Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy totally reamed the national press corps as a bunch of "despicable" scandalmongers in a screamy speech on the House floor yesterday. The media sprang into action to prove him right.

Click to viewThe funny thing about this clip (from the upcoming season premiere) of South Park's Eric Cartmen asking for, and receiving, 500 AK-47s, is that it is based on a real thing that Blackwater did in Afghanistan.

When the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran abandoned his war-zone embed with the Marines in Afghanistan last week for "personal reasons," military officials thought it sounded serious. But he just needed to go hang out with Matt Damon.

Charlie Wilson's war is over. Wilson, the Texas congressman whose love of booze, cocaine, women, and secret CIA-run wars supporting Osama bin Laden's friends in Afghanistan was memorialized in a film starring Tom Hanks, has died of a heart attack.

Kabul residents say US soldiers murdered an imam who was sitting peacefully in his car with his three children. "After they shot him, they didn't stop, they just kept driving," said one witness. The US military confirms the killing. [WP]

Okay, maybe that's putting it too strongly. But in the past 24 hours we've learned two strange and delightful things about the cradle of the Taliban that give us hope.

They weren't necessarily the best, just the most popular. You saw our least popular posts before getting trashed on New Year's Eve. Before you stop caring, here are the 20 most clicked on posts of 2009.

They weren't bad posts, just misunderstood. Nevertheless, we wrote them and you didn't want to read them. Ladies and gentlemen, these are the least popular Gawker posts of 2009.

Michelle Lang, a Calgary Herald reporter, was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan yesterday. The blast also killed four soldiers. Earlier this year, the National Newspaper Awards named her best beat writer in Canada. She was 34. [Calgary Herald]

Two examples of downright, calculating festive nefariousness have happened today in Afghanistan and China. One set of media-savvy people wanted to hide their cruelty and the other wanted to show it off. See if you can guess which is which.

Spencer Ackerman has composed a very helpful (and optimistic?) explanation of what, exactly, our "end game" in Afghanistan is, and how it relates to the Endless War On Terror Forever. We are totally going to defeat al-Qaeda everyone!

As the war in Afghanistan intensifies, the New York Times has relieved its Kabul bureau chief Carlotta Gall of her duties, ostensibly so she can do more reporting. She's not happy about it and hasn't been showing up for work.

On the afternoon of September 1, 2009, Gawker launched a wide-ranging, multi-front investigation into the hazing practices of a State Department contractor in Kabul. About an hour later, we published the shocking results. Today, the State Department listened.

We're in such a rush to get the hell out of Iraq that we're leaving as much as $30 million worth of equipment there. "In Iraq, people drive around in new Yukons, Suburbans, Envoys," said one official. Sweet rides! [WaPo]

President Obama's new Afghanistan policy seems like basically the Afghanistan policy he kept promising he'd pursue doing the campaign, so why is everyone so surprised? Unfortunately for America, there is concrete, inescapable proof that it will not work:

It was easily one of the 50 most important speeches Barack Obama will ever give: Tonight, he made the case for why he's sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. (Oh, and terrorists? They still want to kill us.)

The Pentagon is mad at the White House because the White House insists on giving an accurate prediction of the cost of troop escalation in Afghanistan.

Rohde's remark suggests that other press blackouts, like the one enforced for seven month by the New York Times as it tried to negotiate Rohde's release, are currently in place regarding abducted reporters.

Barack Obama's decision to think really hard about what to do in Afghanistan has been praised by most people who aren't Dick Cheney. Peggy Noonan tackles it in today's column, and by "it" we mean JFK and 50-year-old TV shows.

Blogger Michael Yon—one of the few people to break the New York Times' news blackout over the kidnapping of reporter David Rohde in Afghanistan—reports via Twitter that former CIA operatives paid a ransom to secure Rohde's release.