Well, we definitely found a Weapon of Mass Deception. It sat right there next to John Edwards last night, radiating deceptron particles all over him. And all over Gwen Ifill, who must have been taking more direct exposure, judging from the increasingly idiotic nature of her questions. The fact that this WMD has been close to the court-appointed president of the United States for the last four years goes a long way toward explaining Bush's growing cognitive detachment from reality, as well. (I suppose it also explains Rove's efforts to keep Cheney secured in undisclosed locations for so much of the term.)

Here's the transcript documenting the whole frightful affair.

Lefty bloggers immediately set about mopping up Cheney's biohazardous waste with powerful cleansers like the actual records of his attendance in the Senate, pictures of him meeting Edwards prior to last night, text of his specific comments linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda... Stuff like that. But man, oh, man... There's the shock and awe: As a lying machine, Cheney is a thing of beauty, as perfectly engineered for his task as, say, a virus (biologists will appreciate the analogy, if no one else does). He is perfection when he is unleashed.

I have a tennis-playing friend (hey, KB) who says that she doesn't get too worked up when her opponents cheat on line calls, because she finds that they usually blow a shot soon enough afterward -- she calls it tennis kharma. Cheney got a little tennis kharma last night when he lied about Halliburton...

If you've got some time, MoveOn.Org has set up an editorial letter-writing link. I just noticed that The Courier is one of their targets; lotsa luck with that, one, folks. I tried during the summer, when I was visiting family, and could even give them the page number with my picture in a local high school yearbook, and they wouldn't publish the letter because I no longer live there.

As for the real weapons of mass destruction? --
Still not there. How many more people have to tell us this?

Winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis --
by bombing civilians and gloating about it?

A brave woman is gone --
Fannyann Eddy, founder of the Sierra Leone Gay and Lesbian Association, was murdered as she worked late in the offices of the agency she founded (also here).