Gotta hand it to liberal papers like the Globe for their never-ending efforts to enlighten poor benighted conservatives. Apparently one benefit of such enlightenment is that you will be less likely to do yourself in. Here is the start of a story from today's Globe OpEd page:

Suicide rates in the United States generally rise as you go south and west. Earlier this year,I got interested in the exceptions to that rule, so I decided to create a map. States with lower than average suicide rates I colored blue; the rest I colored red.

And there it was: an approximation of the year 2000 presidential election map.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have lower than average suicide rates. All but one voted for Al Gore. Of the remaining 37 states, 29 voted for George W. Bush. The five states with the most lopsided Bush vote (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, with a margin of 25 percent or more) were all among the top eight for suicide.

This bit of wackiness is an inept pitch for Republican support for "The National Strategy for Suicide Prevention". This must be the liberal flipside of those stories a few weeks ago that said the Democrat's dogmatic support for abortion was over time reducing their numbers at the polls.

And now for something compeletely different that will at least sicken you, if not drive you to suicide. Oliphant's column today is entitled "Smear by Veterans May Hurt Bush". Even a Kerriphile would crack up at that idea. After the media disgraced themselves with the attempted burial of the story of Kerry's Cambodian Christmas, we learn from the ever-sanctimonious Oliphant the reasons why our betters in the 4th estate have been protecting us from confrontation with spurious rumor. Discerning voters will either snicker or puke at this pure horse manure:

Discerning voters will notice that the more reputable organs of the national press have not cast doubt on Kerry's Vietnam service. That is because political attacks on it don't pass the smell test. We are influenced by eyewitnesses, not by people whose stories keep changing or are contradicted by official records. We are used to arguments over things like war records, but the burden of proof is with the accuser and Kerry's accusers cannot shoulder it with the credible evidence required of credible stories.

But there's another way in now. Raise some Bush buddy Texas money, create a TV ad, hire a right-wing loony to put together a smear book, and cable TV producers desperate for shouting matches are happy to oblige. The result then gets recycled into the serious press because "questions" have been raised about Kerry's record that couldn't survive a minute under traditional standards.

Kerry may have been nicked some at the margins by all this while he was responding via surrogates the last few weeks. Raising the profile of the smear, as well as confronting it directly and putting it at Bush's door, is overdue in the view of some Democratic Party operatives, a risk in the view of others. My own guess is that the higher the profile of this mess the more it looks like the smear it is, and the more it risks boomeranging on the president.

As happened to O'Neill in 1971, the best counter to him today is the serious press attention that his group fears most.

Well, Kerry "may have been nicked some at the margins", but Oli is as accurate as the Black Night in reporting that this is "Just a flesh wound".