I'm rapidly beginning to understand that I'm wasting a lot of time.

Here's how it works.

On the CE board, people submit rants, quotes from other websites, news articles, or long lists of grievances or assertions. A good 70 percent of these boil down to "Bush sucks. Here's why." Apparently this seems to be uppermost on people's minds.

I go out, and do some research to respond to the post. I look up original documents, when the post quotes only news articles about the documents. I find charts and statistics. I check up on sources. I try and use historical perspective. I draw analogies, show examples. Point out that history did not begin in January of 2001.

And I get called dogmatic. And this from people who haven't changed their basic ideology since 1930.

Why do I bother? You know, that's a damn good question. Who the heck am I trying to convince? It's not like I get paid for this. Intellectual challenge? Part of it. I like organizing arguments and documentation. But geez, like O'Connor said, I'm throwing pearls and not even getting a pork chop in return.

The cold hard fact is that not one virulently anti-Bush person here would support him, regardless of what he did or what evidence was presented. There would be no support of his economic policy no matter what the unemployment rate was. There would be no support of his foreign policy even if we had discovered fifty intercontinental nuclear-tipped missiles buried in the sands of Iraq.

I feel like that cop in "Alice's Restaurant" who carefully organized all the evidence, putting "circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one," only to find the judge to be literally blind, and all his work wasted.

Judging from the many sites I cruise, there seems to be one primary motivator on the Left right now: George W. Bush won the 2000 election. For this, he has to die. At least in the political sense. And that's what all this is about for most Democrats now. The fact that the undying allegiance of the Left has jumped effortlessly from Clark to Dean to Kerry shows that the object is to field someone, anyone, who has a chance of beating Bush. Policies? Who cares? Every single policy right now in the Democratic Party is based on one criteria: will this take Bush out of power? Nothing else. National security, the economy, everything else comes in second. And if you don't think the DNC wouldn't rejoice at the collapse of Iraq or the crashing of the economy right now, you're lying in your teeth.

To be fair, this type of psychosis was not unknown on the Right during the Clinton years. "CDR." Clinton Derangment Syndrome. Easily detected in a conservative by mentioning Vince Foster and watching him stop blinking and start yammering. And we ran an even bigger loser against him than the Democrats will run against Bush. Bob Dole. Good God.

It's a long time until the election. If I spend it batting back political hacks that take ten times the effort to refute as they do to write, and to no discernible end, I'll be dead of sheer frustration by July. This isn't much fun any more. Frankly, Mary Anne is getting to be almost the only liberal I learn anything by talking to on the CE board on a regular basis. The other reasonable liberals seem to have largely faded out except for sporadic appearances.

So, okay. I watched your damn film. I knew what was in it before I saw it. The hard Left is as predictable as gravity. The only mild surprise was that the author actually mentioned administrations other than Republican ones.

To deal with it in my usual manner, I'd have to transcribe the thing, and go through it piece by piece, and hostile interpretation by hostile interpretation. Just as one example, the accusation on the biological weapons is wrong. Would it matter if I documented and explained it? What's the bloody point?

The animator's opinion of Bush is a single, long, badly-spelled leftist scream, containing not one, single original thought:

I despise Bush because he stole his way into office, by virtue of a nakedly partisan ruling by the United States Supreme Court. This, in itself, is reason enough- undermining the election process is nothing short of treason, and Bush is deserving of prison time on that count, alone.

I also dislike Bush for shifting the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes, just so he could give a huge tax break to his rich donors. These tax breaks, along with his reckless economic poloicies have led to severe budget crises in all of the 50 states, which have been forced to close museums, libraries, firehouses, and schools.

Bush is also a serial liar. Normally, this wouldn't perturb me much, as all policians tend to be economical with the truth. Bush's lies, however, lead to suffering, poverty, and death on a massive scale. He proposes grand mandates that are foisted upon the states, and then withholds money to pay for them. He passes laws like the "Clear Skies" initiative, which is nothing more than a blank check to polluters to pump even more poison into our air.

The gandest of these lies, of course, was his excuse for his war in Iraq.

Furthermore, Bush was wrecked the good name and image that the United States used to have in the world. By spearheading a foreign policy based upon hubris and arrogance, we have alienated just about every other country on the face of the earth.

I despise republicans, because they ignore the lies, support these policies, and don't care who suffers, or who dies, simply out of dogged blindness and willful ignorance. Furthermore, the Republican party has forsaken its grand traditions, and allowed itself to be taken over by a hard-right version of protestant christian fundamentalism that preaches bigotry, supports racism, sexism, and homophobia. They seek to impose an orwellian prison state upon america, because they see it as their god-given duty to "occupy the land." Their main goal, in life, politics, and faith, is bring the world into a firey armageddon, after which they will all be brought unto the bosom of their lord, while the rest of us burn in their vision of hell.

Religion is a fine and good thing- but apocalyptic cultists like John Ashcroft, Tom Delay, and Bill Frist shouldn't be put in control of governmental mechanisms that could affect us all...

Fine. There's plenty like him, plenty of hostile websites, and plenty of hostile news in the mainstream media (Kind of odd considering how badly Bush has suppressed dissent.) Nobody who is anti-Bush has to look very hard to fill this board with material. Fill away.

I'm very tired, and I'm supposed to be writing a book.

As Ayn Rand said, it's not my function to be a flyswatter.