NAKEDLY IDEOLOGICAL LEFTY PRESS DESTROYS OWN CANDIDATE! NAZI TOTALITARIAN THUG PARTY STAMPS FOOT IN ANGER!

I think most people know the story already: the Democrats were at great risk of losing Christopher Dodd's Senate seat in Connecticut this year, until Dodd announced that he wasn't running and the state's very popular Democratic attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, said he was; Blumenthal instantly took a huge lead in the polls. But now it's all over for Blumenthal: The New York Times has revealed that for years he's misrepresented himself as a Vietnam veteran -- in fact, he obtained multiple student deferments and then served stateside in the Marine Reserves.

I'm addressing this to the right-wingers: please note that Blumenthal's career has been destroyed by the newspaper you regularly describe as the evil flagship of a relentlessly pro-liberal, pro-Democratic elite-media propaganda machine. You tell the rubes -- and many of you actually believe your own words -- that the ideological extremism of talk radio and Fox News is necessary to counter the naked partisanship of the "liberal media," led by the sinister New York Times.

Well? What's your explanation for what's going on in this morning's paper? You want to tell me that Fox or Limbaugh would ever take out a Republican pol in a similar situation with GOP control of the Senate potentially on the line?

And your side has a newer complaint: lately you've been saying that the Democratic Party is a collection of Nazi/commie/Mafia thugs, relentlessly using anti-democratic force to trample on American liberties. Again, this is what you say to the rubes, but quite a few of you actually believe that the activities of the "Democrat Party" rival the worst crimes of Hitler, Mao, and Al Capone. So why did the thugs fail to stop the presses at the New York Times building?

I'll be accused of taking your rhetoric way too seriously; it's just hyperbole to get the yokels worked up. Except that the yokels don't think it's hyperbole -- they think it's literal truth. And they're going to vote in November based on their belief that it's literal truth. That's crazy -- the Times isn't analogous to talk radio or Fox, and there's no thuggery in sight -- but it's a set of belies that's currently driving our democracy.