MORE GOOD NEWS. The butched-up Kerry campaign seems to be working. Evidence: it has inspired Deep Thoughts on manhood from the Ole Perfesser. First, apparently after doing bong hits all night with his much smarter father, the Perfesser hallucinates Kerry morphing into LBJ: "The constant photos of Kerry with Harleys, guitars, guns, and soldiers... it's, like, blowing my mind." OK, he didn't say the last clause, but he did say,

Lyndon Baines Johnson was another President with a silver star and a short combat career who seemed to feel that he had a lot to prove. Might Kerry's rather clear desire to be seen as a tough guy make him a surprisingly resilient warrior? Or might it backfire, as it most likely did with LBJ?

He does answer himself, convincingly, "I don't know," but all hope of drug-induced revelation and the attendant humility before God are dashed when he tells Oliver Willis, understandably confused by the tenured radical's pipe dream, to "read it again," as if Willis were a slow freshman and Reynolds' gibberish A Theory of Justice.

Today Reynolds gets back on the horse at his mainstream media gig."The party that gave us Al Gore's earth tones is now the party of swaggering machismo," chortles the Perfesser. "But it rings kind of hollow." Hollow why? Because Reynolds and his pals say so, that's why -- with references to commedia dell'arte, yet!

What I am actually enjoying here is the sound heard throughout the land of the Right blowing a gasket, because The Big Stiff seems to be putting it over. This drives them nuts for the usual reasons, but what twists the knife is that Kerry's doing it with a schtick they thought they had patented -- oh, they would have included more homosexual panic, of course, but that flag thing, that butch thing, that's got © GOP all over it!

So don't you fret, my children; when the frothers tell you that the Democratic candidate is too manly, that ain't nothin' but good.