My fellow Americans, I have a confession to make. I don’t know shit about Sam Brownback. At least, I didn’t until I started researching this article.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, until Friday, was one of my rivals in the 2008 presidential election, campaigning for the Republican Party nomination. He officially dropped out of the race yesterday, lacking donations and poll numbers. And until today, that was the sum total of my knowledge about the man. In comparison, if what I know about, say, Mitt Romney, could fill the text of one of those Chinese takeout menus that delivery boys slip under my apartment door (Mormon, millionaire, creepy, etc.), then what I know about Sam Brownback could fit onto that little slip of paper inside the fortune cookie.

Which got me to wondering, what is it about Sam Brownback that no one knows anything about him? Why were we content to leave him on the third-tier GOP laundry list alongside candidates like Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo? I assume he must suck in some fashion, if he can’t even compete with the likes of Nasty Man Giuliani. But exactly how he sucks, that was the mystery. After a couple of hours of research, I believe I have discovered why Sam Brownback sucks, not only to the likes of liberals, but also why he failed as a GOP nominee.

He doesn’t believe in evolution, he simplifies everything into terms of faith, and he’s against abortion, even for victims of rape and incest. That’s why the average Beak reader doesn’t like him, but they’re irrelevant, because he had to win the GOP nomination first before caring what we think. But run a YouTube search on Brownback, and guess what you’ll find? Endless videos related to the aforementioned topics. Abortion and evolution, and nothing else. Seriously, if he has opinions on other issues, it’s not widely publicized.

What’s so telling about these talking points isn’t their ass-backwards moralist pandering. A pro-life/pro-Jesus stance is part of the GOP prerequisite checklist, and the first rule of debates is to avoid wasting time on issues that all of the debaters agree upon.

And that’s why the GOP voters and cash contributors ignored the twit. Because the Morality Checklist is irrelevant in Election 2008. GOP voters want to know about the war in Iraq, about Iran, terrorists and national security in general. They want to know about balancing the goddamn budget and re-valuing the dollar. They’re probably concerned with things like Mexican labor and Chinese imports. And they’re really sick of all these GOP congressmen getting caught in stupid corruption scandals, making them look as depraved as all those Catholic priests that got caught molesting little boys a few years ago.

In other words, Republican voters still aren’t fans of evolution or abortion, but right now, they really don’t fucking care, because for once they have bigger problems than judging other people’s private lives. And that’s why Brownback was a shitty GOP candidate.

Thank you, and may the Beak bless America.

My fellow Americans, what the hell is going on here? Have you seen what’s passing for election coverage? Ranking the candidates’ haircuts and freaking out over an absent lapel pin? Pundits pinning their hopes on a dude from “Law and Order?” Seriously writing articles about Mrs. Clinton’s sorta-cleavage?

But that’s not what made me decide to enter this race, America. I made my decision after stumbling upon this website, which lists the candidates’ positions on reproductive rights. Almost every Democrat in the race has a perfect 100% score from NARAL Pro-Choice America, but they’re all being very careful to tiptoe around the topics of abortion, sex ed programs, and — if I may use an eye-rollingly awful expression — “lady issues” in general.

All I want to see is a Democrat get up there and admit that damn near everyone fucks outside of marriage, and if you don’t want people to get pregnant, or get abortions, you should teach them how to put on a goddamn condom. I mean, people get hurt playing football, but we don’t try talking people out of playing. We give them helmets. If you can cover your head, you should be allowed to cover your dick.

How’s that for a position? Safe, affordable contraceptives, a condom machine in every location we can fit one, accessible abortion services for anyone who needs them, and comprehensive education on how to fuck responsibly, in or out of marriage. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? Bet you wish you had something like that when you were in high school. Probably would’ve worked better than that abstinence pledge you took. How’d that work out for you, by the way?

Of course, nobody will come right out and say any of this during campaign season, lest they alienate such mythical beasts as Swing Voters and Security Moms. Let me assure you, both of these groups did their share of premarital boning. And I believe that if someone actually took the time to address their concerns, and to gently point out how fucking stupid those concerns are, my position would start making a whole lot of sense to them.

Thank you, and may the Beak bless America.

Campaign 2008. A canned response for every occasion. Pundits manufacturing ridiculous scandals from thin air. Enough candidates to form a P-Funk cover band. And more than a year before it’s all over.

We at the Beak will probably end up endorsing whoever the Democratic Party nominates. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get pissed off at our own party. We can.

You see, there’s an unwritten law on the campaign trail which states that Democrats have to pretend they don’t have any good ideas in order to seem “serious” and “electable.” This is, for lack of a better term, fucking moronic. Bush’s approval rating is as low as it’s gonna get, and Americans are angry at Congress for their failure to lay the smack down on the Administration.

“What we need,” I mused to myself, “is a brutally honest candidate. This candidate wouldn’t have a hope in hell of winning, of course, but goddamn it would be awesome to watch him tell off reporters and call the other candidates on their bullshit.”

So we went out and found one, and thus was born Shadow Campaign 2008.

The Beak’s own Shadow Candidate will be along to cover this Presidential campaign, with a focus on cutting to the heart of each and every non-issue that gets trotted out to distract us. With any luck, he’ll bring a unique brand of Monday-morning quarterbackery to the proceedings, and probably find time to make fun of every single person on Fox News.

We’re getting an account set up for him as I type this. Once that’s taken care of, he can rain down satirical indignation on our hallowed electoral process, and hopefully be the sort of guy you wish you could vote for.

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
By Matt Taibbi
Published October 2007

“Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like she said yes, and days where the answer was no.”
–Matt Taibbi

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire is the best book I’ve read all year, and that’s not surprising, as it’s the long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s Spanking the Donkey, the book that started everyone referring to Matt Taibbi as “The New Hunter S. Thompson.”

While he may still be perfecting the beautiful art of Gonzo Journalism, Taibbi is, if anything, more focused than Thompson. This may simply be a by-product of the perpetual shit flood pouring out of Washington these days, or it may be an after-effect of Taibbi’s years in Russia, but either way, Taibbi’s reporting hearkens back to the skull-bashing, chop-busting ruthlessness of Thompson’s best work, and you don’t have to stop every five minutes to talk about sports gambling and abusive hotel bills.

The secret to Taibbi’s writing is not simply his abundant candor or his vicious humor, but his genuine and ever-present outrage at the corrupt, greedy, senseless idiocy that will forever pollute the legacy of the Bush administration. It’s the same shocked rage that a mother might find upon returning from a trip to the supermarket to discover that her house is on fire because her five-year-old dropped his crack pipe while her husband was fucking the babysitter. It’s a baffled and appalled “what the hell happened while I was away?” kind of feeling.

Which is understandable, because Taibbi really was out of the loop for a while. In 2002, Matt Taibbi returned to the United States after 11 years of bumming around the remains of the then-newly-collapsed U.S.S.R. Still reeling from culture shock, he jumped headfirst onto the 2004 campaign trail and, with the aid of LSD and a gorilla suit, managed to write Spanking the Donkey, the best campaign book since Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. Throughout Spanking the Donkey, you could tell that Taibbi hadn’t quite gotten his America legs back. After all, he left at the dawn of Bill Clinton, the Internet, and grunge rock, and returned to find it all crushed under the weight of the post-9/11 Bush administration. This is a transition that was scary enough to observe gradually, and for Taibbi to get it all at once, it’s astonishing that he didn’t catch the next flight straight back to Moscow.

In Smells Like Dead Elephants, released last week, Taibbi continues his quest to understand what the hell is happening to the United States. He writes of his paranoid quest to decipher the secrets of the nefarious conspiracy underpinning all the monstrosities of Karl Rove, Enron, and every other stupid, mean mess of the last six years.

“But in the end I understood that there was a good reason that I never tapped into what the hidden truth of the Bush years was, and the reason for that is that there never was anything to tap into. The tragedy of the Bush era is that there was never any depth under its absurd surface — and when the ridiculous exterior washed away, in scandal and indictment and disaster and failure and ignominy, we were left with nothing but emptiness, disorganization, and chaos.”

Here you will find scathing (and completely appropriate) critiques of the 109th Congress, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Joe Lieberman, and the thievery beneath the Hurricane Katrina “reconstruction” effort. And while his analysis is consistently insightful, Taibbi is at his best when he follows the pure Gonzo ethos of throwing himself into the story he’s covering. Particularly brilliant is his coverage of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in which Taibbi teams up with Sean Penn and a black Baptist minister named Reverend Willie Walker to rescue survivors in the Ninth Ward.

“Here we are in the midst of the worst flood in the country’s history and I am in the middle of an armed convy, holding a plunger.”

However, the coup de grace of the entire book is Taibbi’s five-week tour of Iraq in the summer of 2006. Not content with simply riding alongside army caravans, visiting forward operating bases, and investigating the excesses of civilian subcontractors, Taibbi takes things a step further and eventually wanders off with a creepy mustachioed commando who proceeds to lock him up in Abu Ghraib prison for three days.

You want to know how Gonzo Matt Taibbi is? This is how Gonzo Matt Taibbi is:

“The Commando dumped me in an abandoned cell block and shut the door behind me almost immediately upon arrival. […]

“You go where I go,” he said on the first day. “And don’t ask any fucking questions. In the meantime, stay here and don’t move.”

He shut the cell door. I stood for a moment in the middle of my cell, staring at the white concrete walls; it took exactly ten seconds for me to burst out laughing.”

It gets better from there.

Giuliani: Nasty Man
By Edward I. Koch
Published in 1999; Re-printed with new material in 2007.

“Mayor Giuliani is a good administrator, but he’s not a decent human being.”
–Ed Koch, March 15, 1996, The New York Post.

What’s the best way to determine if a person should be president? Simple: ask someone who was there the last time they were in charge of something.

Candidates spend a lot of time talking about their past achievements, saying things like, “I voted for such-and-such a bill,” I initiated reforms for this-’n-that in my home state,” “I sided with so-and-so in his crusade for better cogs and sprockets,” and so forth. It’s all very nice, and almost entirely pointless. If you don’t believe me, then try listing all the times you’ve completely fucked up on your resume the next time you’re job hunting, and see where it gets you. Presidential candidates lie on the campaign trail as often as your average barfly lies when he wants to get laid on the first date. It’s human nature to point out your successes and omit your failings, and the problem with politicians is that they are not immune to human nature. The best way to get around this is to ask for references. Ask someone who has paid attention to their earlier endeavors, be it their supervisor, secretary, vengeful rival, or, if available, a previous one-night stand. As citizens of the United States prepare to elect a leader brilliant enough to clean up George Bush’s mess, it’s relevant to wonder who might make a reliable character witness for the candidates.

For leading GOP candidate and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the man to ask is former New York City mayor Ed Koch. In 1994, shortly after Rudy took office as the new mayor of New York, Mayor Koch began writing columns about him in The New York Post and The New York Daily News. Koch, a proud New Yorker, followed Rudy’s career closely, and felt compelled to weigh in on just about any newsworthy item involving Giuliani’s administration. The collective texts of those columns, which ran from 1994 to 1999, serve as an insightful running commentary on Giuliani’s actions as leader of one of America’s most complicated and diverse cities. Of course, acquiring half a decade of old daily newspapers is not a pleasant task for the average voter, even in the age of eBay.

And then, in 1999, when Giuliani was battling Hillary Clinton for the New York Senator’s seat, Koch had a brilliant idea. He gathered up all of those old columns and put them in an excellent little book called Nasty Man, to show just what a creepy bastard old Rudy really was. It was a clever tactic, and might have proven useful to the Clinton camp, but then Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer, dropped out of the race, and Hillary won with ease.

Koch’s book, meanwhile, transformed overnight from a clever criticism of a powerful politician to a harsh attack on an old guy with cancer. That’s how campaign publishing goes, of course; one day you’re on the bestseller’s list, the next you’re remaindered for fifty cents at The Strand. After the September 11th attacks, Rudy was dubbed “America’s Mayor,” his approval rating soared, his cancer went into remission, and he was ready for a long, prestigious retirement. But no, Rudy wanted to go another round, this time for the presidency. And like an opportunistic phoenix, Mayor Koch’s book came back into print this year, equally ready for another round.

The book starts out on a positive note, Koch having endorsed Rudy as the best man available for the job, following the disastrous administration of Mayor David Dinkins. Shortly thereafter, it gets ugly. On February 17, 1995, Koch writes in The New York Post, “What’s happening to Rudy Giuliani? Here he is, 14 months into his term, and he’s fighting with everyone.”

Koch goes on to describe Giuliani’s battles with the city’s Police Commissioner and Schools Chancellor, which stirred up a good deal of conflict and controversy. He goes on, exasperated, declaring, “I believe in a strong mayoral presence, and one that leads by example. But leadership based on fear breeds resentment and mounting anger.”

The following year, October 6, 1996, Koch refers to Giuliani as a “control freak,” and laments Giuliani’s penchant for petty dishonesty. “When someone in public life engages in a string of false statements on small matters,” Koch writes, “they will ultimately fail the test of probity on larger matters because it’s become a way of life.”

Koch’s columns increase in frequency over the following three years, detailing examples of Rudy’s interference in the city’s judicial appointments, and his declaration that he “runs the NYPD,” micro-managing the city’s police force in much the same way that G.W. is always running around calling himself the “Commander-in-Chief,” as if that weren’t a sickening slap in the face to true military leaders. Koch takes us through classic mid-‘90s controversies, railing at Rudy’s attacks on critics and his inability to admit error.

The picture that develops is a frightening one, depicting a devious creep that must have his way, no compromises accepted. This, I would argue, is the exact opposite of what the United States needs in an administrator right now. On the other hand, Koch never fails to give credit where credit’s due, frequently mentioning Mayor Giuliani’s great achievements in reducing crime and prosecuting the Mafia. An administrator that can effectively battle crime (and terrorism) is certainly what the United States needs. It’s a serious conundrum, because what we’re looking for here is an effective balance. In other words, it boils down to a question of who can stop al Qaeda without getting us into a half-dozen wars. Giuliani may be good at fighting crime, but he sucks at making friends.

The repackaging of Koch’s columns for future consumption and education is illuminating in the same style as Paul Slansky’s fantastic book on Ronald Reagan, The Clothes Have No Emperor. This is a form of reporting that I would like to see expanded during this election season. Are there any columnists for New Mexico newspapers that have been keeping an eye on the five years of Bill Richardson’s time as governor? Who’s the Arkansas journalist that’s been dutifully watching Mike Huckabee’s every move since he took office in 1996? And while we’re at it, I’ll bet there’s an enterprising columnist in Alaska that’s got some great stories to tell from Mike Gravel’s 1969-1981 senatorial term. Please, all of you, compile those archives and start publishing books right away. America deserves reliable witnesses.

In the meantime, Nasty Man is on sale in bookstores now. Do your fucking homework, America.

UPDATED BELOW (June 19, 4:45 PM)

By an incredible stroke of luck, and with a little scheming, I was able to see Michael Moore’s new film Sicko ten days before it arrives in US theaters. By now we’ve all heard the stories of Moore’s trip to Cuba, his anonymous donation to a political rival facing a health crisis, the near-reverent reception at Cannes. All stories for another day; I just want to talk about the movie.

Moore’s toned it down a bit in this one; far fewer jokes and very little of the guerilla street theater that defined his earlier films. He’s willing to step aside and let things unfold, tossing in a bit of narration here and there, but mostly letting his subjects speak for themselves. Just a few minutes into the film, it’s clear this was the right choice. In the opening minutes we meet a couple, once reasonably comfortable, who have been forced into bankruptcy by their medical costs, despite being insured. They’re moving into a spare room at their daughter’s house, and not long after they arrive their son pays a visit to lecture them on their irresponsibility. It’s depressing, and hard to watch, and this is just the tip of a massive fucking despair-iceberg.

Before long we’re watching interviews with cancer patients who were denied care because their conditions were not considered life-threatening. Most of them, we soon learn, are now dead or dying. We meet people who have lost spouses and children because their insurance deemed life-saving procedures “unnecessary”. Current and former employees of the insurance industry talk about their work in the same halting tones as an old soldier wondering how many people he killed. You’re goddamn right Mike isn’t telling a lot of jokes this time out.

Of course, the director comes out in favor of universal health care — he’s Michael Moore, after all — and this is where the tone of the film brightens somewhat. He provides an admittedly silly summary of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to introduce health care in the early days of her husband’s administration, before moving on to her opponents. We’re treated to a montage of conservative politicians and pundits explaining that universal health care is the first step down the slippery slope of Soviet tyranny, and describing the bureaucratic nightmare of Canada’s health care system. In classic fashion, Moore heads north of the border.

The Canadians he talks to seem quite happy with their health care system, as do the people he meets during his trip to Great Britain. In France he dines with a group of American expats who regale him not only with tales of free health care, but of daycare centers, paid maternity leave, sick days that last as for long as you’re sick, doctors who make house calls 24/7, and five weeks of paid vacation a year. By the end, France ends up look like some kind of fantastical paradise, minus the jet packs.

And then there’s the Cuba trip. Having learned that volunteer 9/11 rescue workers were being denied coverage for the lingering effects of digging through the rubble, Moore decided to take them to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where “enemy combatants” receive free medical care in addition to all the waterboarding. Denied access to Gitmo, the group makes its way to a Havana hospital, where Moore requests the doctors treat them no better or worse than Cuban patients.

This sequence, and that request in particular, promise to become a source of controversy in the months to come. People have already questioned whether or not the trip to Cuba was legal, and others are accusing Moore of dishonesty, claiming he requested top-of-the-line treatment for the patients, then saying otherwise in the film. More charitable opponents claim Moore himself was duped by the Cuban doctors, who put on a good show for the Americans before returning to bureaucratic business as usual once the cameras were gone.

I honestly don’t know, and I don’t have the resources to find out. I’m sure that, before long, people with press credentials and expense accounts will have picked over every second of Sicko, each hoping to push their own agenda, each omitting the findings that hurt their case. The “objective” analyses of Sicko will end up far more biased than anything in the film, which is a little silly. Sure, Moore’s become a liberal poster boy, and a punching bag for conservative commentators, but this film doesn’t take sides in the way pundits would like us to think it does.

Contrary to what Moore’s many detractors would say, this is not a left-wing propaganda piece. Everyone — liberal, conservative, and everything else — will come away outraged at the way insurance companies treat the people they claim to protect. No matter your feelings on universal health care, it will be hard to deny that the system we have now represents the very definition of “hopelessly broken”. Perhaps the coldest of capitalists will be able to rationalize insurance companies’ practices as “good business sense,” but one would have to be a seriously evil bastard to ignore how little sense those practices make from a medical perspective.

I know I walked away deeply unsettled, baffled by America’s refusal to adopt the kind of health care system that has succeeded in the rest of the industrialized world. None of those countries have fallen into oppression, even as our leaders tell us such a result is inevitable. Nobody in England goes bankrupt because their appendix picked a bad time to explode, and yet the Bolsheviks never quite took over. Why, if I didn’t know better, it would almost seem like our government was full of stubborn idiots who don’t give a shit about you.

You know what? Fuck all y’all, I’m moving to France. Have fun picking out tiny caskets for your dead uninsured kids, assholes.

Update: As of right now (4:45 PM on June 19), it’s very easy to obtain your own free copy of Sicko from any major torrent site. Although this is technically illegal, I support anything that will put copies of this movie into the hands of people who might have avoided it otherwise. Nonetheless, I plan on going to a theater on June 29, and paying real money to see this movie, and I urge everyone reading this to do the same. A lot of people will have a lot of unkind words for Sicko no matter what, and I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of a box-office failure.

I’ve been in the habit of regarding the Oscars as pointless garbage for so long that I didn’t remember until this morning to check and see what happened to Al Gore. As you may know by now, An Inconvenient Truth won two Oscars last night, one for Best Documentary and one for Best Song (that awful Melissa Etheridge thing). Unfortunately for legions of Gore True Believers who were hoping/dreaming/praying that Gore would use an Oscar win and its promise of an enormous TV audience to announce his entrance into the 2008 presidential race… He didn’t. Not even close. Instead he stayed on message, saying as part of his acceptance speech, “People all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It’s not a political issue. It’s a moral issue.” This is the sort of admirably steadfast dedication we’ve continued to see from Gore this year, and it will no doubt inspire the True Believers to believe even harder.

But Horatio, he didn’t announce his candidacy! Big deal. You all seem to keep forgetting that it’s only February, and I can’t blame you. This is really all Tom Vilsack’s fault, and we’re going to jump into a quick review now, so that I can get this article online before tonight’s Daily Show airs and renders all of my jokes obsolete.

I want to know if anyone has yet coined the phrase “Pull a Vilsack”, because if not, I’m doing so now. To “Pull a Vilsack” means to be so unknown and unremarkable that you have to pull out of an electoral race right after you started for lack of funds and for lack of anyone giving a rat’s ass. Or, perhaps more generally, to jump the gun and be first in line, only to realize once you’re ahead in the queue that you’re not nearly as prepared as all of the people who have lined up behind you.

And this is more or less what Vilsack has done; the political equivalent of camping out for two weeks to be first in line for Rolling Stones tickets, only to realize when the ticket counter opens that you’ve got about three dollars and fifteen cents in your pocket. Vilsack inspired a stampede of candidates by announcing his intentions on November 30, 2006, almost a full two years before the election. Last week he officially dropped out of the race, citing a lack of funds and worries of being overshadowed by more prominent candidates. That’s probably the last we’ll hear from Vilsack, so I hope you had fun saying his name while it was relevant. I was under the assumption that Vilsack was the first Democratic candidate to enter the ‘08 race, but according to Wikipedia, that honor goes to former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, who announced his candidacy all the way back on motherfucking April 17, 2006. I’ve never heard of this guy, but apparently he’s popular in New Hampshire and has the support of activist Granny D.

Moving on. The Gore True Believers can take heart, for now, at Vilsack’s blunder, because it gives a calm and sensible edge to the suggestion that Gore is just waiting things out. This idea is given more credit by “Uncle” Newt Gingrich, who earlier this month mocked the early-announcer candidates, saying, “I think the current process of spending an entire year running in order to spend an entire year running in order to get sworn in in January of 2009 is stupid,” he said. Uncle Newt explained that he had better things to do with his free time, but that in September, if he didn’t think the GOP had anyone worthwhile in the running, he’d enter the race then. It’s possible that Gore is thinking the same thing, albeit with more tact. It’s also been suggested that Gore is hesitant to run against Hillary Clinton, not so much because of her but because he doesn’t want to hurt ‘ol Bill Clinton’s feelings. I can respect that. Remember Bill’s confessional Lewinsky TV address in the late ‘90s? A sad Bill is not a pretty sight.

Avoiding Hillary Clinton is probably a good idea right now, considering her highly publicized fight with Barack Obama last week over David Geffen’s money. In response to the “who does Geffen love more” debate, the always-charming John Edwards told the Associated Press, “It’s a huge strategic mistake not to be dealing directly with Iran.” This is: A.) Correct; B.) Intelligent and reasonable; and C.) A good way of telling Clinton and Obama, “I’m staying out of this garbage and I hope you both tire each other out.”

While John Edwards was busy saying intelligent and reasonable things, John McCain was equally busy destroying his own credibility, at least in the eyes of people who happen to enjoy rational moderation. Having never entirely recovered from losing the GOP’s nomination seven years ago, McCain has redoubled his efforts to pander to extremists in the Christian Conservative camp, randomly throwing around statements about overturning Roe vs. Wade and, one assumes, burning some sort of interlopers on some sort of stake, at a recent event in South Carolina, the state which essentially sealed his defeat in the 2000 primary. McCain is making a classic Bush move here, by simultaneously attacking an established progressive precedent, and pandering to a minority of hot-button issue nincompoops whose priorities are more skewed than a Salvador Dali painting.

Judging from last week’s meeting of the Council for National Policy (a group founded by Tim LaHaye and listing Jerry Falwell and James Dobson among its most prominent members, if that gives you any idea of who you’re dealing with here), it’s not working. Speakers at the event took time out from delivering anti-Muslim hate-speeches to attack McCain. Probably because they’re still mad about McCain’s speech on February 28, 2000, in which he declared,

“Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”

Seriously, what happened to the John McCain who had the balls to say shit like that? That’s good stuff! Almost exactly seven years ago, he denounced the mealy-mouthed pandering to extremists that he is now engaging in. This is probably a good time for McCain to take his own hint and stop trying to appease every pack of freaks in his party and go back to being moderate and sensible.

The main reason for the CNP meeting, however, was to address their concern over a sudden gap in their influence over the election’s frontrunners. As The New York Times put it, “In a stark shift from the group’s influence under President Bush, the group risks relegation to the margins.” Oh ho ho. Somebody give me a ride to the pawnshop, because I need to buy the tiniest violin in the world.

With the fall of baby corpse-cuddling supercreep Rick “No Casserole” Santorum, the only candidates the CNP still approves of are people like Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee, but everyone acknowledges that those guys run a serious risk of Pulling a Vilsack.

Here’s to you, True Believers. Don’t stop believin’.

I put off writing this post last night, partly because I was still processing the massive surge of new data, partly because I was tired, but mostly because I needed to get in the right mood.

And now? I am in the mood to fucking gloat.

Because dude, we did it, and the Republicans helped by doing so much to themselves. I don’t have the time or the motivation to go over each and every way they fucked up, by Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece, which called the current legislature the worst Congress ever, does a better job than a mere mortal ever could.

Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, and Mark Foley upset a lot of people, but I suspect the bigger problem was the persecution complex that has become a major part of the GOP’s platform. Even with control of all three branches of government (and don’t forget, they’ve still got two of them), they acted like they saw wicked liberals lurking around every corner, waiting to pounce and force them into gay marriages to pro-choice clones. Despite a string of Democratic losses that rivalled the humiliation of the 1984 Presidential race, the Republicans would have had us believe that the Democrats were this close to conquering the world and making us all eat soy bacon.

Bill O’Reilly and his ilk warned us for months of the terrifying new world that Nancy Pelosi would bring us as Speaker of the House. Gay people would marry! Abortions would be safe and legal! The minimum wage would come slightly closer to covering basic expenses! Congress would spend their precious vacation time investigating the administration’s misconduct! She was a liberal! A San Francisco liberal! And how could she be Speaker? She was a lady!

Sooner or later, the fact that this wasn’t really that scary got through to the public, along with the fact that the war in Iraq keeps getting worse. “Staying the course” sounds nice and all, but it’s not the best idea when you’re waist-deep in manure and there’s a perfectly serviceable road a few feet away. Sure, that road might not be great either, but at least you’ve kept your options open. Hell, the reason I objected to the war in the first place wasn’t the administration’s questionable motives, but my belief that they just weren’t smart enough to pull it off. That’s a gold star for me.

Now, the sorry state of the war effort and the ongoing corruption and laziness in Congress have finally gotten so bad that people had no choice but to demand something be done. In my home state of Pennsylvania, we gave Rick Santorum the ol’ boot, which I’m sure he considers a form of sexual immorality. Even if nothing else had changed, if the Republicans had held onto the rest of their seats, or even gained a few, I wouldn’t have cared. Santorum was gone, and I spent last night celebrating.

I danced. I sang “Don’t Stop Believin’” at the top of my lungs. I went to bed, woke up, and danced and sang some more. I made a casserole. It just came out of the oven, and it looks pretty good. But Rick Santorum doesn’t get any casserole, because he’s a douchebag, and calling him that is no longer an unfair attack, because he’s a private citizen again. What accusations can they really make? That I’ve undermined his constituents’ faith in his ability to mow his lawn?

Here’s hoping you’ve got some hobbies, Rick. Christmas is coming soon. Maybe Jesus will bring you a new pillow to cry into.

The Democrats have taken the House of Representatives, and, as of midnight on the East coast, they still have a shot at the Senate. I am, for once in my life, speechless. We didn’t fuck it up!

Sure, there was the Cunningham thing, and the Abramoff thing, and the Foley thing (ohhh, the Foley thing), so the Republicans had all of that working against them, but still. The Democrats couldn’t beat Bush, and that guy is, well, not very bright. Apparently, there is a limit to the amount of bullshit America can deal with.

More in the morning, once everything is official.