That Smell: Actually, it's not the cheese. (The cheese is supposed to smell like that. It's French.) It's the scent of a rotting carcass -- in this case the rotting carcass of the blogosphere. You know what? I bet it's been two years since I told anyone I had a blog. I'm embarrassed by it these days. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I wanted very badly to have a CB radio. And there you have the equation: Blog = CB + internet.

I'll admit that I enjoyed blogging for a while, and some of the stuff I wrote for FauxPolitik is the most lucid prose I've written since I started working for the government. (To be fair to myself, though, they paid me for the bad prose. Being lucid was just a hobby.) And now it's 2006 and everybody has a blog. You knew it was getting bad when the MSM began to blog; things took a nose dive, though, was when major political campaigns decided to blog -- in the form of unpaid interns formulating nauseating politi-jive on a campaign website. Then there was Howard Dean's million-blog army -- the one that couldn't even win him a f*cking primary. Finally, John Kerry started to post with the bedwetters at Kos, in effect knocking down the fourth wall of the blogulo-political complex.

It was something of a jump-the-shark moment, given that Kerry had just had his ass kicked by the man the left regards as the dumbest human being in recorded history. And you can't really go out and say that "the people" were too stupid to choose wisely, right? At least not when you're called the Democratic party, right? I mean, not without exposing the party for what it is, namely a populist/crypto-socialist enterprise that actually does believe that Americans are too dumb to make their own dietary choices, let alone their choose own president, right? Nah, they said it anyway, and nobody blinked.

A circuitous route to my point, I hear you saying. True. I'll be brief. If I write something for FauxPolitik these days, it's generally not about politics -- as you may have noticed. Perhaps I'm just more cynical than usual these days (the major parties will do that top you), but it truly seems that political commentary so saturates all media that about the only worthwhile comment I can make is not to comment.

Perhaps it's a passing thing, but it does seem to have coincidentally struck our dear Razor . . .