Vote For Kodos: Defection of a Defective
Good riddance to bad rubbish: Bloomberglink. I detest Bloomberg for two reasons: a) The man is a turncoat, and I'm not talking about quitting the Republican Party. He may call himself "independent," but he is a Democrat, he's always been a Democrat, he's governed like a Democrat, and he only started calling himself a Republican in a cynical ploy to benefit from Mayor Giuliani's legacy and, in the terrible days following 9/11, immense popularity. I dislike the Democrats' platform, I dislike the party's national leaders, and I dislike the spurious reasoning and circular logic behind the political beliefs of my Democrat(ic) friends, but at least they have the gumption to stick to their guns, and for that they have my respect.

b) Criticism of partisan politics is the refuge of the spineless and dimwitted. Partisanship can be and too often is carried to counterproductive extremes, but the notion that "the politicians" are ruining this country and "the people" can all sit down and coolly reach consensus is dangerously childish. "The people" are the ones who elect "the politicians" as their champions, and I believe in democracy enough to know that a democratic nation gets exactly the leaders it deserves. As a body politic we lost faith in ourselves and our cause in the '70s and thus justly earned the disastrous, embarrassing reign of President Carter. The left had no coherent message through the whole of the 1990s, and so a fairly radical strain of Republicanism was allowed to gain and hold control of the Congress. Consensus is a pernicious myth, a fairy tale for grown-up children afraid to face the harsh realities of governance; politics is ugly, sometimes almost too ugly to bear, but never forget that the great debate, no matter how acrimonious, is the crucible through which we determine what kind of a nation we wish to be.

And a final note on a): once a Democrat, always a Democrat. Besides Bloomberg, look no further than the late, unlamented Senator Strom Thurmond. He may have called himself a Republican in the latter half of his political life, but to his dying day that terrible old brute remained a hardcore Dixiecrat.

Vote For Kodos: Church & State
Three cheers for the Vatican: Kennedylink. I am so terribly sick of Democrat, supposedly Catholic politicians from Massachusetts using and abusing Holy Mother Church like some painted whore. Of all the things I loathe about John Kerry, no other rouses my ire like the annulment of his first marriage. How can a marriage that lasted eighteen years and produced two daughters be declared to have never happened? (Consequently, Kerry's two horse-faced daughters? Who campaigned on his behalf in 2004? Yeah, in the eyes of the Church they're bastards, born out of wedlock as a by-product of sin.) I delight in the terrible fate that surely awaits those men of the cloth who betrayed the Church by perpetrating Kerry's and Kennedy's frauds when they die and face His perfect judgment. The Church in Massachusetts has long debased itself on behalf of the unfathomable Kennedy mystique, and I'm glad Rome has finally decided to rein in the nigh-idolatrous deference given to the Kennedy name.

Deep in the Heart of Darkness
Texas in a nutshell: murderlink. Murdering the driver would have been a monstrous crime, but murdering his passenger? That's both monstrous and incomprehensibly stupid. Brutal and stupid, that should be the state motto of Texas. (The actual motto? "Friendship." I'll give the Texans this, they've picked stupid as a theme and by golly they're sticking to it.)