Oh come on, Post, we thought you were running a family paper here.

To measure the cathartic effect of online whacking, half were questioned before they started pummeling; the other half afterward.

But, uh, even stepping away (briefly) from juvenile misreadings, this is still a weird fucking piece. Internet whack-a-mole? Seriously? It turns out that after (digitally) hitting dictators with (virtual) mallets, folks soften a little in their assessments of major pols. And we're sure we'll be seeing the "Hey, compared to Stalin, I'm not half bad!" campaign ads by Monday. Seriously, though, it doesn't sound like great news for anyone:

The results suggest that political independents had a significantly less sour view of Bush and the GOP after spending 45 seconds whacking images of Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and other rogue leaders. [...]Cheney, Jackson and Hitler were the favorite targets in their respective panels.

Fine company.

Whacky Politics [WP]