It isn't that I practice or endorse pastimes like corpse-abusing or grave-robbing or anything like that.

But snarking at the dead is a legitimate reaction to the current, and worsening, corporate media AND blogospheric* compulsion to respond to the death of a public figure-- especially members of the political elite and celebrity infotainwhores-- by generating a tsunami of hagiographic glurge.

The snark may be unfortunate, like projectile vomiting, but individuals differ on how much forced and phony eulogizing they can absorb or tolerate.

*Huffington Post hews to a lily-livered, quasi-Victorian standard of censorship. (If one refers to this "moderation" AS censorship, out you go!) Thus, I was shocked that a typically gag-inducing Snow eulogy by some truthless ass named Bob Franken permitted comments in the first place. Still, I politely refrained from dissenting, EXCEPT for commenting "I thank you from the bottom of my hip boots" to a commenter who'd simply posted "Balderdash!"

Both "balderdash" and my appreciative response didn't last the night. The HuffPo censor-elf apparently considered it too mean-spirited for their trash-tabloid e-rag.

The pernicious persistence of Big Lies, even polite posthumous ones expressed in a deluge of sanitized maudlin odes and reminiscences, just trips the gag reflex on some of us. And in varying degrees, we prefer to spew rather than swallow what's being poured down our throats.

How to put this delicately?

The disagreeable truth is that both of pestilential conjoined twins in the political tub are fouling up the bathwater. They are oozing, dripping, dribbling, exhaling, or ejaculating toxic secretions from every pore and orifice.

Oh, there may be a clean fingernail here, a healthy pinky toe there, an undecayed tooth-- but this bicameral monster is terminally diseased, and highly contagious.

The problem isn't the bathwater. Even if Obama proves to be the Scrubbing Bubbles Fizz-Its Toilet Tablet he's made out to be, minimally cleaner water will not precipitate a cascade of reform; this two-headed abomination is not going to become sound and wholesome.

The duopoly must die.

This is a hard sell in the best of times, but all the more so during the presidential campaign rutting season, when the hysteria abiding in our corporate-media driven public discourse is amped up by the incipient panic driving lesser-evilism.

This view is not exactly compatible with even sound, focused pragmatism. But FWIW, this view doesn't keep me from supporting Glenn, Accountability Now, Strange Bedfellows, etc. I admire and appreciate their extraordinary diligence and purpose.

I also respect the necessity of those who can stomach it working within the system, and essentially rationing relatively limited funds according to dispassionate cost/benefit analyses.

But... all that said, I also ask Glenn and his colleagues to try to keep their collective Third Eye open at least a slit. Thus, I again echo LT Bohica's plea that Cindy Sheehan be given at least nominal support. I understand that all of the grown-ups already know that even if Sheehan gets on the ballot, that when push comes to shove she'll just be ground up by the Pelosi woodchipper.

It bothers me, though, that an intelligent, honest, passionate, committed, humanitarian populist/progressive is either ignored, patronized, condescended to, or cooly hung out to dry while dissenters exclusively pursue the strategy of rewarding better germs and attacking virulent ones.

I expect that the prevailing view among democratophiliacs will persevere, and the moderate, progressive wonks will stick to the plan of throwing out the fouled bathwater, believing that at least one of the conjoined twins is essentially curable, once a few unsightly excrescencies are trimmed away, malignant tumors removed, and substantial improvements are made to diet and exercise.

Still, I hope that worthy public figures who reject the duopoly as beyond reform can be accommodated, encouraged, and supported on principle despite the risk, such as it is, of seeming Unserious or Irresponsible.

Apropos of this point, I recall being unpleasantly surprised many months ago when Scott Ritter, who's about as Serious and Responsible as it gets, snidely criticized and dismissed Cindy Sheehan as a hopeless amateur who was fucking up a "real" anti-war campaign. He made some valid enough points about a need for organization, focus, etc.

But for all that, his Inner Jarhead really showed through. He sounded like a grizzled field commander pissed off at some ditsy dame wandering around the battlefield and royally Fucking Up the mission. He argued for a Sheehan, Code Pink-free paramilitary antiwar movement, with clearly-delineated chains of command, talking points, etc.; I haven't heard anything more of the idea.

I believe that the Founders were correct to warn against party and faction, although We the People ran-- or were led-- in exactly the opposite direction. Now the evils of partisanship have metastasized into the Party of Cain and the Party of Judas-- the above-described bloated conjoined babies in the bathwater.

Supporting Cindy, Cynthia McKinney, and even the notorious Nader-- at least rhetorically, given the limited financial resources-- reinforces the goal of returning to a constitutional republican democracy. IMO, the duopoly isn't going to get us there. Only in the narrow view is this expansion "counterproductive". A little therapeutic folly is in order, and can't hurt.