Actually, it was a relief to return to the workplace. I had too much time on my hands the past few months, and it’s so easy to fuck off when you’re home without enough work to keep you busy. Luckily I have a great boss and we’re having a lot of fun. (I was actually her boss five years ago, and she hired me when she heard I was back in town.)

I feel really good, but it won’t last long. After all, bush is still president.

This is interesting. Sinagapore’s new PM Lee is telling his people they need to increase the country’s population, so they’d better have at it.

Placed in charge of securing his city-state’s economic future in the face of growing competition from China and India, Singapore’s new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is calling for his citizens to be more productive – literally.

“Have a couple of children, three if you can,” Reuters quoted Lee as saying in unprepared remarks during his National Day Rally Speech last weekend.

In a country where a good job is hard to find, telling the citizens to be fruitful and multiply may strike some as a peculiar suggestion. But Singaporeans tend to do as their leaders tell them, so I suspect this will be a very busy week over there.

I thought Bob Dole had mellowed after he became poster boy for Viagra. I thought he was less crusty, less the hatchet man and more of a human being. I totally misjudged him, and now I see he’s the same old hatchet-man he was in the 1970s. A seriously wounded veteran and war hero, Dole had led me to believe — or rather, my misplaced perception of him led me to believe — that he’d be gracious to John Kerry. And he now joins the ugly chorus of smearers and character assassins, stirring up the shit so bush can keep his hands clean. Just another source of disillusionment.

Damn, just a few more hours of freedom. Work starts at 8 a.m. and I’m afraid it’s a blog-free company. Unfortunately, I have to join the family for dinner soon, so this may be the last post I’ll write as a free man.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to pump out as many posts as possible, knowing that come morning I’ll be an indentured servant to The System. I’ll have to pay taxes again! Two weeks vacation. Bi-annual reviews by a boss who’s half my age. Half-hour commutes and fast-food lunches. Ah, the American Dream! I’m so excited, I can hardly wait….

From the never-to-be-misunderestimated Maureen Dowd:

Meanwhile, the Bush crew is shamelessly doing to Mr. Kerry what it once did to Mr. McCain: suggesting that the decorated Vietnam vet has snakes in his head and a temperament problem. “Senator Kerry appears to have lost his cool,” Scott McClellan told reporters in Crawford on Friday. And the Bush campaign chairman, Marc Racicot, said on CNN that Mr. Kerry looked “wild-eyed” responding to Swift boat muck.

It makes sense for W. to use surrogates to do his fighting, just as he did when he slid out of Vietnam and just as he did when he sent our troops to fight his administration’s misbegotten vanity war in Iraq.

Ouch.

Yeah, Maureen, but what about Cambodia — he said he was there in December but he was really there in January! Damn liberal media, ignoring the stuff that really matters.

This is Hugh as he tries to reconcile all the evidence proving the SBVFT lied with his efforts to showcase them as great American heroes.

How awful. And what a waste. Of course, Ann Coulter and twin Asian sister Michelle Malkin will say the guy was just being “girlish.”

Apparently she’s taking the war on terror into her own hands and actively encouraging others to do the same. And along the way she just may be fucking up the efforts of the FBI and the CIA. This lady is a menace, and she heads my candidate list for internment. A beautiful, crazed birdbrain.

There is great stuff over at this blog, told with a flair and a touch of dry wit. Also, meme-orandum is an excellent clearinghouse for breaking news stories and how bloggers are covering them. Both to go on the blogroll today.

From an editorial in today’s Boston Globe; absolutely required reading.

IMAGINE IF supporters of Bill Clinton had tried in 1996 to besmirch the military record of his opponent, Bob Dole. After all, Dole was given a Purple Heart for a leg scratch probably caused, according to one biographer, when a hand grenade thrown by one of his own men bounced off a tree. And while the serious injuries Dole sustained later surely came from German fire, did the episode demonstrate heroism on Dole’s part or a reckless move that ended up killing his radioman and endangering the sergeant who dragged Dole off the field?

The truth, according to many accounts, is that Dole fought with exceptional bravery and deserves the nation’s gratitude. No one in 1996 questioned that record. Any such attack on behalf of Clinton, an admitted Vietnam draft dodger, would have been preposterous.

Yet amazingly, something quite similar is happening today as supporters of President Bush attack the Vietnam record of Senator John Kerry.

The situations are not completely parallel. Bush was not a draft dodger, but he certainly was a Vietnam avoider, having joined the Texas Air National Guard rather than serving in the regular military.

Kerry, on the other hand, may have done more than Dole to qualify as a genuine war hero. Although his tour in Vietnam was short, on at least two occasions he acted decisively and with great daring in combat, saving at least one man’s life and earning both a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. That’s not our account or Kerry’s; it is drawn from eyewitnesses and the military citations themselves.

Yet a group of Vietnam veterans is questioning Kerry’s record, operating cynically and ignoring the evidence. Many in this group felt betrayed by Kerry’s opposition to the Vietnam War after he returned home. A renewed debate on that war might be useful, though we believe most Americans now agree with Kerry’s famous statement to Congress at the time that it was a mistake.

Rather than seeking debate, however, this group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is attempting political assassination, claiming in ads and a best-selling book that Kerry is “Unfit for Command.” In many cases the charges conflict with statements the same men made in the past. Sometimes the allegations contradict documentary evidence. Last week a former swift boat commander, Larry Thurlow, said Kerry didn’t deserve his Bronze Star because there was no enemy fire at the time, but this is contradicted by five separate accounts — including the Bronze Star citation Thurlow himself was awarded in the same incident, as reported by The Washington Post.

While a few details and dates of Kerry’s Vietnam record are open to question, most of the accusations are laughable. Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam is clear and, one would think, unassailable. Given the contrast in their Vietnam-era records — Bush even let his pilot’s license lapse while still in the Guard — Bush might be expected to change the subject.

Yet the Kerry opponents, working with funders and political operatives closely linked to Bush personally, are attempting what is known in politics as the big lie — an effort simply to contradict the truth repeatedly.

Both parties do it, but Republicans are developing a shocking expertise. The smearing of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000, the reprehensible attack to oust Senator Max Cleland of Georgia in 2002, and this utterly cynical campaign against Kerry by Bush’s False Squad deserve only condemnation.

Of course, no matter how much light is shed on this act of slime, the Hughs and Glenns and Rogers insist the reporters are glossing over “the truth” and not giving enough space to the Christmas in Cambodia nonsense. Well, they asked for coverage and they sure got it this week.

I am frankly amazed; I thought the media were going to allow the Swift Boat Scumbags to run roughshod over journalistic principle and regurgitate their talking points unchallenged, even encouraging the lies (are you listening, Joe Scarborough and Fox “News”?). I was encouraged when James Taranto and even Bill O’Reilly were critical. Now, the media are standing up and saying, “Sure we’ll cover it; but the allegations will be put under the microscope. It’ll be just as though Clinton had made the same charges against Dole — of course we won’t just report that he said it, we’ll also investigate it.”

Thanks God that after three years of kowtowing before the bush media thugs our newspapers are finally showing some backbone again.