Give credit where it's due; these "carbon offset" deals are Al Gore's greatest idea since the Internet. Not only has he given the Holy Warming Church their very own indulgences, he's also invented a new way to approaching human faults without actually trying to change them.

Verily, money can't buy happiness, but it can purchase political piety.

A wonderful side benefit of Gore's offsets is that the idea is so transferable. For example, Gore and those of his ilk may be offended by all the carbon emissions polluting the air. Others of us are put out by all the noxious, moronic emissions polluting the airwaves. A grand irony it is that one of the chief sources of those emissions sparked this idea — moron offsets.

Here's how it would work, in a nut's ... er, a nutshell. If you're a veritable smokestack of moronic ramblings, inane opinions and bug-eyed rants, and you'd rather not sacrifice your venting lifestyle for the sake of rationality, then moron offsets are just the ticket for you. Just pay someone else to "scrub the air" with good sense after you belched forth some gassy nonsense, and you won't have to bother rethinking anything.

You can see how close this system is to Gore's carbon offsets. Imagine how it could have worked this week.

Let's start with Gore. In testimony before House and Senate committees this week he gave off the following: "The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

Rather than trying to have Gore sort out exactly who or what is the baby in his weird analogy, or tell who's the doctor, let alone explain why you would even bother calling a doctor when the obvious reason for the child's elevated body temperature was his proximity to open flame, just offer him a way to offset that "moron footprint." He could, for example, package the "Saturday Night Live" Blue Oyster Cult skit featuring Christopher Walken into a DVD billed "An Inconvenient Spoof," so that everyone who hears him start up with "The planet's got a fever" will immediately think, "and the only prescription is more cowbell!"

After John Edwards withdrew from a Nevada debate sponsored by Fox News (to paraphrase Monty Python, "Yes, brave John Edwards turned about / And gallantly he chickened out, / Bravely taking to his feet, / He beat a very brave retreat"), and after Kate Michelman touted him as potentially the first female president, CNN correspondent Carol Costello complained of "neocons" deliberately "feminizing" Edwards. Now you won't need to try pointing out how Edwards and his friends are doing just fine in that regard all by themselves. Moron offset: Just have CNN grant one day's free advertising to the NFL Network or bring in Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield to discuss his book Manliness.

Jesse Jackson penned an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times in which he said that the "definition of a decent economy" was a "job for every person willing and able to work," claimed that for three decades "the United States has built jails for those unable to find work," and stated that "For those who don't graduate from high school, the situation is at deep Depression levels." Continued...