Ohio Water ... Evidently Laced With Gall

First, Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Oh.) ... breaking ranks, joining up with the Gang of 14 to "sell the Republican majority down the river," as the drug-addicted Rush Limbaugh had it yesterday on his radio show. ("Traitors! Weasels! Towering midgets!")

(Incidentally, we've been silent on the Senate compromise averting the "nuclear option," wondering ourselves if this is a decision we want to celebrate, or deplore. We tend to TOLERATE it, since the Limbaughs of this fragile world, along with Mullah Dobson and all the other little mullahs, have been in a thrashing rage since Monday night. When they're upset, we're closer to content. But one warning note: when we feel ourselves beginning to like Sen. Lindsey Graham of S.C., as we were beginning to do yesterday, just a smidgeon of an iota ... then we have to worry about what powerful hallucinogenic may have been added to OUR drinking water!)

Anyway ... back to Ohio and its other Republican senator, George Voinovich, who yesterday upped his own ante of maverick uppitiness by sending a letter to all his Senate brethren urging them to vote against John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador ... for the friggin' good of the nation: "In these dangerous times, we cannot afford to put at risk our nation's ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective ambassador to the United Nations."

Whoa!

"...it is unusual for a Republican to break ranks so publicly with President Bush." You ain't just whistling Dixie, Bubba!

Maybe this is the start of some rolling infection of STATESMANSHIP among the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, an acknowledgement that just because you have the POWER to be dickheads, you don't always HAVE to be dickheads.