Senator John Cornyn (R. Wingnuttia) is locked in a Titanic World-Historical Struggle with noted Viking Kitten Erick the Son of Erick over a deleted Facebook comment. It’s sort of epic, in the sense that when people united by a shared concern over the possibility of rampant, unchecked human/box-turtle fucking start squabbling, well, the Ken Burns miniseries can’t be too far behind, can it?

Yesterday, I ambled over to John Cornyn’s page on Facebook and wrote on his wall.

I told him, very politely, that I was disappointed in the NRSC endorsement of Crist. At a time when Senator Cornyn says we can capitalize on the anxiety people have about spending and deficits, it undermines his goal by endorsing a man who supports the spending and deficits and also says he’d vote for Obama’s stimulus.

Senator Cornyn responded that given a recent third party poll showing Crist at 54% and Rubio at 18%, Crist is the candidate who can hold the seat and the NRSC wanted to go on and support him.

I responded that there were more than 365 days before the election, Crist was elected statewide with high name identification, and Rubio has 365 + days to show people that Crist would support the policies that are increasingly unpopular in Florida.

I tell you this all here because you cannot now go to John Cornyn’s page at Facebook to see the exchange.

Whoever runs the page for him has deleted it.

So the long knives are out, apparently. Will these mighty antagonists perhaps… delete each other from their friends lists? A terrifying possibility.

Only time will tell. But I fear that soon the Internets will run red with blood, or at least Cherry Mountain Dew.

(For the record, I’m slightly sympathetic to the Viking Kitten here; as a progressive, I can relate to frustration with insiders who sacrifice principle for centrist cred. The difference, of course, though, is that history really is very likely to look back appalled on an epoch when torture was fair game for Civilized Official Conversation and, say, workable universal healthcare wasn’t. Epic Win for Our Side!)