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Sanjaya Malakar has left the building

The day many of you feared would never happen has now happened.

Sanjaya Malakar has been sent home.

I'll give you all a few hours to do your happy happy dance.

(6 hours later)

Now that you all have that out of your system, I can continue.

For weeks now, article after article after article was being posted and published about how people both inside and outside of American Idol were afraid that Sanjaya Malakar would win. And for weeks now, I've been saying the same thing over and over and over: He won't win.

While it is true that Sanjaya was one of my favorites this season, it was obvious during the Top 24 night that he did not have what it would take to win the competition. There was never a danger of Vote For The Worst or Howard Stern or any India call center of garnering enough votes for Sanjaya to win.

So don't you all feel silly now for thinking there was ever a chance? Well, you should.

One of the things that bugged me this season was how many people had negative blinders on when it came to Sanjaya. Even before the show began on any given night, people had already said he was the worst peformer of the night. Yet not one was he ever truly the worst performer on any given night. But many of you refused to even give him a chance. You placed him at the bottom and never once fairly judged him.

He wasn't even the worst this past Tuesday. That honor went to Chris Richardson and his extremely nasally and off-key rendition of [i]Mayberry[/i] (who knew that singing nasally was something people intended to do?). But Chris' mention after his song that he had been affected by the Virgina Tech tragedy garnered him a ton of pity votes this week. If it had not been for that, he would have been the one leaving.

That being said, I'm not disappointed that Sanjaya was the one sent home. After his terrific performance last week, he failed to deliver this week. He had the second worst performance of the night and deserved to be sent home for it.

You can pick up your mouth off the floor now. I did say it. Sanjaya deserved to go home after his performance this week.

I also loved how he exited. While singing his going home song [i]Give them Something About[/i], he exchanged the word "hair" for the word "love" in the chorus. That was priceless.

By the way, anyone who was watching AI when the show started knew that Sanjaya was the one going to be voted off. The only reason AI did that Ryan/Sanjaya exchange for the second week in a row was because Sanjaya was going home. As soon as I saw that exchange, I knew Sanjaya would be the one to go.

Sanjaya, I wish you the best of luck. I know you have a great voice and I look forward to you maturing in it and showing us all what you can really do.

Before I sign off, I want to give my girl Melinda Doolittle some props for how she handeled the obligatory "choose which group of 3 is the top 3" schitck that Ryan does every season.

Every season we wonder how the person picked for this will handle this, and I loved that Melinda just sat down in the center of the stage. Well done girl.

So leave me your thoughts about this week's AI, Sanjaya leaving, and Melinda sitting down.

Tags: Taylor Hicks, American Idol, Birmingham, Alabama