Posted 3:12 PM by Robert

Bye, Bye. And Get Enough Rest To Clear Your Mind.

I confess to a certain meanspirited motive in checking in on Eschaton today, a site I don't consistently visit.

I was "curious" what the word around Bedlam would be following Saddam Hussein's capture. But I never expected that the site would be dark, with the following message hung in the gritty cyber window:

Atrios will be away from 12/16-12/19.

Somewhere in there, he took time off for a birthday breakfast, saying: With that I turn the asylum over to the inmates. But just for a few hours. At least he knows his audience - even if any differences between them and the management are, shall we say, a bit blurred.

He announced his planned absence shortly after Saddam was captured, and there is a fair amount of confused, mostly dispirited gibberish on the site following the capture: A pathetic But, it really doesn't change much post. A confused group message to Senator Kerry about linking Dean to Al-Qaeda - it's really come to that on the left. Hope is expressed that the Telegraph story isn't true. A bizarre complaint that George Bush focuses our attention on the negative aspects of Saddam's capture. Tasteless joke about CNN fails to inform us that Powell's virility is unmatched in its report about the Secretary's cancer operation. Some other odds and ends, including something about vibrators (260 comments on that one).

But nobody's heart seems to be in the lunacy now. It's like they're just going through the motions. It's sad, really. So sad.

As Atrios would say:

HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH.