Well wasn't that a vicious little primary? Who was it who set the rule that Gore and Bush can smear their opponents but not the other way around? At least when they turn on each other neither one will be constrained in any way, since they're already down in the mud. Bush Bush Bush. Never has one man looked so smug with so little cause. Except for Clinton, Starr and Guiliani. Poor McCain has now been branded an out-of-wedlock father, a corrupter of children, an abortionist (for supporting fetal tissue research along with 92 other Senators), a tax raiser (tobacco taxes, but the ads didn't say that), the candidate of the Democrats and fags...

More on the great-grandmother Bush will execute this week: it seems that the person who could have been the witness to prevent her getting the death penalty was actually her lawyer. See, he had been the one to advise her to try to collect the insurance on one of her several, um, missing husbands. This means that she wasn't planning to gain by his death, which is what got her the needle, but her lawyer then was also her lawyer for the trial, so he would have had to give up the potentially lucrative media rights in order to be a witness. Mr. Ethical, a major alcoholic, was later a DA who tried to sell exemptions from the death penalty. But this is Texas, where snoring is not considered proof of ineffective counsel, so don't expect much from that.

Mark Shields commented that the National Right to Life group has proven itself the wholly-owned subsidiary of the official Republican party by its smears of McCain, who is as anti-abortion as they could wish for.

Bush is now a "reformer with results", which will doubtless prove to be as meaningful a label as "compassionate conservative."