Jon Stewart was on CNN's CROSSFIRE today, declaring it all theater, declaring the lunch naked, making known the opinion of many that such a farcical slapfigh passing for the highest level of political discourse is in fact hurtful for the country and for democracy. Watching Carlson and Begalia do their best to laugh it off, you really get a sense of how hollow that whole scene is. Stewart's on the main nerve now: it's not Bush that's the problem. He's not even all that good a politician.

What's wrong is the system that let him do what he has done.

Jon, you are now my personal hero, not in any romantic sense, but in the mythic sense that I identify with your struggle and wish that I could do the things you are able to do. My hat is off.

Bittorrent link here. Pass it on!

(what the heck is "bittorrent?")

Matt Stoller is good with words:

"Bush can no longer claim to be a superb commander in chief. He can only claim to be an unapologetic one."

I think that's an excellent summary. The rest of the analysis in the article (about why the GOP freaked on Kerry's mention of Mary Cheney) is pretty good too, but those two sentences rang clear like a bell for me.

Hootnanny!

Bush fucked himself. The "ex-agg-er-a-tion" line is a gaffe on the level of Dukakis in the tank or Dean's post-Iowa scream. The rough cut, which took less than 12 hours to emerge from blogger one good move, is devistating:

I actually wrote something a lot more coherant about this on BOP News.

It's far from a done deal, but the race is now officially a matter of putting our heads down and running some king-hell Democratic GOTV. Let's get to it.