This is awful enough that I hesitate to point you to it. And I'm not even much of a dog person. But go take a look, if you have the stomach for it.

Artist thinks he's holding a mirror up to society. He's just prying back the cover on his own sadistic, sociopathic mind. An act of narcisism from a creep.

Is it more stupid, or offensive?

Mike Huckabee making an ass of himself:

"Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Huckabee also spoke adamantly of the need for conservative lawmakers to show no compromise on fighting for a constitutional amendment that defines marriage between a man and a woman. "I'm very tired of hearing people who are unwilling to change the constitution, but seem more than willing to change the holy word of God as it relates to the definition of marriage," he said.

1) That's right, the Mexicans working today -- Saturday -- to beautify my neighbor's yard so that they can further shame my own paltry sod, are there replacing aborted babies. If we had not had legal abortion we'd have more Americans to do the backbreaking, underpaid jobs we reserve for immigrants.

2) Holocaust. Interesting choice of terms there, Huck. The termination of pregnancies is analogous to the shooting, starving and gassing of men, women and children for purposes of racial purity. Those who've had abortions, and those who support legal abortion, including, incidentally, the GOP frontrunner, are in effect, Nazis.

3) He's a conservative who is tired of people objecting to adding constitutional amendments. And somehow those who are reluctant to ammend the constitution -- a position that used to be part and parcel of conservatism -- are related in Mr. Huckabee's fevered imagination, to those who are reluctant to locate in the gospel a doctrine of intolerance toward gays? Huckabee says, "Amend the constitution as needed to enforce my religious opinions."**

Okay, Amba, you've championed this guy. What do you have to say in this theocrat's defense? For my part, I withdraw my assertion that Mr. Huckabee might be a threat to Hillary if he were nominated: under pressure the mask of reasonableness slips and we spy the extremist beneath. And I think we're tired of extremists. Mr. Huckabee combines an idiot's-eye-view of immigration, profound ignorance of 20th century history, a cavalier indifference to the stability of the constitution, an apparent belief that US law exists to ram his particular religious doctrines down our throats, with a complete lack of either experience or special insight on the foreign policy front. Hillary would chew him up and send the Huckster flying toward the nearest spittoon.

* Paraphrasing.
** Paraphrasing. But barely.

I won't embarrass them (or indict them) by linking.

I go over to their blog and start some trouble. They give it back as hard as I dished it out. I accuse them of being GOP water carriers. They accuse me of suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Everyone gets bitchy.

A couple days go by and we're okay. We could all sit down and enjoy a lovely glass of Scotch and trade stories about work or women or our favorite movies.

It's the difference between politics in this country and politics in too much of the world. It's what the Congress used to have, but somehow lost. It's what the Limbaughs and the MoveOns never had. Which is a shame.

You don't know if you're right about something until your idea is tested in combat. You want your idea tested. You need to be slapped around. Because getting at the truth is the point. And even when both sides remain far apart you remind yourself that you're all just trying to understand, and all just trying to do what's right.

I raise a glass (Macallan 12, neat) in the direction Kansas.

You thought I was crazy when I first floated Jeb Bush as the GOP's "true love" candidate for 2008 all the way back in February and then again in August. Didn't you?

Well, I have a companion in craziness: James Carville. Who actually does know a couple of things about politics.

I'm not saying it will happen. I'm just saying that deep in their dark, dark hearts Republicans don't want the closet liberal, or the Mormon, or the lazy old fudd, or the war hero. They want Jeb.

Occasionally I encounter a situation about which I'd like to blog, but then I realize I've already done so. This is a reprint from my old blog:

When I was a kid I was raised for a couple of years in France. The US military was still stationed in France when I was nine years old. I attended a French school. (Murmurs of, 'that explains a lot.') Like most kids, I had a bike. Unlike most American kids I fetched warm baguettes from the boulangerie on my bike.

I rode all around my little town of Fouras on a narrow-seat, goose-neck handlebar ten-speed bike at a time when the only bike most Americans had ever seen was a chrome, steel, cast iron and chiseled granite Schwinn that weighed only slightly less than a Buick. I loved my bike. Rode it everywhere. And in the whole time I rode that I bike, I never once used it as an excuse to show by nutsack to strangers.

Things have changed when it comes to bikes. Used to be that kids rode bikes. There was no politics involved. No one was making a statement. And, amazing as it now seems, we managed to carry out our two-wheeling activity without donning a special costume that displayed our scrawny legs, padded our asses till we looked like refugees from the bustle era, and elevated, outlined, positioned and displayed our fucking genitals.

"Hi, I'm a cyclist, please enjoy two quail eggs and a Vienna sausage nestled in Spandex."

Had we seen anyone doing that when I was a kid, especially an adult, we would have beaten the shit out of him. Yes, nine year old kids, even French nine year old kids, would have known that an adult man peddling feverishly around on a children's toy while dressed in skin-tight shorts stuffed with neoprene butt-enhancements, and with his package laid out like a pair of fucking cream puffs and a party-sized eclair on display in the window of a goddamn patisserie, was someone who not only could have the merde beaten out of him by children, but deserved, indeed, demanded to have it done.

"Hello, I'm a cyclist, please enjoy the view of my comfort-padded ass as we creep along at a speed normally reserved for rolling through stop signs."

But ah, I guess those innocent days are gone now. Nowadays the kids don't ride bikes, the adults do. Why? Why do grown-ups ride bikes? For two reasons: one, because it's wonderfully healthy. Yes, there are few healthier activities than riding around atop an unstable fifteen pound toy at twenty miles an hour while sharing a two-lane road with a steady stream of four thousand pound cars doing sixty. What could be healthier than that?

The second compelling reason for adults -- many of whom do in fact own cars -- to ride a bike is to offer a reproach to those of us who, selfish bastards that we are, insist on raping the land, using up all our limited natural resources, polluting cough cough hack hack the air, and frankly stabbing Mother Earth straight in the fucking eyeball with a red hot crankshaft when we could, instead, pedal around dressed like fruits trailing a heady aroma of sanctimony and exhibitionism.

Yes, cycling has everything going for it. It's expensive, pointless, suicidal, ridiculous, undignified, and allows the rider to be a complete jackass and feel not only pretty darned good about it, but to actually hold in contempt the grown-ups who, understanding something of the laws of physics, conclude that in an environment where everyone else is driving a fucking tank maybe wobbling around with your padded ass in the air and a piece of styrofoam on your fucking head is pretty fucking stupid.

Unless, of course, you want to die. Which would be perfectly fine with me but for two problems: one, it is considered, for reasons that defy logic, illegal to run down some spindly little shit who is doing ten miles an hour up a fucking incline and swerving back and forth like a drunk so that you cannot pass. You are forced by Mr. fucking Petie Power Bar, to sit there, keeping pace, unable to do anything more than perhaps shift into neutral and gun the fucking engine so he thinks you're running him down and screams and panics and runs his lighting-bolt festooned plastic helmet into a speed limit sign. Anything more than that is actually considered illegal. (Except in Wyoming, where it's encouraged.)

The other reason you can't play the Ten-Points-Per-Cyclist game is that although cyclist and cycle taken together weigh less than your car's battery, the differential in speed is so great -- twelve mph vs. whatever the speed limit is plus 15 mph or so -- that the impact of fine German chrome on butt-flesh, carbon fiber, Spandex, sports drink, coffee-cup-helmet and a full load of righteousness, can do serious damage to your grill.

I can stand a lot, I don't have a particularly weak stomach, but I don't want to have to be hosing some guy's balls out of my three-pointed star.

Some time back, in a sincere effort to be constructive, I implored people to follow this simple guideline as they moved through life: Am I In Michael's Way? AIIMW? If you follow that simple rule, you may not be happy, you may not have a good life, but you won't have some red-faced bald guy screaming obscenities at you, and that, as Martha Stewart says, is a good thing.

Now, I must add a second rule for you to consider: IMAIMF? Is My Ass In Michael's Face? Because if you insist on riding a bike, going an eighth of the fucking speed limit and a tenth of my speed, and force me to look at your padded ass the whole time, you had better damned well be showing camel toe on the other side and not a pair of marbles and a goddamned button mushroom. You don't want to be in my fucking way and inducing homosexual panic simultaneously, that's all I'm saying.

I mean, Jesus, show some fucking consideration.

Listen, folks, I'm Michael's guest blogger . . . um, let's say Frank. Anyway, I am saddened and outraged to report that Michael Reynolds will be unable to blog for several days as a result of a vicious attack made on his person.

Yesterday, while running his usual ten miles, Michael was set upon and savagely beaten. The circumstances suggest a politically-motivated attack, since Michael was not wearing jewelry or a watch, and was not carrying a wallet.

Needless to say, we all are outraged at the kinds of political fanatics (could be these guys, maybe this guy, possibly her) who might have carried out this attack.

UPDATE:
Okay, on further examination, it seems Michael was not attacked while running.

It appears that while in a state of mild to moderate inebriation he missed the toilet seat and landed hard against the side of the bathtub. Passed out in the narrow space between the two porcelain appliances he woke sore and stiff and was extracted by Paramedics using the Jaws of Life.

We regret any misunderstanding.

In other news . . .

I've been in Chicago shooting viral videos for the launch of GONE, my new book series with HarperCollins. So I'm going to pull an Althouse and post some pix.