This becoming almost uncomfortable to watch.

Unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge that their beloved Drudge Report has, despite increasingly desperate efforts in recent days to tangle up the Obama campaign, lost its influence this campaign, proud Beltway Drudge-ologist are sticking with their script that Matt Drudge still rules their world.

The latest to tip his hat is Time's Mark Halperin, who writes up an item on The Page that suggests, via photoshop, the all-powerful Drudge is calling the shots from the Oval Office

The news? “For the second straight day, powerful Internetist tries to tip the flow against Obama,” Halperin writes.

Second day? It's more like 22nd day, but who's counting. Halperin adds, “Follows recent pattern of posting things that seem not to help Obama -- including Biden's Orlando TV interview, the closer sets of polling data and more.”

This is where the playing dumb becomes unbearable. If the press wants to ignore the fact that Drudge has become a bystander during this campaign, completely unable to alter the unfolding events in any significant way, so be it. But this whole phony Beltway narrative that Drudge is impossible to predict; that he's such an iconoclast he keeps everybody guessing, is really too much to take.

Let's give it a rest, okay? For nearly ten years Drudge has been a professional Dem hater and this White House campaign has been no different as he's used his site as a transparent conveyor belt to advertise the latest from the RNC oppo department.

Press insiders like Halperin won't acknowledge the truth, but his campaign has revealed Drudge for what he is, a partisan hack who has lost his juice.