How is it that respectable news organizations keep giving Darth Cheney a soapbox? I will be interested in his oinkings when they emanate from between the bars of a jail cell.

And while we’re on the topic of mistaking bullshit for a more nourishing substance, Steve Benen at Political Animal notes that The Washington Post ombudsman writes (surprise, surprise) that most of the health-care “journalism” to date has been of the smelly, stick-to-your-boots variety.

Notes Benen: “For the media in general, I think there’s a reliance on horse-race and he-said-she-said journalism because it’s easy — and because all of their colleagues and competitors are doing the same thing.”

Judas Priest. More rain. Happily, I managed to reduce the back-yard jungle with the lawn mower before the skies cut loose with a fresh dousing of angel piss. Must be the Kennedys celebrating the latest arrival. Dunno what they’re drinking up there, but clearly prostate issues don’t carry over into the next life.

How is it that these people didn’t bat an eyelash at eight years of the Daffy-Fudd Reichstag barbecue, but go batshit crazy in less than a year of Obama-Biden? I’ll bet the Secret Service has given up drinking coffee and is horning lines of Ethiopian hararrharrarhar right off the counter at Starbucks.

I lived in Arizona, briefly, back in 1980, and had the same handgun I do today — a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum — but my mild hippie-anarchist gun-nuttery didn’t prepare me for seeing a motorcycle gangster roaring down the road with an assault rifle slung over one shoulder. Or a line of greasy-spoon stools bearing rednecks wearing holstered pistols.

If I recall correctly, back then you could wear a sidearm or fetch a long gun pretty much anywhere in Arizona, barring banks, bars and liquor stores. But I don’t recall anyone fetching one to a Ronald Reagan rally. We had to wait until 1981 and the nation’s capital for that, when John Hinckley Jr. punched a few .22-caliber holes in the prez, press secretary James Brady, DC police officer Thomas Delahanty and SS agent Timothy McCarthy.

I remember folks being somewhat upset over the idea that a crazy fucker with a gun might have the audacity to shoot a president. I guess times have changed.

Adolf Saddam Hussein Obama has a 1,200-word op-ed in The New York Times, and Steve Benen at Political Animal found a keeper in there: “No one in America should go broke because they get sick.”

Truer words, etc. And who among us are the most vulnerable? Just look at the pix of these tinfoil-beanie tea-baggers and tell me they won’t lose their single-wides, their rusty F-150s and their beloved three-legged hounds to bankruptcy without affordable health care. Obesity, illiteracy, ignorance and insanity are all treatable ailments, if not rejected for coverage as pre-existing conditions.

Congenital idiocy, alas, we shall have with us always. Until Adolf gets his death panels, of course. Then we can set about vigorously chlorinating the gene pool.

It will surprise no one familiar with the Bibleburg Military-Industrial Christo-Clusterplex that the El Pendejo County commissioners have voted to oppose Uncle Ben Schickelgruber’s End O’ Life™ Care, just, ’cause, like, y’know, ’cause he’s a tax-and-spend Islamic socialist and illegal alien who wants to kill your granny.

Health-care reform, bleats Commissioner Amy Lethen — who is proud of having helped elect the infamous beer-swilling DA, John Newsome — would place the good, God-fearing bidnessmen of El Pendejo County “under the thumb of the federal government.”

Jesus wept.

Pardon my French, but just how fucking stupid can you get? Bibleburg could care less about the federal thumb — it already has a liplock on Uncle Sammy’s floppy pink comm’niss hooters that a lamprey would envy. The place is home to Fort Carson, Peterson AFB, Schriever AFB, NORAD, the Cheyenne Mountain Air Station and the Air Force Academy — and leave us not forget the military retirees enjoying gummint pensions, VA medical care and the local PXes, BXes and commissaries.

Then we have the civilian retirees and low-income families on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Head Start, the National School Lunch Program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Bibleburg has never been a fat-paycheck kind of town — a working guy (or a gal) often needs a little sumpin’-sumpin’ from Uncle to make ends meet in the cold, dark shadow of Pikes Peak, a famous view that clips more than a buck or two off the prevailing hourly wage.

So who needs health-care reform? Are there no emergency rooms? No prisons? No workhouses?