P.J. O'Rourke is grumpy about Hillary Clinton's novel over at Front Page. What I'm wondering is whether P.J. has been out-curmudgeoned by the blogosphere. Remember back in the late Eighties and early Nineties when P.J. seemed like the only hip guy out there taking on the idiotarians, and doing it with vicious irony? Remember P.J. tearing into the likes of homeless advocates, Sandalistas, and Soviet wannabes? Now everyone's got his own blog and is gleefully skewering all the latest stupidities of the Illustrated and Enlightened Among Us, or as P.J. used to call them, the Perenially Indignant, within hours of the occurence of said stupidities.

Now, this is a perfectly good article and a lovely Hillary-bash, for those of you who like that kind of thing (I certainly do), but everybody in the blogosphere has already written the same piece. Hillary's book is just so early June, and P.J.'s behind the curve on this subject. It used to be, ten years ago, that a guy had a couple of weeks of time to put an article together and have it still be current when it came out--you had TV, the daily papers, the weekly newsmagazines, and the "serious" political / critical journals, in that order of decreasing immediacy and increasing detail. You used to have some breathing space between when you wrote the piece and when it hit the Atlantics and the New Yorkers and the National Reviews as a still-fresh topic. No longer. P.J., time to join the blogosphere!

Here's Mark Steyn on getting felt up by dead racist Strom "Who the Hell Needs Viagra?" Thurmond. Lester Maddox just died, too. I calculate that the only old segregationists still not only alive, but in power, are the notorious Klansman Robert Byrd and South Carolina's other Senator-for-Life Fritz Hollings. Both Democrats. As were ol' Strom when he started out, and Jesse Helms, too. (Is Jesse dead yet? Boy, if anyone can filibuster St. Peter into letting him into heaven, it'd be ol' Jesse.)

Fred Barnes over at the Weekly Standard gives six reasons why Bush looks good going into next fall's elections. He's even daring to use the L-word--that is, landslide. I've been very good at picking elections recently, and I will stick my neck out right now and say Bush takes forty states in November 2004, and that's assuming the Dems nominate somebody electable like Lieberman. If Nader or somebody like Chomsky runs on the Green ticket and knocks a couple percent off the Dems' vote again, Bush wins forty-seven to fifty states.

NYAAH-HAH-HAH-HEE-HEE-HEE! See, the Dems have to move left, or at least they think they do, so that no one can out-left them this time around like Nader did last time. And, by doing that, they move even farther away from the center, which is where the votes grow and are just looking to be harvested by a war-winning President riding a strong economy. Their goofy far-left candidates like Kooch and Carol "What, Is That The F---ing Ethics Committee Again?" Moseley-Braun and Brother Al the Pimp and Howie Dean are going to pull the already very lefty Dem primary electorate even farther to the left by bringing out the university Socialist cadres and the Seattle antiglobo wackjobs, whether the mainstream Dems want it to happen or not. The Dems have tremendously high negatives; the Republicans don't. About half the people in the United States just cannot stand the sight of the Clintons or Algore; there's a hard core of 20-22% or so on the Left who hate Bush with a passion, but Bush's positives are well up in the 60s and his negatives are staying below 25%. Barring unforeseeable disaster ("PRESIDENT FATHERS JACKO'S ALIEN LOVE CHILD"), Bush gets reelected easily.