As you watch Master Rahm spin, baby, spin, you can only hope that all the spinning makes him so dizzy, he falls down and breaks his lying mouth

I happened to have a chance just now to look at today's Washington Post online newsletters, and went promptly apoplectic over this listing for a story you can be sure I have no intention of reading:

Pelosi Splits Democrats With Push For Murtha
A showdown over the House majority leader's post today has Democrats bitterly divided only a week after their party took control of Congress and has prompted numerous complaints that Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and her allies are using strong-arm tactics and threats to try to elect Rep . . .

Is it possible to take everyone who was involved in producing this crock-of-doody fiction out and shoot them? Are we really going to have to keep putting up with this kind of unvarnished propaganda from Master Rahm and the Beltway-entrenched Democratic "centrists" for . . . well, forever?

It's not Nancy Pelosi who's splitting Democrats, it's Master Rahm, the self-proclaimed enemy-to-the-death of every true, principled democrat and Democrat.

What was Pelosi supposed to do? Stand by and let her party's House caucus--some of them innocently and some of them gleefully in on the fix--saddle her with a second-in-command whose principal reason for existing is to make her job impossible? If she feels, after the time that she has served as minority leader with Steny Hoyer as minority whip, that she's not going to be able to work comfortably with him as majority leader, who isn't getting the message?

Since when is a speaker of the House not entitled to have a majority leader, if not of his/her own choosing, at least one he or she is comfortable with? Huh? Since when? "Strong-arm tactics and threats"? Who brought the media in on their mostly dishonest whispering campaign against Jack Murtha, and trotted out that ancient and almost totally irrelevant Abscam videotape?

And no, quite obviously this has nothing to do with political philosophy, with the predictably simple-minded and dishonest right-wing caricature of Pelosi as a "San Franciso liberal." After all, ideologically speaking Hoyer is noticeably to the left of Murtha. No, from where I sit, well outside the Beltway, it's all about power. And the determination of certain elements within the Democratic Party to blow the damned thing up rather than not get their way--and to allow themselves to be played like the chumps they are by Master Rahm "What's in It for Me?" Emanuel.

It's times like this when the Washington Post reminds us that, despite its pretentions to being a great newspaper, a good part of the time it's a next-to-worthless, indeed dangerous, brain-dead establishment propaganda sheet. Man, those Beltway insiders--of both parties--can always play the sad old rag like a kazoo.