I'm all cooped up. I'm totally cooped. I'm too cooped to cop.

Jon Stewart had his media frenzy after he left-hooked Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire." But thankfully, Stewart relies on a gang of good writers, and that has resulted in staying power. He's not dependent on nepotistic media contacts like Carlson is. Anderson Cooper is just another case of nepotism, a mediocrity embued with star power. Sound like anyone else we know? Like, maybe a politician or two? Or several thousand?

Europe declined for a number of reasons, one of them the fact that they had a gaggle of inherited power. Generations of spoiled, mediocre and below-average brats made up an ossified aristocracy which stultified culture and resulted in disasterous wars and a fed-up peasantry. Thanks to these factors, Europe destroyed itself several times (hullo, Nicky and Willy?) and allowed the once-egalitarian US to seize its day in the sun. But America is now firmly in the hands of its own feckless aristocracy. The White House, the Senate and the media are treading water in a trance in this country due to the fact that the peasantry is happily sucking on beers and "reality TV"", content to let connected incompetents run the show. Whenever I see Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert interview one of these walking emblems of nepotism, I wonder how they - both men who made it on their own, without the help of family ties and even without their own fathers to help them get along in life -- keep from reaching out and throttling these people.

Man, we are sooooo cooped.

"Is it so awful to take the oppportunity to discuss disease and starvation in Africa, even if it's with a famous slightly-weird movie star?"

Probably not, but in the old days, a reporter would have gone to Africa, done some fact-finding and filed a report about famine in Africa sans movie star. That's what CNN used to do in the 1990s and it was a damn good news network. I watched it a lot. I can't stomach the network now because it is all goony-eyed "anchors" reporting on the latest coed murder and opining about how guilty someone who isn't even charged with a crime is, how disgusting defense attorneys are, how hilarious Al Gore is with his crazy-daisy preaching about social ills and global warming and let's not even go there with Wolf Blitzer, a man who never saw a GOP talking point he wouldn't mindlessly repeat ad nauseum despite facts glaring him right in the face.

I understand why an occasional article like this shows up in War Room. The cable networks are so bad that it just makes you want to scream every now and again, and Anderson Cooper showing up on every TV show in tarnation, giggling like a schoolgirl, might send someone temporarily over the edge. I sympathize. Especially when CNN used to do such good real reporting on the world. It's a crying shame, so let Scherer do a hair-tear over it; he's just keeping it slightly real in this bizarro-world we're living in.

No, Cooper's not O'Reilly but that doesn't make it any better. When we're reduced to getting news from Africa from a half-baked starlet (does she wear Brad's blood in a vial around her neck?) and a overexposed "reporter" who seems to have a creamy caramel center, it makes you go "argh" every once in a while. No biggie.

I think the story is a plant. After all, what would Rush Limbaugh do with Viagra?

"Weldon said he had been informed by a "former intelligence officer" that the Bush administration had not searched all suspected sites in Iraq."

Well then, he's accusing the Bush administration of extraordinary incompetence, isn't he? After all, who starts a war to find WMDs and then doesn't search all potential WMD sites?

Only a moron.

Robert Dole capped his career as an American politician by jumping on the Swift Boat bandwagon in 2004. I dislike John Kerry. I think he is a gaseous windbag with a tin ear who is currently as oblivious to the life of the average American as any Bush is. But he did volunteer to go to Vietnam when other Americans were concocting "other priorities" to avoid being sent there. He was wounded there and received his Purple Heart the same as thousands of other American servicemen received theirs during that conflict. That is one thing nobody can take away from him. He may be nearly impossible to listen to without one's eyes glazing over today, but during the Vietnam War he was as scared as all the other young men over there; he was as much a pawn in a cynical post-WWII corporate country-grab as his boatmates were.

That Bob Dole, a wounded WWII veteran, so nimbly jumped on the Swift Boat bandwagon is the true measure of the man. I can't stand John McCain - that phony 'maverick' act of his is as calculated as any political marketing campaign launched by Karl Rove - but at least he didn't debase himself as low as Dole did. For a veteran of one war to publicly slander a veteran of another war - all in the service of a crowd of chickenhawks - is a disgrace that Dole brought upon himself and one that he should always be remembered for.