As many of you have alerted me via email, my concession speech is still out there, replicating itself and mutating like an alien virus in a bad sci-fi movie. As Eric at Whuzzup! has pointed out, a Google search using any phrase from the speech yields hundreds of results, about half of which credit yours truly. Many of ‘em credit my good friend “Anonymous,” many claim that it’s Kerry’s actual first draft, and several people credit themselves or their friends.

I’ve tried not to say much about it around here, as I think the speech speaks pretty well for itself. But after receiving a couple of emails that complained about me adding my name to “The Concession Speech that John Kerry Should Have Made,” I thought it was time to reiterate something in the dignified fashion that befits a major candidate:

It’s mine. MINE, I tell you! Me me me!

Again, you’re free to repost it, pass it around, misinterpret it, rail against it, submit it as evidence as how out-of-touch we liberals are, bend it, fold it, spindle and mutilate it, add an outboard motor to it and ride it across Lake Minnetonka, whatever you want. But I ask you to please keep my name attached to it. I am a professional writer, after all. This doesn’t mean I’m a good writer, but it does mean that using the pseudonym “Anonymous” isn’t a terrific career move. [Except in the case of a certain groundbreaking and highly imaginative new erotic novel concerning a satirical political writer who gets shipwrecked on a desert island with the Miss Coconut Oil pageant, the entire student body of Smith College, and Dutch swimming sensation Inge de Bruijn. That was written by some anonymous guy, but I highly recommend it.]

Er, anyway… If I can wax serious for just a second about the speech: I don’t really think that calling red state voters “slack-jawed yokels” is necessarily the best campaign strategy we liberals can come up with. Then again, I could be wrong. The trick may be to adapt the Bush strategy - not to insult anyone directly, but to create the impression that those who choose to vote Republican are aligning themselves with slack-jawed yokeldom, or worse. You know, the same way that by voting for Kerry, 48% of the population had to acknowledge being anti-American, soft on defense, in bed with al Qaeda, and out of touch with mainstream American values. That was kinda effective, I have to admit it.