Last week, “Southampton [NY] police responding to burst water pipes in a Hampton Bays home found the mummified body of the owner—dead for more than a year—sitting in a chair in front of a television, officials said Friday. The television was still on.”

Apparently Vincenzo Riccardi, age 70, died of natural causes and failed to decompose because of the lack of humidity in the house (as opposed to Anna Nicole Smith, who is decomposing rapidly while relatives pick over the remains). Poor Vincenzo had previously gone blind, it was reported, and had strung a rope from the mailbox to the front door so he could stumble out and get his mail.

Imagine: dead in his chair, Vincenzo absorbed a whole year of wretched programming on the same channel. Maybe that's what mummified him. Don’t ask how he could watch if he was blind. Or if he was dead.

Don’t ask how this story applies to the Democrats, dead in the water and watching the war in Iraq run away from them. Their neighbors, the Republicans, are not going to come to the rescue—any more than Vincenzo’s did. The Dems are watching C-Span at 3:00 a.m. sitting on a folding chair in the middle of a desert.