Instead of using an alarm clock, we have our wakey-box switch on the local NPR station to roust us from our peregrinations in the land of nod. I can remember when I used to look forward to lying there for a bit and listening to Morning Edition. Now I just want to switch to the alarm clock, although I’m sure I’d be overruled on that. I did switch to the alarm clock back when NPR joined the clown parade of 24/7 blowjob coverage in the late 90s, but eventually tried them again when the sociopaths finally figured out - probably via one of the sentient ones explaining to the rest via the cartoons, hand gestures and gutteral noises required - that they weren’t getting rid of Clinton that way and resigned themselves to fixing the upcoming election in order to save the U.S. from its long national nightmare of peace and prosperity.

Occasionally I still lie there for a bit in the foolish hope that something of a substantive nature might - if only by accident - appear. I tried this on Saturday as will as earlier today, with the expected rather than hoped-for results. Today, superstar insider beltway pundit Cokie Roberts was brought on to dispense her weekly observations about the body politic. I can remember when she was a an NPR regular, and even occasionally substantive, but she went big time TV quite a while ago and has way too many requirements on the Cool Kids circuit to spend more than a couple of minutes a week enlightening the NPR crowd. So how did she edify us this week? When asked for her thoughts on the election, she tells us that the biggest lesson we’ve learned is that the American public is tired of bickering between the parties and within the parties. She apparently intuited this eternal verity without having actually talked to anybody except all of the other Cool Kids at the Cool Kid Parties, otherwise she might have been misled by the voters, who told those who wasted their time actually asking the proles what was important that they were overwhelmingly unhappy with the conduct of the war by the party that controls every branch of the government with an iron hand. Lucky for us that Cokie is one of the privileged few who can actually reach out and feel the American pulse without having to mingle with the huddled masses who would only confuse the certainty of her connection to the American uberpsyche.

No, none of that anti-war crap for her, when it is obvious to anyone with two Mercedes in their garage and vacation homes in Sedona and Aspen that the real problem is that the Democrats have been constantly bickering with the Republicans for the last 6 years, to the detriment of the commonwealth. If only the Democrats would stop bickering about how they’ve been almost completely excluded from even debating legislation in Congress by the party that equates dissent with treason. If only those Democrats wouldn’t be so stubborn and uncompromising when Cheney tells the nation that the results of the election mean nothing to the administration’s conduct of the war. If only the Democrats (and shouldn’t the Republicans have forced them to change their name to America-Haters when they still had dictatorial power?) would stop unfairly hounding predatory child-molesters like Foley and bribe-taking, amoral lackwits like Cunningham when they’re only striving to protect their country from the Islamofascists. If only the Democratics would stop bickering and whining about democracy and the Constitution and realize that a few sacrifices are needed if we are to remain a peaceful, free democracy.

And let’s not even get started about the bickering within the Democrat(ic) Party. Without a strong, clear, and rigidly enforced unitary vision within the party, there’s just no way to get anything done other than via the gutless, anti-American, surrender tactic of compromise, that the GOP has rightly rejected utterly and completely.

That’s right, Cokie, if the election has taught us anything it’s that the American people don’t want the upcoming Democratic majority in Congress to bicker and disagree with the policies of a party that they utterly rejected in the voting booth because of their conduct of the invasion of Iraq. And it will only hurt the country and disappoint those voters that rejected the GOP because of Iraq if the people they elected to replace them bicker and argue with the Iraq policy the administration has explicitly stated will not be changed one iota. That not a single Democratic incumbent lost and that the House, the Senate and many gubernatorial seats and statehouses were returned to the Democratic party should tell us nothing if not that the voters want the Democrats to stay the course and immediately agree with any and all White House demands. Let the history books hundreds of years from now call this election the Referendum on Inter-Party Bickering.

I’ve got a suggestion for Cokie and the rest of the pathologically blind idiots in the supposedly liberal/moderate branch of the punditocracy that will cut way down on future conflict - specifically the conflict between the real world and the big, steaming piles of surreality these buffoons regularly pinch off in lieu of actual journalism. They can all retire to one of their vacation homes and leave the task of journalism to those who are still capable of adding 2 and 2 and at least realizing that the answer is a number rather than a talking point. Let’s retire the whores whose tertiary moral syphilis causes them to value personal access to power over reporting honestly about those in power, to respond to even the most obviously absurd lies spewed out by their cocktail party buddies as if a profound insight were being delivered rather than a turd, to have been obseqious, unabashed administration cheerleaders for the last five years, and to have saved whatever outrage they have left for those who criticize the cabal rather than those who’ve parlayed a mountain of lies into a mountain of body bags.