I dissed your first installment. Came back to give it another try. Perhaps you need a new schtick. Or some Henny Youngman jokes: Take this column. Pleeeeeeeee-zzzeeeeeeee! I went to the doctor, told him my eyes hurt after reading Andres Martinez. He said stop reading it. I said okay.

"Is it impolite to call a neocon a neocon to his face?"

Well that depends. You probably are using the term completely wrong. It's trendy to call any conservative with which you disagree a "neocon". But the term has a very specific meaning, and most people are using it incorrectly and are displaying their own lack of sophistication in their attempt to use a sophisticated sounding word.

hillary = neocon

I have heard "instant run-off balloting" called Australian rules even though it isn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

If your first place candidate comes in last, they recount your ballot with your second choice and this keeps going until a candidate has a majority of the votes.

After voting, I'm aware of having developed a phobia toward Republican candidates. My friends and family are mostly of that manipulation, so I'm desensitized to GOP voter. The suggestion of a bipartisan ticket is made in good faith - naive, reckless, senseless, historically ignorant good faith. Grover Norquist famously described bipartisanship as a form of "date rape", and he should know. We've been warned. We've been swift-boated, stood up, ripped off, shut out, and shut up until a kind of "battered spouse syndrome" informs our bipartisan dreams. If ever the Republicans deserved to be locked out of the White House for starting unnecessary wars, violating the Constitution, refusing oversight, habitually lying, its now. The Democrats need Republicans in 2008 like a woman needs an abuser or a man needs a user. As if the Democrats can't "heal" the country without Karl Rove underfoot.

Who the heck is Achenbach? Great, another blogger...spot on.

"Great column. The fact that the humorless take offense makes it even better. More, more.
Looks like some of the posters here need to remove the stick." (Please avoid cliches.)

Silliest comment read in a two decades. Australian rules? Knock Obama...go ahead...knock Edwards and Clinton, though the last will not get MY instant backing. However, they have all retained their original spouses, so...where do we go for moral values? Mr. Giuliani? Sure. My Bible tells me so...along with all the candidates on the right side. GOP is no more. (We will forgive Huckabee...he still has the same spouse---but ????---oh I forgot, Mittsky does, too, though with cultists we never know.)

Need to get out of here, pronto.

My party in days of "yore."

If you don't like the column, don't waste your time reading it.

ANd as a corollary, don't waste our time telling us how you want it to go away.

The wonderful thing about washpost.com is that you can choose which links to go to -- and which to avoid -- and no matter how many of the latter there are in your estimation, they don't waste one cent of your money or one minute of your time if you choose to not go there.

You might have a case if we were talking about the dead-tree version of the Post, where (even if you choose not read an article, you could argue that it is wasting some miniscule fraction of the 35 cents you paid to have the offending article exist...or more reasonably, that it is taking up space that could be devoted to a more useful, more to your liking, or more enlightening piece.

But that argument makes no sense in the ether-world, so...Easy Solution ! DUH...don't click on "Stumped" if you think it's weak, lame, pathetic, not enlightening, tripe...or whatever similar term you feel it deserves.

I like this blog--keep it up.

Maybe Kucinich can make your cross-party ticket a reality by asking Shirley MacLaine to channel General Curtis LeMay.

High school students and Maureen Dowd toss off this kind of tripe. Just another example of a desparately flailing WaPo, trying something, anything, to draw a few easily distracted eyeballs.

We do say "enfranchised", however.

Great column. The fact that the humorless take offense makes it even better. More, more.
Looks like some of the posters here need to remove the stick.

Here's a sausage making question: Why do some WaPo blogs place the comments in chronological order, but others (particularly the news stories) place the comments in reverse chronological order. It makes following threads and conversations very difficult.

As for multiple candidates, I think you need to create priorities and go down the list Australian rules ballot style. If Richardson is your guy, you need to know in advance who you would swing to if and when he drops out.

neo-con is a virus, not a disease. the disease is our welfare/warfare domestic policy caused by the neo-con virus. viruses also mutate the DNA of their host, another fitting metaphor for the neo-con effect on the Republican party.

vote Ron Paul.

Gosh, cranky ones, lighten up!

Funny, and with reasonable discourse thrown in.

More, please.

:-)

Why would Obama give up his seat in the Senate to be window dressing in a Republican administration? He could develop his foreign policy credentials just as well remaining in the Senate, maintain a prominent public role and still work on the domestic issues that will remain of more concern to the vast majority of Americans and remain his own man. If he went to work for whoever the GOP could get elected he would spend his tenure the way General Powell did--carrying water for people who have no respect for him and who's beliefs are antithetical to what we progressives would like to take place in the world.

Howdy

The cynicism that's rife in your column may go over well w/ your bosses and fellow Beltway information workers.

But it's the very poison that's strangling our democracy.

Be brave. Take a chance. Drop the cynical crap.

-- stan

Now that Hillary was forced to admit she wouldn't remove troops from Iraq during her first term can we all agree on "No more Bushes, No more Clintons?

We need change in Washington, not the same two families in the White House with the same record of corruption for another 4-8 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN5dqJHEnyE

"If I were elected president as a Democrat, I might ask Rudy Giuliani to head up Homeland Security".

That's probobly the one position on Earth he's LESS qualified for than to be president.

I like it and I am a certified idiot to prove it, come on pleople, lighten up!

If you have volunteer time or money to donate, then now is the time to get involved. In any election you have to make a choice on both who is the "best" candidate as well as well as the "best candidate with a chance to win". No candidate can perfectly match your personal policy positions as well as experience requirements and the "electability
quotient". So compromise is always the order of the day. Comparing supporting a candidate for President who has no chance of winning with an 18 year old mooning after and spending precious time and money on a fantasy foreign frump is completely wrong. It is with the former that you are more likely to be screwed. So go with Edwards, but, if you like, send Bill a "good luck with the Vice-Presidential campaign" card.
Likewise, comparing Clinton appointing Cohen Defense Secretary with Bush appointing Mineta (or the Republican Colin Powell) is equally disingenuous. The Former actually had power. But, the way Bush has jammed his own right wing politicos everywhere in the Federal government, from the Supreme Court to the Justice Department to the US Commission on Civil Rights (see the Boston Globe, November 6) it seems highly unlikely that any Democrat, outside of Hillary, who is elected President would look outside her own party for nominees.
Oh, and I thought there was only one pronunciation for the word "neocon" and that is "wȯr crim·i·nal", with the emphasis on the second syllable.

neoconservatism is a disease

Actually, Norm Mineta was not the only example of Bush "reaching across the aisle" as implied. Examples abound of Bush's non-neocon actions, but they don't make good left-vs.-right copy, so they aren't reported much.

Other retained appointess include Freeh at FBI and Tenet at CIA.

Bush appointed a prominent left-of-center cabinet member in Powell at State.

Bush grew government spending like a liberal at a slightly higher average rate than Clinton, something like 7.8% vs. 7.2%, with the Iraq war spending roughly eqaulling the difference.

Part of that spending was for expansive and wasteful farm subsidies, which liberals generally support.

More of that spending was for vast increases in funding for the left's DoEd, which is the source of the Dems' 1998 success (that phony $1.1 B for 100,000 teachers pitch that won over the math-challenged soccer moms).

Bush defied conservative principles by threatening to violate international trade agreements in order to protect the U.S. steel industry. (He backed down eventually.)

Bush campaigned in 2000 on avoiding nation building, which the left loved until someone actually tried to do it.

Bush campaigned in 2000 on "taking out" fictitious North Korean nuclear missiles and then, very leftly, took no serious action when they became real.

Bush is no far right conservative.

Lighten up people! However, I wouldn't give Giuliani any government position whatsoever, exept perhaps executive floor-mopper. He scares the heck outta me - he's a loose cannon, and has no regard for people's rights or the rule of law. He's more like Bush than anyone else - why do we want another one?

I think this column was fun -- looking forward to more installments.

I agree with the majority of Post, terrible column. Belittling non-beltway approved candidates (only clinton and Mr. 911 matter), saying asinine comments that going back to the gold system is pure comedy. Ronald Reagan believed the same. And, judging by the strength of our dollar, it might actually be a great idea.

This column is pathetic. It's not funny and it's not enlightening. Why is it here? What has happened to the Post's standards?

I liked it.

I like how the two strongest anti-Iraq war candidates are the ones lacking in `sanity.'

Worst.
Column.
Ever.

Lame.