Who says politicians don’t keep their promises?

The tightly contested race was ratcheted up a notch today when candidate Dick Gephardt challenged his opponents on their “punctuality of concession.”

“The failure of Al Gore to shut the hell up and go back to the farm hurt us as a political party very badly,” said Gephardt. “I promise America right now that I will concede the 2004 Presidential election within ten minutes of the final vote being cast, if I am your candidate.”

Heh.

In other “news,” “Howard Dean bid the state farewell as he stepped onto his private jet tonight. ‘Shut up, you gun-toting, God-fearing homophobes,’ Mr. Dean said to a cheering crowd of Iowa Democrats.” :)

And:

Democrat presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich made a dealto send his Iowa caucus supporters to rival Senator John Edwards, D-NC, and to send Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb to the Carolina Panthers.

“Did you hear the news? An F-16 just shot down Santa’s sleigh.” –Becky’s dad, first words after I picked up the phone.

Heh. He had me there for a second. My thoughts were something along the lines of: “An F-16 shot down… what? Oh.” :)

Meanwhile my Dad and Chris are trading Santa’s-sleigh jokes over on the parental blog. Hehe.

It’s almost midnight on the East Coast. (Still two hours to go here.) Merry Christmas!!!

The inimitable Donald Rumsfeld has won a “foot in mouth” prize (mooooo!) for the following statement:

“Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Hee hee hee.

Rumsfeld’s statement barely beat out this Arnold Schwarzenegger gem: “I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.” Heh.

At last, a living wage!

From comments: “The minute we stop making fun of the Massachusetts delegation for being drunk or looking French…the terrorists have already won.” –Chris Fahrenthold. Hee hee hee.

From ScrappleFace: Democrats Blame Bush for Lunar Eclipse. Hee hee.

Triumph, Late Night With Conan O’Brien’s wonderful “insult comic dog” — who, by the way, had a hilarious segment last night making fun of American Idol auditioners (”That’s incredible breath control. How do you do that? How do you sing and suck at the same time?”) — now has his own website as well as his own, brand-new CD, Come Poop With Me. (At last, high-brow humor returns to the airwaves! :)

Sean says I’m obsessing over Isabel. Obsessing? Moi? No way! Certainly I would never devote 16 consecutive posts to one topic…

Well, maybe 16, but not 17. And so, in the interest of breaking the monotony, and in the name of horrible yet funny black humor, I give you this headline from the front page of this week’s Onion:

God Grants John Ritter’s Wish To Meet Johnny Cash

David Letterman on Arnold’s Tonight Show announcement last night: “I missed the whole thing. The one night that I forget to watch Leno, and this happens!” Heh.

The text of the InstaPundit post that included a link to my site reads:

Arnold Schwarzenegger is running, and Brendan Loy has all the cliched headlines covered already.

Well, hmm now. Following in the tradition of my recent Dowdification of Chris’s “plug” for my site, do you think I should do a little creative editing and add the following quote to my list at left?

“Brendan Loy has… [it] covered.”
–Glenn Reynolds

Heh. Well, perhaps not.

Below, I wrote that trying to fit Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last name in headlines is going to be a nightmare for newspaper staffers everywhere. But actually, it’s only a problem for serious newspapers. For tabloids and others who allow themselves the luxury of informal headlines, “Arnold” will do just fine… and it’s just the beginning of the possibilities. For those headline writers, this is an absolute dream. Are you ready for…

Total Recall
(quite possibly the headline in either the Post or the Daily News, or both, tomorrow)

Arnold Seeks to Terminate Davis

No Gray Area: Terminator Is Running

And then, during the campaign…

Arnold Accuses Davis of True Lies

Can He Jingle All the Way to Sacramento?

And if he wins:

Voters Pump Arnold Up

And if he loses:

Terminator Terminated

And if he loses, but hints he might run again in 2006:

Arnold: I’ll Be Back

Hello, InstaPundit readers! Welcome to BrendanLoy.com!

While you’re here, please check out my earlier post about the California recall (quoting someone else’s funny joke) and join the ensuing debate in comments, if you wish.

And hey, check out all my Noteworthy Posts and tell me whether you think they’re really all that noteworthy! :) Or, if you just want to laugh, please visit my Funny Stuff category.

Oh, and one last thing: take a peek at my photo gallery of Saddam Hussein being brutally attacked by a vicious kitten:

Yeah, I know that has nothing to do with this post, but what can I say? I’ve been trying to drive traffic to the Saddam-vs.-Psychokitty page for months, and I’m shameless. :)

UPDATE: I was right about the Daily News.

Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web has an utterly hilarious satire of California’s political situation. I particularly love the first sentence:

California is a desert land roughly the size of Iraq.

Heh. The article goes on:

It is also an object lesson in the dangers of trying to impose democracy in a culture that is not ready for it. … Leon Panetta, himself a Californian, writes in the Los Angeles Times that California is undergoing a “breakdown in [the] trust that is essential to governing in a democracy.” … Others say a move is under way to “hijack” California’s government.

Har har. Now here’s a great statement:

What isn’t widely known is that the U.S. has a large military presence in California.

Hee hee hee.

And our troops are coming under attack from angry locals. “Two off-duty Marines were stabbed, one critically, when they and two companions were attacked by more than a dozen alleged gang members early Thursday,” KSND-TV reports from San Diego, a city in California’s south.

How many young American men and women will have to make the ultimate sacrifice before we realize it isn’t worth it? Is the Bush administration too proud to ask the U.N. for help in pacifying California? Plainly California has turned into a quagmire, and the sooner we bring our troops back home, the better.

LOL!

Village Voice columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates has a crush on Condoleezza Rice:

I’ve got a running joke with my girlfriend. It starts in an alternate reality where I’m 20 years older, single, and childless. I’ve also gone all John Hinckley over Condi Rice, and somehow I manage to finagle my way into a social event where she is a guest. When she’s off to herself and no one’s looking, I whisper in her ear, “I hate everything you stand for. You take orders from a tribe of orcs who worship the Stone Age and mistake myopia for morality, and brutality for strength. You are a disgrace to your people and their long history of forcing this country to live up to its lofty ideals. Furthermore, you are the most beautiful woman inside the Beltway. Come away with me to a desert island. We will make beautiful arguments together.”

SOMEWHERE IN CYBERSPACE, July 23 (AP) — In an unprecedented display of the Internet’s power, the amorphous multinational entity known as the Blogosphere declared war on Iran early Wednesday.

“We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail,” said Blogosphere president Glenn Reynolds in an address to the blogger nation. “The mullahs of Iran will rue the day they messed with the Blogosphere.”

The long-simmering ideological conflict between the Iranian government and the Blogosphere’s dominant conservative wing turned personal and boiled over late Tuesday when President Reynolds’s site, InstaPundit, linked to a post by blogger Hossein Derakhshan in which Derakhshan indicated that Iran’s government has blocked access to more than three dozen blogs, including his own.

“Miserable mullahs,” Reynolds wrote. “The blogosphere will dance on your graves.”

Within hours, a Technorati analysis revealed that a vast majority of bloggers supported making Reynolds’s prediction come true — immediately.

“That’s when we decided to take matters into our own hands,” Reynolds stated in the full version of his speech, published online. (He read only a two-minute summary in his televised address, but read the full speech’s URL aloud and urged citizens to “read the whole thing.”)

“The Bush Administration may not have the political or diplomatic capital to prosecute this war right now, but that’s okay — we’ll do it for them,” Reynolds wrote.

It was not immediately clear just how the war would be fought, given that most of the Blogosphere’s citizens are university professors, political columnists or columnist wannabes, unrepentant computer geeks, and other people with way too much time on their hands — not professionally trained soldiers.

But Andrew Sullivan, the Blogosphere’s Secretary of War, said he is confident victory will be swift and overwhelming. “The pen is mighter than the sword, and the keyboard is even mighter,” Sullivan said at an early-morning press conference.

“We brought down Trent Lott, we brought down Howell Raines, and now we’re going to bring down the government of Iran,” he added. “No sweat.”

Sullivan said the opening stage of the war would involve “an extremely thorough Fisking” of the Iranian regime. “We’ll attack them at the paragraph level, the sentence level, even the word level,” he said.

He declined to comment further on strategy, but sources said General Scott Ott was mobilizing his ScrappleFace Brigade, preparing to launch a no-holds-barred anti-mullah joke spree — reportedly termed a “Mock and Awe” campaign — in an attempt to win over the hearts and minds of the Iranian people.

It was unclear at press time whether The Onion, a more left-leaning comedy website, would join with Ott’s conservative blog in the Mock-and-Awe effort. Experts said a ScrappleFace-Onion alliance would create the most potent comedic force in military history.

Some liberal bloggers objected to the “rush to war” by the Blogosphere’s government. Josh Marshall, a prominent opposition blogger, called the declaration of war an “unilateral action that has absolutely no validity.” Fellow liberal Atrios said there is “absolutely no evidence that Iran poses an imminent threat to the Blogosphere.”

Sullivan dismissed Marshall and Atrios as “members of a fifth column that is seeking to subvert the legitimate government of the Blogosphere.”

Big Media outlets, meanwhile, were caught completely off-guard by the news. The cable networks struggled to come up with on-screen slogans for the impending conflict. CNN initially labeled it “Showdown: Iran,” but later switched to “Bloggers At War.” Fox News had less trouble, quickly settling on “When Geeks Attack.”

News organizations were also scrambling to provide staffing to cover this new and unexpected military theater. The New York Times, upon learning of a major story that could actually be covered from an apartment in Brooklyn, re-hired Jayson Blair. The BBC dispatched several reporters to Reynolds’s home, where they were reportedly digging through his garbage for evidence that he had “sexed up” Derakhshan’s post.

Reynolds said now is the time for the citizens of the Blogosphere to unite. “My fellow citizens, this is our hour of destiny,” he said. “We will erase Big Media’s doubts, and we will eviscerate our Iranian foes. And maybe, somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ll get Maureen Dowd fired, too. You never know.”

“When this conflict is done,” he concluded, “no place in the world will be safe for terrorists and tyrants, because no one can hide from the Blogosphere.”

Today’s quote in my daily calendar of “The Very Curious Language of George W. Bush” is priceless:

“Laura and I are proud to call John and Michelle Engler our friends. I know you’re proud to call him governor. What a good man the Englers are.”

Hee hee, har har.