Why Do You DO That, Mitch?

Occasional correspondent GK emailed me:

Mitch

Why are you spending so much time reading lefty blogs lately?

This can't be good for your mental health"

Seriously, there's a method to my madness. I think.

It's a little over a month until the election. I'm starting - just starting, mind you - to feel a little teeeeny bit optimistic about the President's chances of carrying this election off. Not that I ever felt that Mad How had a chance, or that John Kerry is anything but a tragic electoral joke - but between the full-court media press that John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson have spent so much time exposing, and George Soros' bottomless pockets, and the pent-up hatred of so many narcissistic baby-boomers and solipsistic college humanities majors and superannuated pseudo-socialists, I never felt I could take anything for granted. Still don't.

But I'm starting to feel the momentum settling into place. Lurch is retreating from battleground state after battleground state, is in dead-heat races in Democrat playgrounds like New Jersey, Illinois and Minnesota, will probably lose Wisconsin and Iowa (both of which I'd considered safely Blue when I made my infamous predictions with Hugh Hewitt last January), and can't even muster a crushing lead, at least according to some polls, in bluest-of-blue New York.

And if Kerry loses, I want to be able to watch the mental meltdowns that ensue on the left - and be able to frame those breakdowns in the context of their usual narrative. I figure six weeks of unobtrusive observation should suffice.

And it gives me so much material. No, seriously - I've written probably 15 of those "They Get Paid For This..." pieces, and it's not slowing down. I have to stop, of course - I'm probably the only person remotely interested in fact-checking the likes of Atrios, Willis and Pandagon (certainly none of their regular audiences, as evidenced in their Nuremberg-sized comment sections, are...).

Anyway - it'll be over soon...