Go see at www.pariahisland.com.

Mark George Spittle succumbed to radioactive polonium poisoning on Christmas Day, 2006, at Tampa General Hospital. He was 42.

Authorities are investigating whether the poisoning was due to Mark’s intention to run for the office of Presidency of the Russian Federation, against Vladimir Putin’s intended successor, Dimitry Medvedev. Authorities are not ruling out that Mark may have been killed by a conservative blogger, either. Or a liberal blogger, for that matter. Or another podcaster.

Mark leaves behind a wife, Solange, and three sons, Marjorie, Bettina and Judith. He was buried next to his mother, who hated him passionately, at Kensico Cemetary in his home state of New York. His only dying wish was that his tombstone read “Don’t Organize. Mourn!” This was honored.

Mark’s family asks that in lieu of flowers, mourners donate to the John Edwards 2008 campaign. A family representative said, cryptically, “That’ll show ‘em.”

Celebrations for political bloggers, forum board moderators, religious leaders and everyone else who wanted Mark dead will be held nationwide in the typical ad hoc, chaotic fashion of political bloggers, forum board moderators, religious leaders and everyone else who wanted Mark dead.

Spittle & Ink will remain up, for now, for archival purposes.

Doctors at Tampa General have confirmed the presence of radioactive thallium in Mark Spittle’s system. It would appear he has been poisoned. He is still unresponsive to treatments.

Mark’s family is gathering at his bedside today, having flown in from various parts of the world.

More as this develops.

Mark was hospitalized at Tampa General yesterday evening after complaining of severe stomach pains and sudden physical deterioration. In the past 24 hours, Mark’s condition has worsened, and his symptoms include sudden hair loss, skin discoloration, and intense abdominal pain. He is currently not conscious.

The local FBI was notified after it was revealed to hospital staff that Mark was considering a run for office in the Russian Federation, against Vladimir Putin’s expected successor, Dmitry Medvedev. With the heightened awareness of thallium and polonium poisoning by Russian secret service agents against political opponents to President Putin, the US is paying increased attention to symptoms such as Mark’s. At this time there is no evidence that Mark was poisoned by Russians.

I will report back as soon as I know more.

So sick have we become with this addiction, we sacrifice our lives, and even the lives of our own children, for the next hit.

Let me back up a second, and throw in some folksy slang so you know I haven’t suddenly adopted the fey arrogance of that queer little Italian kicking up Green Zone dust in Iraq right now. The American people are frickin’ idiots, and like Dr. Evil in his underground lair, I’m surrounded by ‘em.

Why am I so endlessly shocked by this fact? I mean, holy moley, I’ve been politically active since the term “holy moley” was tossed around by Billy Batson’s red-suited alter ego. (Well, in reprints, anyway.) Why am I so surprised? Why can’t I ever just succumb, and slip gently into the warm bath of serene, calming words that fit my simplistic, if horribly erroneous, preconceptions?

In my last podcast, I threw out a manifesto of sorts, announcing to the world that “no blog will ever convince anyone of anything.”

So what do I do with this stuff? Do I run it? Does anyone really care? Will this suddenly make Kos and his gang realize they are no better than the Rocco DiPolepuffers or Michelle Malkins of the world? That they are just as much the gay whores of the political blogosphere as the ones partying with Duke Cunningham?

No, ladies and gentlemen, the reality is this. No blog anywhere will ever convince anyone of anything. I want to repeat that. No blog anywhere will ever convince anyone of anything.

Why is that? Because unlike television, which you can stumble upon by accident, blogs are not read by those on the opposite side of the spectrum. They are also not read by this mythical creature called the “undecided.” No, the hard truth is that lefties read lefty blogs, and righties read righty blogs.

No one is convincing anyone of anything. Instead, all these things are doing is reinforcing their own troops. And I call bullshit on the whole thing.

(An aside: it does feel good to be such a fantastic person and remarkable writer that quoting yourself actually adds a level of scholarship to your site. Go, me!)

I don’t know, but going back into the filthy underbelly of American conservative politics and spending a few more days reading the never-ending, eternal flood of absolute bullshit coming from Righty blogs has gotten me more sensitive to this fact than usual. We are faced right now with an undeniable truth, a reality as tangible and real as the air we breathe or the sun in the sky: Iraq is a clusterfuck. But to watch the blogs on the Right spin it, you’d think the only reason things are “kinda grim” right now is because we didn’t do enough right-wing stuff. We didn’t, as Redstate put it, “unleash Hell” on them.

Because clearly if something isn’t working, than doing a whole lot more of it should work, right?

But in moments of clarity – meaning the Paxil and Goldschlager has kicked in – I see it all for what it is. The American dialogue isn’t about discussing truth or delving into facts. It isn’t about trying to debate an issue in order to actually end up with an outcome. It isn’t anything near what the participants insist it is.

It’s about consumption, just like everything else in our arch-capitalist society. We consume rhetoric for pleasure, just as we buy cigarettes and alcohol and porn and cookies – or, if you’re me, tobacco-laced rum-soaked porn cookies.* We consume what we want to hear, because it gives us pleasure, and America is nothing if not addicted to pleasure.

Blogs aren’t helping. Well, all the blogs except mine, that is. Both the bloggers and their readers surround themselves in safe little bubbles, cocoons of like-mindedness, breathing in each sentence of reassuring rhetoric as if it were their last breath. And always – always – they fight against change, against opposing thought, against anything that might break the spell or detox the addict.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t exactly surrounded myself with like-minded “colleagues”. Nor do I rely on an army of sycophantic, bobbleheaded readers to post approving comments and make me feel that, yes, I’m okay after all. No, I’m over here in my self-contained little corner of the blogosphere surrounding myself with people who, face it, really can’t stand me. You guys have only read about a third of the problems I’ve had with Lefty bloggers, some of whom are still being promoted over there on the right side of my page, even though a lesser guy would have dumped them a long time ago. You’ve only heard about Mafuckka because, face it, that was one of the funniest things to come across my desk in a long time. But I’m still promoting C&L, because even though they may have a guy working there whose full mental capacity outshines only a can of spray-on Cheez-Wiz, the site itself has a noble purpose and the content is pretty damn good. Unlike so many of the Lefty blogs who routinely deny running anything with the name “Mark Spittle” on it, I still run their bits and promote their blogs. Because I don’t need their love. I love myself. In fact, I just loved myself in the shower this morning.

Apparently, judging by the treatment I’ve gotten, they need my love. And if I don’t dole it out like free samples at an Excedrin conference, then I’m not worth looking at – ever.

Same on the Right, of course. Righty blogs remain in lockstep, only tolerating minor deviations from opinions, and then shouting to the rafters about how “Big Tent” they are. But in the end, they provide a commodity for a hungry, ravenous mob of consumers, creatures who must eat to sustain their addiction.

When you live in a culture that is so fat and overprovided that you can consume rhetoric to the point of addiction – well, something’s a miss, miss.

I usually like to end my little rants with a Final Solution – no, not that Final Solution, you cynical bastards – but in this case I’m pretty much left wondering what can happen to fix this. I suppose you can do what folks do for any other addiction and try to stick to what’s necessary, to what’s healthy and best for your body and soul, and to avoid everything else like the Black Death.

Which, of course, means purging your RSS feeds, browser favorites and home page, and every other link to anything … and reading only Spittle & Ink. Because, face it, the other guys will never tell you that they’re part of a big game of bullshit and self-porn. But I will. And that honesty should count for something.

* An old family recipe.

My God, it’s full of stars.

Now, we all know Rocco’s priorities are bit mixed up. He goes batnuts when upstanding blogger like myself discusses his wife’s crafts art, but thinks nothing of leaving her alone so he can fly to Iraq. To blog.

To blog, for chrissakes.

(You MILFbloggers out there might want to take advantage of the situation, and make a trip to Rhode Island. Snicker.)

Am I the only guy on in the blogosphere who doesn’t think blogging is a higher calling? Am I the only one who recognizes that blogging is nothing but the Porn of Narcissus: stuff people write with the intent of masturbating over later? Has everyone on the internet succumbed to the Golden Arm of Sinatra? Has the Curtain of Oz been pulled over all of you?

Oh, wait. It gets better.

Not only has the Don of the Sockless Mafia gone off to Iraq to, of course, find the “good news” there that the rest of the planet has so far been unable to uncover – because, y’know, the entire world is stupid, and Rocco is the only guy who will save us – but he’s done so in prose. Or, at least, something like it. He began his milblogging efforts under the name “D. Alighieri” – that would be a subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-balls reference to the author of The Divine Comedy, Dante, the poor soul from whom Rocco quotes as an opening to his latest literary masterpiece, at least when he’s not quoting Melville. To, y’know, prove that not all guys named Rocco are stupid right wing redneck. Some actually read!

(An aside, in the form of a pop quiz question: if DiPippo had read Moby Dick, wouldn’t he have noticed the stunning similarity between Ahab and George W. Bush? Just sayin’, is all.)

Acquiescing to the Call of Icarus, soon Rocco realized his ego required that he had to post photos of himself, and that would blow his cover, so he dropped the nom de mortar fire plume. Oh, but kept the lyrical prose. Boy did he ever.

Take a look at this snippet from a post Rocco entitled “The Gate.” Remember, this is the guy who thought I was nuts for fake-blogging as a make-believe superhero.

Whoomph! — It hits me in the gut, like a massive bass drum note at a rock concert. Almost immediately I see thick, black smoke rocket upwards from behind the huge concrete blast walls surrounding the compound I am in. Distant sirens pierce the shocked silence in my head. I ask Janan if it was what I think it is. She nods. Then, without a hint of concern, but with mild sadness, she says it is common.

I feel a twinge of sickness watching the color of the car bomb’s ugly cloud lighten as it rises. I think of the horror and madness beneath it.

I wonder if this awful mark on the bright, blue sky, this black proof of obscenity under God’s sun, contains the souls of the newly dead.

With blog entry titles like “Out of Acheron” and “To Be Surrounded by Virgils” and “At the Whim of Charon“, clearly Rocco is doing more damage to the English language than to Islamofascism. Look at this wordsmithery from “At the Whim of Charon – Part II“:

In three days I have hardly slept. Now, there are two things keeping me from finally falling into the arms of Morpheus: the unfamiliarity of my surroundings and a desire to explore them.

Okay, let me preface my critique of that – er, “paragraph” — by first apologizing to my dear friends in the GLBT community, including all those lovely men I sleep with when my wife is out of town.

OMGZZZZZ!!! “FALLING INTO THE ARMS OF MORPHEUS? THAT IS SO FUCKING GAY!!!!! ROCCO IS SUCH A TOTAL FAGGGG!!!!1111 LOL!!!!111

Ahem. Anyway, overlooking his hissing, horrific prose, so much so like the Follicles of Gorgon, is Rocco succeeding then, and finding the good news that the mainstream media won’t report? Uhhh… not so much:

Every day, I hear car bombs explode. Their concussions sometimes rattle the windows in my office. And then I climb to the top of the roof and watch the smoke of the dead rise towards the sky.

So much for going to Iraq to report back on how the US is building schools and saving babies’ milk bottles. But don’t think that the smell of The Black River of Styx deters Rocco from his holy mission, albeit one conducted from the safety of the Green Zone.

If you think that if the U.S. leaves this place the bloodshed will end, you are deluded. The killers here are playing to a press that longs for the defeat of the U.S. And the press could care less how its obsession effects Iraq or its people. In my opinion, a lot of violence in Iraq results from that symbiotic relationship. If all Western leftwing “journalists” were banned from Iraq, I’m convinced that the level of violence here would drop significantly. And if along with them, the Arab pro-terror media outlets were shut down, violence targeted towards Iraqi civilians would lessen even more.

Kids, you cannot make this shit up. Even in the middle of the Crucible of Vulcan, Rocco is blinded to the glaring reality of his own insanity. Yes, he openly, and without a shred of irony, says the best way to defeat those who (he says) want to “destroy our way of life” is to get rid of the American free press. Perhaps while we’re at it, to really guarantee a victory, we should do away with our right to vote, our rights to trials, our free speech, our freedom to associate, our system of laws, our representative civilian government, our hospitals, our schools, our art, our literature, our religions, our (gasp!) right to bear arms … and maybe then, just maybe, we can win this war against those who hate our freedoms. After all, if we voluntarily abandon our freedoms, they’ll have nothing to hate us for! We win by default!

If Rocco gets himself shot, his dying words will somehow manage to ignore the fact that it was his right wing President and neocon nutjobs that put terrorists in Iraq, that it was his own racist addiction to hatred that put himself in country, that it was people just like him shooting each other over deluded religious believes just like his… no, it will have been the Liberal Media’s fault.

And then, of course, rain will start to fall upwards.

Without a shred of self-awareness or irony, Rocco posted these photos of himself under the blog title “The Ruins of Self Worship.” The photo captions are reprinted here, as is, and with bad spelling:

Standing where one of the world’s most brutal dicatators once stood. (As a souvenier, I took a small piece of the naugahyde fabric covering the pulpit’s prow.)

I stand in wreckage of a totalitarian’s monument to his self.

My current best friend and I, under the swords

Let’s recap, as one does in the Haberdashery of Aske. Rocco DiPippo, the guy who bans anyone from his site who disagrees with him, leaves his wife to go on a trip to Iraq to take pictures of himself posed in macho arrogance, holding a gun, while writing bad prose about

So, perhaps someone can explain to me how that last photo is not identical to this one?

How, exactly, is Rocco’s tough-guy mindset different from al Qaeda’s? Not much, according to the right-wing War College’s Director of Insurgency Studies director Bard O’Neill:

“Al-Qaida people come from middle class backgrounds. And when you begin to look at that, you find out that their motivation is very much psychological. People who are searching for a sense of identity, a sense of respect, searching to address humiliation — these are the kinds of things that tend to motivate them rather than poverty.”

Sound familiar? Why, it’s almost as if Rhode Island could produce terrorists!

Given his own monstrous ego, on display without any restraint in his milblogging posts, are we to believe that if given the chance, Rocco would not agree to build a gigantic statue of himself holding his handgun in the middle of Warren RI town square? Are we to believe that there is some difference between the dictator who once said and the violence-obsessed blogger who writes Are we actually supposed to believe that such an arrogant egomaniac who, as he has already proven, is willing to see his fellow Americans opened up to murder is in some way different from the maniac we knew as Hussein?

The only difference between these people is the religion that blinds them to reality.

How is this all going to look if Rocco gets himself shot? Will he be heralded as a hero blogger who defied all risks to tell the truth from Iraq, even if that truth is nothing more than him posing like a 12-year old fanboy posing next to a guy dressed as Boba Fett? Or will Rocco be revealed for what he was: so blinded by his consumption of rhetoric, and so devoid of fact and reality, that nothing mattered more to him; nothing: not his wife, not his family, not his country, not the military he allegedly loves (who must be thrilled to have another under-armed American jackass running around for them to protect.)

Rocco, come home. If not for yourself, think of those others you have forsaken. I mean, of course, lovers of literature. You’re committing an act of murder against an entire art form with every post you write from Iraq.

Come home, Rocco. We will forgive your crimes against humanity and welcome you back into the gentle, loving Arms of Morpheus. But not in a gay way. Unless you really do swing like that.

For you non-gun-savvy folk out there, they overlaid a rifle range target on a photo of Paris Hilton. In fact, the “kill zone” for Paris Hilton is, according to Salon, her left nipple. Hey, Achilles had his heel, so who are we to argue?

Here’s what a typical range target looks like, sans Paris. (Image courtesy Law Enforcement Targets, Inc.)

Included in the Rebecca Traister-penned piece is the line, “It’s time to admit that Paris Hilton, that creepy dollie, must be destroyed. Metaphorically, of course.” Well, if you leave that option up to Salon’s graphics department, they said, “Screw metaphor!” and practically put a fatwah on the skank. A skankwah, if you like.

I’m really conflicted over this one. Sure, I’d like to see Paris Hilton dead like all of the rest of America does. But I keep those thoughts to myself, y’know? Is this what Salon ran instead of my piece on how The Office is jumping the shark? For shame!

Look at what pops up on Technorati now:

Okay, so this probably has to do with the fact that we had to switch the main blog page from the Simpleblog address to the new Wordpress one… but, c’mon, you pathetic freak. I pay you to make me popular, not make me less popular! I have enough people doing that for me, for free!

Sigh. It’s as if my slovenly Executive Editor doesn’t know that this whole blogging thing really is just a popularity contest. And now I’m basically starting from scratch. Good thing my personality is so strong that I can get this back up to the rank I had before — which was third, by the way, although now all the records to prove it or disprove it are gone — rather quickly.

Remember, dear readers, the only way I can get enough clout to begin throwing my attitude around like a proper blogger is by increasing my standing in all these Web 2.0 ratings things. Technorati, Fark, Feedburner, Alexa you name it. Start putting this site’s name out there, or I’ll never be as arrogant and conceited as the Big Dogs. And I really, really want to be arrogant and conceited, dammit!

A quickie visual overlay of Iraq’s ethnic regional boundaries and Iraq’s oil infrastructure. Click the thumbnail below for the large (171 K) image.

I had this done as part of my research for my upcoming Mark Spittle Study Group on the Iraq “Situation”, a report which is being more anticipated than even the next Harry Potter film. For now, it’s just data. Do with it what you will.

Why do I suspect that upon analysis we will find that either (a) the Iraq Study Group didn’t even bother with such a map, or (b) their entire strategy is built on a map of this sort? We’ll see.

Today Jay’s running an actual interview he did — y’see, A-Hose? Bloggers can actually talk to people, instead of about them! — with Congressman Donald Payne of Newark NJ. The interview gets a little confusing because they are talking about Darfur, but sitting in Newark, so at times its unclear which human tragedy they are talking about …. rimshot … but, really, it’s an amazingly frank interview with one of the House’s most genuine Representatives.

Here’s a snippet:

JL: Nicolas Kristoph suggests in today’s New York Times that the Janjaweed’s attacks are beginning to spread into neighboring countries such as Chad and the Central African Republic. Umm, that’s kind of similar to what happened with the Uganda crisis some years back, it was almost, um sort of a proxy war between these militias. What on earth can we do?

DP: It’s terrible; you had finally at one point almost a mini-world war in Africa with the Ugandans and the Rwandans going into the Congo. And Zimbabwe and Angola and others get pulled in as well. Now the Janjaweed is trying to destabilize the government of Chad and I know because I have spoken to the president of Chad on several occasions. Also the water tables in northern Chad have always been historically low and they are almost being depleted and so it created tensions between the (Sudanese refugees) and the people living in Chad already. The Central African Republic has a weak government in the first place, and one another government falls you have even more refugees. It’s going to become almost impossible to reach people, to feed people.

The fact that so many people are in flight is why it’s so difficult to get an accurate number of deaths in this conflict. On the low end, there are estimates of 200,000 victims of the Darfur genocide, other estimates go as high at 450,000. They die from a lot of different reasons — malnutrition — the physical killing is about 50% of the total death toll. It’s the malnutrition and disease (associated with war and refugee crises) which push the number so high.

JL: This is depressing. I was kind of hoping you’d tell me that I am overly pessimistic about this stuff. But looking at the reality, it’s hard to not get down. Is there a glimmer of hope for Darfur with the recent Democratic victories in the Congress? Is there a hint of a possibility that there will be a change?

DP: We still have to get the Bush Administration to act.

You know, we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation. If this crisis was pre-Iraq, really I think we would have been able to really I think organize the world community and send some of our troops in — we would only need a limited number — to do support and so forth. But because of the Iraq situation, and following Somalia, there has been some timidity about Africa anyway. But I think the proportions to which is has risen it would have been some affirmative action by now had it now been for the debacle in Iraq. Many of us can support Afghanistan, that is where Osama bin Laden was. We should have committed ourselves to go after him, but as you know we went to Iraq instead. So it’s been very difficult to get anyone in the administration to talk about any kind of real action on the part of our military.

I still believe that a UN force should be gathered, that we should have the UN and NATO prepare to assist, that we should provide armored vehicles, which we do not have in Darfur now, and that the biggest weapon, that would be the drones. I say we should have a no fly zone. And you can make your messages known very clearly without putting one single American troop in harm’s way. I am not a military guy, so I don’t know exactly how they work, but I know that unmanned drones are able to detect and destroy. And if this (genocide) continues, I think we have an obligation to do something to stop it.

I think the first step should actually be the deploying of some reconnaissance-type planes to get a lay of the land, deploy some drone to identify aggressive troops from the government of Sudan who are perusing innocent people and we should destroy them with the technology we have at our disposal. I think if a couple of those (drone missions) were to occur, you might see a change of opinion of the part of the government of Sudan. Umm, it seems kind of far-reaching, but someone has to stop this genocide and we have to do something to show them enough is enough. At some point, enough will have to be enough.

I strongly support taking on….We could destroy some of those (janjaweed) battalions which could be done simply by pushing a button. It’s just that simple.

Go read the entire interview here, faithful droogs. This is how blogging should be.

* One could argue that J-Laz’s work even makes me look pathetic. One could argue that, but they wouldn’t right? They wouldn’t dare… right?