Sigh.

I can't help but be a little wistful about the idea of an America without a Fox News, free from approximately the same spoiling of the nation's discourse as British Petroleum's poisoning of the Gulf.

Just imagine... we could have had eight peaceful years of Al Gore as president and a federal deficit almost entirely erased to nothing if Fox News hadn't continually beat the drums for such nonsense as Whitewater or obsessed 24/7 about dear little Monica. Some honest conversation about these two teapot tempests would have more than offset the 600-vote difference that flung our country into the arms of calamity.

The Butterfly Effect notwithstanding we would still have had Katrina, but I'd bet anything that the government response would have been quicker and more effective, especially when it came to repairing the breeches in the floodwalls.

We would have had no wars in the Middle East because Mr. Gore would not have shifted the ability to scramble interceptors from air traffic controllers to the Pentagon itself... a mere two months before 9-11. Those aircraft would have been shot down long before they'd reached their targets and, yes, I know what I'm suggesting.

The Stock Market wouldn't have crashed at the end of 2008, taking the world economy with it, because there would have been no incoming Republican president to take the blame and suffer the consequences. Sixteen years of peace, tranquility and prosperity for all would have proven that Democrats indeed know what they're doing. And the people, without the Fox worm in their ears vomiting its trademark dissonance, would have agreed.

So, Mr. Ailes, in closing, may you both burn and rot in Hell for all eternity... if not longer.

=Lefty=