of armchair journalists whose lives revolve around telling Joan and Alex Koppleman how incompetent they are? I make my living writing and reporting and it's all I can do sometimes to keep from crawling through my wireless router and punching some of these ignoramuses in the teeth. Publish something, do an interview or research and write a cogent story before you whip out the venom pen, you idiots.

Oh, and maybe learn something about what it takes to run and fill space in an updated-many-times-daily publication, as well as what constitutes newsworthy material.

Ah...I needed that rant. Back to my previously scheduled morning.

...we may have misunderestimated Senator McCain's ability to crap in his own drawers.

What a colossal, clueless, pandering tool.

I'm all for healing the wounds of the last 8 years, but I have to admit I'm going to love surfing the Net and the cable channels for about a month after Nov. 4 and watching the Neocons devour each other in a cognitive dissonant frenzy. Maybe Ann Coulter will eat Bill O'Reilly and give birth to a jackal. I imagine that's the only thing her dessicated uterus could support, anyway.

Man, I'm going to pop up the corn, invite some anti-American pals over, and make a spectator sport outa this. It's going to be good.

I love it! The Joe McCarthy of 2008 belongs in the dustbin of history right along with...well, the rest of her party, soon.