MIND OF A LUNATIC. I have got to cut back on the cocaine and cough syrup (a combo known to us drug cognoscenti as "bleeding ulcers in your esophagus"). Every TV news show I watch, every paper I read, every blog I accidentally select while surfing for hardcore pornography, seems to have been created by a committee of screeching gibbons and howling, feral dogs.

Hugh Hewitt, for example, reads like a Fafblog parody of himself. First there is the right-wing society page, Larry-King-Meets-George-Lincoln-Rockwell part:

Now the new Chris Muir strip is up. The only reason Muir isn't widely syndicated is MSM bias.

Michelle Malkin is the hardest working, smartest woman journalist without a television show in America. Take, for example, just this one post on Durbin. Which tells you a lot about MSM bias. She celebrated her first anniversary as a blogger this week. May she celebrate her first anniversary as a television host next July. Memo to MSNBC: Ratings with Michelle, or straight-lining with Olbermann?

Why don't you stupid, evil bastards listen to my program recommendations? Further down, Senator Durbin's recent rhetorical device -- easy to understand and inoffensive if your head is not filled with screaming, paranoid delusions -- invites from the radio host and spiritual advisor to Jim Lileks a torrent of abuse ("weasel," "anti-American," "Durbin's statements, and the statements of those defending him, are giving direct aid to the enemy," etc) and more finger-waggin' and fist-shakin' at -- hello, white whale off starboard! -- the MSM:

I can't see any of the bigs coming to the conclusion that the vast, vast majority of Americans have come to, which is that Durbin is a pathetic and repulsive political hack who should exit immediately after a lengthy and detailed apology.

What tracking poll is Hewitt reading? Do you find Senator Durbin a.) a pathetic and repulsive political hack, b.) pathetic and repulsive but not a hack, c.) a repulsive hack with just a soupçon of pathos, or d.) very sassy?

Hewitt also gives you emails of denunciation that you can cut out and forward, but, alas, no paper dolls of the bogeymen inhabitants of his scarifying dream world that you can cut out and burn in a cleansing fire.

Then there's culture scold/restaurant reviewer Steve Cuozzo in the New York Post, who takes off from an understandable disappointment at the "temporary" WTC memorial our political hacks will install near Ground Zero, and careens into a mad fear that StoryCorps -- the perfectly benign oral historians whose booths you may have noticed at Grand Central Station and elsewhere, and who will create the temp project -- may take this appointment as "an invitation to blame America."

Why, besides chemical imbalance, does Cuozzo imagine this? Because StoryCorp's founder, Steve Ismay, is on NPR. And because his programming shows that Ismay is "fascinated" with "grotesque corners of American life." Hey, me too -- why do you think I spend more time on these guys that their own shrinks do? But I must divert my eyes awhile. Maybe this weekend I'll turn my life right around.