Pull out, Kinky.

The overnight news from the Dallas paper has Chris Bell asking Kinky Friedman to get out of the race. Kinky's response is to dig in his bootheels.

Here's my message:

Pull out, Kinky. You know you want to.

You're not having fun any longer. All this running around all over Hell's half-acre, having to talk to reporters who keep asking the same damn questions (like 'why do you say "n----r" all the time'), lousy food and weak coffee and hard hotel beds and shitty pillows and everything else about life on the road that you quit years ago when you stopped making music and started writing cheap detective novels.

It's time to go back to the ranch, to your stray dogs, to the cigar-smell infested bunkhouse you call home, take off that nasty hat, brush your slimy teeth and lay it down.

Texas needs you to quit, Kinky. Now.

It's no longer about Mark Foley, Part II

The Grand Old Pederast Party has closed ranks around their rotund Speaker, ensuring his continued leadership all the way to January (when he will likely be replaced by Nancy Pelosi anyway).

I noted the first calls for him to step down, but never advocated his doing so myself. My feeling from the outset was: meh, let him stick around if he chooses. Hastert is a much heavier albatross around the necks of the GOP than even Tom DeLay would have been at this point, and as a result becomes the icon of a Congressional scandal entering its second week as a top news story.

See, among the reasons it stays in the news -- besides the MSM's sexual obsession -- is that the history of Foley's child predation has been extended once again; it now goes back as far as 2000. Which means that when the Republicans say 9/11 changed everything... well, they didn't mean "everything."

Here's a talking point:

More protection was given to a sexual predator among their ranks by Republican leaders than to our soldiers in Iraq (body armor), than to our national security (ports, nukes in North Korea), than even to our childrens' health care (millions -- in Texas alone the number is 1.4 million -- abandoned, uninsured).

Pretty sweet if you're one of the elite, that conservative agenda.

The Congressional page-sex scandal, as of this moment, rightfully deserves to be pushed from the headlines. And it needs to be replaced with the threat of a nuclear showdown looming with Kim Jong Il, or the second weakness exposed in our national food supply in a month (this news suggests that the terrorists understand that they could terrorize us with it), or even -- God forbid -- the 32 soldiers killed in the first eight days of October in an increasingly unstable Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet, perhaps the so-called liberal media still take their cue from the White House in a perverse way. What would Our Dear Leader be most upset about lately?

Disloyalty.

There's a lot of very important things that the Bush administration simply doesn't give a shit about, North Korea being only the latest example of the consequences of electing (sic) a moron President.

And I have to think that a Democratic Congress in 2007 is going to be able to help him focus on a few of the real issues.

(thanks to ThinkProgress, one of the very best places on the Internets, for the leads)