Been light on the posting this week. Topsy-turvy sleep schedule out of nowhere, then some glitches with my new sports car on the information highway, my cable modem.

I seem to be back, though I'm leery of the modem now. The field tech admitted that he wasn't sure what he did to make it work again. Now I'll have to come clean and admit a lot of my repairs jobs are like that. Sometimes I take things apart, put them back together and they just work. Nonetheless, it doesn't inspire confidence. I just hope the fix lasts long enough that Jason at Tech Support and I don't recognize each other by voice anymore.

Anyway, I'll start back with a sandbagging. Some bloggers just deserve to be bludgeoned repeatedly in the blogosphere. Oliver Willis is one of them. He actually gets paid by Media Matters to blog about things he knows little to nothing about. His blog subtitle: "Like Cryptonite to Stupid" speaks of a greatly expanded ego, putting it on a par with his waistline.

Recently Ed Morrisey of Captains Quarters noted that Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele is "articulate", among other things. Besides being articulate, Michael Steele happens to be black.

Apparently the Democrats are terrified of Steele. They have been trying to dredge things up about him from Day One. In Maryland the Governor and Lieutenant Governor run on the same ticket, the same as the President and Vice President. Their initial attacks, in which they disclosed such inanities as he (a member of the state bar) gave his sister advice during her divorce (big hairy deal) were aimed at undercutting the Republican Gubernatorial ticket. Just recently Chuck Shumer operatives stole Steele's SSN and misrepresented themselves to obtain his credit record, a move apparently aimed at keeping him from seeking further office. So make no mistake, they are afraid of him, and that's enough to make mindless automatons like Ollie froth at the mouth.

So Ollie jumped on "articulate". Henceforth to be known as "The 'A' Word". He actually tried to make the point that calling Steele articulate means other blacks aren't. What a stretch.

I think Ollie truly wants to live in the world of things like Race Norming, in which graders say "Well, he did ok.......for a black guy". He likes feeling stupid and oppressed; yet really he's only stupid, not oppressed.

One of Ollie's commenters picked up on an incident that occurred some years ago, in which a DC Councilman referred to the sums spent on a particular program as "niggardly". Someone with an apparently limited command of English and seemingly no access to a DC public library in which to look at a dictionary (and an axe to grind) screamed "racist epithet" and the case was closed. Funny thing is I'm pretty sure the guy who complained that the city wasn't spending enough on a particular social program is homosexual, and thus yet another "oppressed minority". Anyway, Ollie's oh-so-erudite commenter explained that we should know to avoid loaded words such as "articulate" and "niggardly".

Beam me up Scotty. Please. Now.