Punch the President in the Nose!

I know, I know, I know. You're ... peeved ... yeah, let's use that word, since this is a family publication ... you're peeved at the Kerry campaign for letting The Littlest Angel pummel his manhood the way it's been pummeled. You're staying up late at night writing angry letters to Mary Beth Cahill, right? Kerry's campaign manager, the way we wrote angry late-night letters to Susan Estrich, Dukakis's campaign manager, back in '88, for taking all that "liberal, liberal, liberal" crap and not striking back. It's the surest route to Loserville.

I have a good friend, who's also a campaign "operative" for Democrats, who seriously proposes that Kerry call a press conference and keep the pundits guessing for a couple of days what he's gonna announce, and then take the podium to say, "George W. Bush has been impuning my manhood, and I say we settle this once and for all. I'll meet Mr. Bush on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at high noon on such and such a date and beat the living shit out of him, to settle the issue. So let's see who shows up."

I'm all for that. Naturally, I would be, since there's no way in hell that it could ever happen, though Kerry's poll numbers would shoot up 10 percentage points over night if he did it.

It's gonna take that kind of mano-a-mano toughness to expose the pip-squeakery of the little strutting cowboy.

But what I started out to say is that the New York Times has a whole big article today about all the Democrats who are crying for blood and de-crying the bloodlessness of this Kerry campaign. Read only with a Maalox chaser.