BACK TO POLITICS, ALAS. Well, here I am in my own overpriced (but at least, compared to English abodes, well-heated) Brooklyn apartment, thumbing through the local dispatches. The Madrid bombings, I see, are serving as fodder for the Bush campaign. Some operatives have begun to refer to them as "3-11" -- as if Europeans had heretofore no experience of terrorism.

Yet the Spanish anti-terror demos, which I followed in the English press, make a wonderful contrast to the internecine fist-shaking bullshit our native pot-stirrers favor. Imagine how the neos would respond were the Spaniards' gestures of defiance to terror adopted here! The raised-palm salute, the cries of "a people united will never be defeated" -- hey, where have I heard that before? And they seem to call for unity in the face of attack, rather than for bluestate-redstate enmity. Surely Karl Rove would, in a similar situation, dispatch legions of columnists to correct the situation.

As it is, the cons respond with a head-spinning conversion to multilateralism. Aiming, one supposes, to distract from Bush's maladministration of American affairs, they urge us to vote not for our own interests, but that of our allies: "Think how the world will interpret a vote by America throwing Bush out of office," says Roger L. Simon. "Think of the Kurdish people. Think of the students demonstrating today in Iran."

The solution is obvious: let us eject Bush from the Presidency, and nominate him for Secretary-General of the U.N.

On the lighter side, Peggy Noonan is still nuts. "Could a Republican please say something interesting?" Crazy Jesus Lady asks. "GOP senators and congressmen... need a little spirit of 1994: 'We'll make the very dome of this Capitol vibrate with our energy.'" One imagines Newt Gingrich cranking his mimeograph machine and sneering, "She can talk -- she's still got a job."