This post might be titled 'Counter-blast To Mr. Crawl.' The column in question actually appeared in our paper the day after Thanksgiving.

OK, so the guy's coming from the left, and I tend to disagree with him--big deal. Maybe it's not so much what he says as how he says it. In this case we'll ignore his initial misrepresentations and start with his characterization of liberals/Democrats as having tried for too long to make nice with Republicans despite callous treatment in return. Funny, that sounds amazingly like what conservatives have been saying about Republicans in Congress--that they too often truckle to the Left! After more misrepresentations he explains, "The reason it's OK to hate the Republican leadership is because it is a hateful group."

Oh, so does this column qualify as "hate speech?" Who's full of hate--other than *you,* Mr. Crawl? Your bitterness betrays you.

Anyhow, this leads him to trace the supposed trend to the bad, wicked, naughty, evil Nixon and his Southern Strategy of Doom. A South Carolina background evidently implicates the late Lee Atwater in "ugly, dirty, personal politics." Crawl sees fit, without explanation, to skip the intervening years in order to designate Karl Rove, "young Bush's Rasputin," Atwater's successor in those dark arts. (We all know, of course, that Louisiana has long presented a model of *squeaky-clean* politics, and that native choirboy Corporal Cue-Ball Carville was Bill Clinton's Scout-worthy chaplain.) Meanwhile, he laments, Congress was taken over by "the worst the South had to offer"--Newt Gingrich et al. Crawl gives no reason for this judgment, so we may chalk it up to his irrational biases. (Funny, I was under the impression that the South's worst were running the *executive* branch at the time.) Speaker Gingrich eventually revealed some failings and left office voluntarily. Still, there may be some truth to what I used to say about him: that he had "more character in his little finger than Bill Clinton [did] in his big wiener."

Crawl crowns his tirade with a pathetic complaint about the GOP's treatment of Slick-man: "I've never seen such hatred directed at an American president as the right wing spewed at Clinton." Really? You ought to look around now, Mr. Crawl, at the left wing's venomous loathing for the younger Bush! Maybe you should even consider looking at yourself, though it's often easier to see one's own faults in others.

"[T]o attack him in the manner the Republicans did was, to me, close to treason." Oh, come off it, Mr. Crawl--we know the constitutional definition of treason, and it doesn't involve hating the President. It's not as if these Republicans were selling national-security secrets to Beijing for campaign cash!

So Crawl's decided he'll never vote for a Republican again. Fine. He can vote any way he wants. But his choice inspires me: Mr. Crawl, I'll never read one of your columns again. I may deface your arrogant mug printed on the page, but I'll ignore the text--except possibly to rip it out. Go suck printer's ink.

While still working on what I thought would be my next entry, I'm finding myself annoyed enough to interject this one first: Media criticism, naturally. I made the mistake of paying attention to a TV show, evidently a spinoff of the one I mentioned before. What started as an intriguing mystery eventually revealed itself as an incredibly disgusting, particularly insulting play on the old formula--which, if you thought about it, didn't really make sense. Metaphorically, at least, it's worth throwing up over. I guess it doesn't pay to watch the crap being written nowadays, so I'll be more careful to stick with the kind of "crap" you see on the old news and public-affairs programming. Yes, it can be maddening too, but I tend not to find it so disturbing as you might think. I don't want to blow Dan Rather's head off, either, unlike some people around here.

Meanwhile I've discovered another "resolution" I should have kept: Writing my posts offline. For some reason working with a saved draft led to a hideous mess, with duplicates and fragments posted/published in disordered sequence. OK, I've learned.