WHAT THEY'RE SELLING. Of course it's a plant. The questions are -- or would be, if I cared -- which faction planted the Rumsfeld memo, which faction that faction was trying to screw, and to what end?

Well, maybe the last one does interest me a little.

My suspicion is, whoever did it has at least one wider goal in mind: softening the public up for a "long, hard slog" in the Mideast.

Recent polling shows that while most Americans favor the war effort, an even larger majority is quite anxious to offload at least some of the military responsibilities in Iraq to foreign troops. So they're still following the Leader, it seems, but are getting squeamish about the cost in time, blood, and treasure.

What would you do in this Administration's place? Everyone remembers Bush acting studly in his flight suit, announcing "mission accomplished," and everyone is also aware that the mission isn't accomplished, really; the Bush linguistics team could draw up charts explaning what the President really meant, but your average American isn't interested in that sort of hair-splitting, especially from a guy who positions himself as a straight-talkin' hombre.

POTUS could make speeches about our continuing commitment to the Iraqi people. That would not go over well. An economically becalmed (or, if you prefer, joblessly recovering) country like ours will not be eager to send billions to take care of foreigners.

The trick is to make everyone believe that it's what they wanted all along.

Look at the WMD issue. We'd been encouraged to believe that Saddam would blow us all to smithereens Tuesday if we didn't act fast. Now the smart guys are saying, WMD? Whoever cared about them?

So the idea that Iraq is our albatross has been more subtly introduced, via covert actions like these, so that by the time anyone thinks hard about it (preferably before the next election), it will seem as if we had been expecting a long, hard slog from the beginning.

Yes, I know the President never said "Out by Labor Day!" or "Piece o' cake!" But the coming conflict was described to us in terms of apocalyptic dread. "One crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known" -- 'member that one? Now that we've dispatched Saddam, quickly and at a relatively low cost, the horror-movie rhetoric seems nearly absurd, and a citizen might feel, watching his money flow down an Iraqi sinkhole, as if he might have been conned.

Unless, of course, his memory of the war fever Bush pumped up is less clear than the idea now coursing through the feeder-streams of the press: of course it's a quagmire. What the hell did you expect?

And he'd feel less cause to complain, bless him, because he'd been warned. Retroactively; but still.

JUST GO. Sometimes you just have to applaud. Michael Kinsley's latest, and one of his greatest, is at Slate now.

WHEN I USE A WORD IT MEANS JUST WHAT I CHOOSE IT TO MEAN. Remember the laffs right-wingers had over Clinton's "definition of the word 'is'" statement? (No need to remember, actually -- some of them are still laffing!)

That's understandable. Clinton was parsing a tiny word ridiculously fine, whereas his enemies, recent examples now show, seem to see no meaning in words at all. Or, if there is meaning, it shifts from circumstance to circumstance as needed.

First there was the fuss over the " sixteen little words" regarding yellowcake in the last SOTU. Shown that the claim therein was demonstrably untrue, conservatives tut-tutted their critics' shocking literalism. After all, they told us, yellowcake (and WMD, and whatever) were just rationales, which are not quite the same thing as reasons.

Then they told us that the President should be held blameless for any pre-war misapprehensions about the Iraqi threat, despite all the scary fairy stories about Saddam he had told us, because he never once used the word "imminent."

Now Minister of Information Reynolds is doing his bit for the New Word Order. Brad DeLong has pointed out that the Perfesser seems to change his interpretation of the word "stalker" based on the identity of its speaker. Nonsense, responds the Perfesser, DeLong is being too literal -- the Perfesser was engaging in one of his frequent flights of rhetorical fancy, whereas Paul Krugman is just crazy.

When they can't spin the facts, they spin the language. It seems to be working. Their frequent affronts to reason and common sense seem to be softening what few shreds of brain tissue remain in the skulls of the electorate. They've got guys like this saying with a straight (well, excepting the perpetual sneer) face that, not only was the WMD thing no big deal, the war was basically an exercise in machismo and, like, so what, dude?

How can you argue with that? You can't. Literally.

See how it works?

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser suggests that people think of Democrats as doormats, and counsels that they behave like doormats if they want to win elections.

Does anyone believe this shit? (Pretending to believe it doesn't count. P.S. to Derbyshire: if you schlubs are "the Daddy Party," I hope you have a fucking huge therapy trust fund laid up for the kids.)

INSTAPUNDIT'S ANALYTICAL METHOD REVEALED: " I don't know if this is a national trend, but I wouldn't be surprise to hear that."

BIRDBRAINS OF A FEATHER. Andrew Sullivan again: "A classic limo-lib comment from Joan Didion, former prose master, now, sadly, another generational scold..."

In Sullyworld, your artistic credentials are stripped when he notices that you disagree with him.

David Horowitz, as usual, goes him one better (or worse) by turning on a comrade who agrees with him on the big issues but does not share his bughouse assessment of Bush ("belongs in the rare circle of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as wartime leaders").

Horowitz allows that Paul Berman is an "intelligent man," his book Terrorism and Liberalism is "excellent," and his take on the War is "clear." But because Berman has assailed Bush in the Times, Horowitz goes bipolar on his ass:

Berman is afraid to look in the mirror and see a man who has praised a defender of American capitalism and a man of faith or to give him his due. This is the perfect image of the narrow-minded, self-righteous, arrogance of the political left...

...it would jeopardize the moral superiority he feels as a "progressive" that allows him to look down his nose at those who don't agree with him, shut his his mind to their arguments and close his heart to their humanity. Apparently this is the only way the champions of an idea that has been discredited by a century of misery can maintain their illusions that they are still in the vanguard of history.

Funny, isn't it, that a couple of guys who are always caterwauling about Political Correctness are so sensitive to deviations from their own party line?

CHEAP SHOT OF THE DAY. Andrew Sullivan thinks Tony Blair would have fewer palpitations if he followed Bush's stress-busting "predilection for long vacations at his ranch, attendance to sleep, and regular exercise." Yes, but will the National Health pay for the required lobotomy?

HARMLESS LITTLE FUZZBALLS. The Easterbrook thing gets more ridiculous. Professor Reynolds spotlights a Larry Lessig quote, part of which reads, "But if it fired Easterbrook because Easterbrook criticized the owner, that’s an offense to society, whatever the injustice to Easterbrook — at least when fewer and fewer control access to media."

When fewer and fewer control access to media? Aren't these guys always talking about the blog revolution? Isn't it frequently, if not always, "Advantage: Blogosphere!" around these parts?

These guys have many annoying aspects but, for my money, none more annoying than their constant mood-swings between chest-beating and claims of underdog status.

WE'RE GOING TO OPINIONJOURNAL TO HISS ROOSEVELT! Since being pastured to make room for younger idiots, the Wall Street Journal's Bob Bartley has been taking a long view of things. Now his wormy hand reaches back to smack around FDR. The New Deal, per BB, prolonged the Depression. "He was originally elected to cure the Great Depression; how did he do there?" he asks. "Unemployment was still above 17% on the eve of war in 1939. Most of Roosevelt's acolytes settle for saying he lifted the nation's spirits."

Bartley fails to mention that in 1933 unemployment had been at 24.9.

This kind of flimflam is common among the new breed of anti-New Deal authors. The folks at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, for example, write:

The unemployment rate during the 1933-1940 period averaged about 18 percent and was as high as 28.3 percent in March of 1933. By the end of 1938, on the eve of World War II, the U.S. unemployment rate still hovered at 18 percent, as high as it was in 1933, FDR's first year in office.

Follow that paragraph around the block and you'll see that it's trying to shake you. The author hopes the seven-year figure will distract you from noticing that he has called 18% "as high as" 28.3%.

It's always good to revisit and reassess historical figures and events, but I see bad faith here. Given the hideous mismanagement of our present finances, we could lapse into a new Great Depression presently, and if that happens the Bartleys and Institute boys don't want a New New Deal, in which the rich would be buggered ("Above all Roosevelt raised taxes on 'the rich,'" Bartley notes with horror) and jobs handed out like candy to lucky duckies in the hinterland. "Jobless recovery" is what they're all about -- the uniquely modern notion that the continued enrichment of corporations is more important than the self-sufficiency of citizens. There'll be no "lifting the nation's spirits" with jobs in construction and reclamation that would improve everyone's quality of life, as Roosevelt's programs did -- not if it means an estate tax, by Gad!

Despite the frat-house antics of Jonah Goldberg et alia, today's conservatives still have roots in some old, discredited traditions. They're essentially the same people that created the John Birch Society, protested fluoridation, tried to impeach Earl Warren, and went to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.

Bartley also takes a swipe at Andrew Jackson, using a Daniel Webster quote to imply that the seventh President was the founder of class warfare in the U.S. I, too, would like to think so. Jackson is a good model for the kind of guts we'll need to kick these assholes from their seats of power.

CITIZEN RUTHLESS. Apparently Gregg Easterbrook got fired for a post to which I alluded unfavorably here. (I hadn't referred, though, to his seemingly anti-Semitic coda; I was too disgusted to read down that far. The thing was stupid from top to, apparently, bottom.) And now the blogosphere, including many who were angry about Easterbrook's post, is up in arms.

Professor Reynolds and several of his conventionally-wise men now suggest that Easterbrook was fired, not for writing "Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?" per se, but for dissing executives of a Disney company. Easterbrook has made rude comments about the Mouse before (here's one called "Most Embarrassing Disney Senior Management Moment"), but by this scenario, Michael Eisner waited till Easterbrook made himself vulnerable before dispatching this anti-Mouseketeer.

I don't think Easterbrook should have been axed either, but I note with interest that Reynolds et alia have rushed to make this an issue of Independent Blogger vs. Big Media, one of the Professor's preferred punching bags. It strikes me as a typical political trick: take a straight-up free-speech issue and stick it, with no evidence whatsoever, to a largely Democratic interest group. Easterbrook's progress from an accursed vendor of "racist garbage" to a victim of the moguls is just a little too quick and convenient to convince.

If they can get him a gig at Slate or Fox News, all well and good. Otherwise he can labor without pay like the rest of us.

THE PAST SEVERAL POSTS: UPON OFFICIAL REVIEW... Man, I'm in a mood. Maybe I should stop watching baseball playoffs. With the time I wasted on the Division and League games I could have built a small house. Plus, yelling at a TV screen does nothing for my already acerbic personality. I should spend more time on subjects that are good and wholesome, and cute. Like puppies. But if I did, it would probably come out like this.

MORE YANKEE HATRED! Enough of Daniel Henninger's manichaeism -- back to my own! I was looking around for some Yankee-hating stuff to sooth my wounded sense of justice. This is pretty good ("I can't stand those assholes with their shitty stadium and announcer who can't pronounce jack shit, and that's when he actually remembers to. I'm sick of Robert Merrill over-enunciating the national anthem..." Maybe he should revise that last bit to make it about that Irish tenor guy who seems to be there every goddamn night).

But my greatest find is the lyrics page of Christpuncher, who are apparently the new Meatmen. Their anti-Yankees song is pretty cool:

Let's go Bosox
let's go Mets
anyone else
who's fuckin' left
someone else
please take away the crown
and put the Yankees
six feet underground

Now who, as David Huddleston says in Blazing Saddles, can argue with that? But if you're an afficionado of this sort of thing, Christpuncher's other songs are even more amazing -- and if the titles alone ("Fuck You, Jesus," "Beating Off a Clown") don't convince you, maybe this quatrain from "Empty My Colostomy Bag" will:

My bag is filling up
to the very top
please don't yell at me
I cannot make it stop

I should add that, though geniuses, these lads have socially backwards views ("Osama's a Fag") that I cannot endorse. You know, like H.L. Mencken and Jim Lileks.

JESUS FREAK. It starts out as one of those the-religious-right-is-not-so-scary thumbsuckers, but Daniel Henninger's latest quickly veers off into Cotton Mather territory, with a sweeping separation of the elect from the unelect that, you will not be surprised to learn, favors the Republican Party.

"In the 1992 election," Goodman Heninger informs us, "Bill Clinton got 75% of the secularist vote." Hang on, now -- what's the secularist vote? According to Henninger's social scientist sources, Bolce and De Maio, "Democratic secularists are defined as agnostics, atheists or people who rarely attend church, if ever."

I'm confused by that last bit -- given the habits of the Bible-beaters Henninger is using as a baseline, "rarely attend" might mean they only go on Sundays.

Not confusing at all, though, is the strategy Henninger employs here: we're not the freaks -- you're the freaks! Henninger is aware of the Religious Right's poor
image in the eyes of us heathen degenerates -- "the Bible-whacking, shotgun-rack stereotype," he calls it (as if a large part of what scares some of us about these guys were their living accomodations). But they're not like that at all, he says: for example, the first ones he'd met were "educated, 30-something, Texas suburbanites who worked in the technology sector and worried about running their kids' sports leagues."

And wanted to outlaw homosexuality, declare America a Christian nation, and turn over the educational system to preachers, one might add, though Henninger does not. He attempts to shift the onus of singularity to the godless Dems. Did you know that "60% of first-time white delegates at the [1992] Democratic convention in New York City either claimed no attachment to religion or displayed the minimal attachment..."? Did you find this statistic as tormented ("white," "first-time") as I did? Never mind, the message is clear -- Democrats ain't right with Jesus!

And, as inevitably happens when God is whispering in a columnist's ear, Henninger starts naming names:

In terms of their size and party loyalty," Messrs. Bolce and De Maio argue, "secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key constituency, organized labor." In turn this single self-definition tracks political belief across the entire battlefield of the culture wars--abortion, sexuality, prayer in the schools, judicial nominations. Interesting as that is, what intrigues me more as simple politics is how a Howard Dean, John Kerry or Joe Lieberman can feed these creedal beliefs of the "un-religious left" without in time coming themselves to be known as leaders of the party of non-belief? Or hypocrites. It's a hard river to cross.

The linchpin of this outrageous passage is "self-definition" -- I don't know many folks who step up, shake your hand and declare, "Howdy, I'm a secularist!" and I doubt the folks in Bolce's and De Maio's study would, either. But, as slander and tendentiousness go, the rest ain't bad, either, with Henninger in effect telling some Democratic front-runners (including one known for his religiosity) that they should either declare themselves "leaders of the party of unbelief" or be exposed as hypocrites.

One wonders how they would be thus exposed. Mayhap Henninger will assemble a posse of educated, 30-something, Texas suburbanites who work in the technology sector, and loiter outside Joe Lieberman's temple, chanting stuff like "Take off that yarmulke, you!/You ain't a real live Jew!"

HARD TO BE HUMAN AGAIN. But why, Uncle Roy, are you not pleased at the victory of the Yankees?

Well, children, there was once a wonderful comedian named Joe E. Brown, who made the truest statement ever about the Bronx Bombers: "Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel."

But you don't know who Joe E. Brown was, and you don't know what U.S. Steel was. Brown had the greatest exit line in the greatest screen comedy ever. And U.S. Steel was a powerful monopoly; we might compare it to Microsoft today, but you probably love Microsoft, because it produces the operating system that powers your Xbox, notwithstanding that it is inferior in every way to the Apple system that Microsoft has managed to squeeze into near-obsolescence by the unfair advantage of its wealthy patronage.

So there is no way to explain my contempt for the Yankees to you. You love and worship power, and by such as yourselves -- from the pinstriped and suspendered Yuppie assholes bellowing on their highly-polished barstools midtown to the locals who imagine their own powerlessness momentarily reversed by the bats of Jeter and Giambi -- those who, out of fear or ignorance, would never allow themselves to stick up for anyone who has ever been down -- no appeal to what was once called soul could possibly be heard.

But to those of us who love what is best in this city -- the old Brooklyn Dodgers fans, the Mets fans, the champions of the meek and downtrodden, those who remember the dear, dirty New York before Giulianification and still try to make sense and art in the sterile canyons and joyless, smokeless bars of its pathetic remnants -- the Yankees will always be the well-fed champions of privilege, pusillanimity, pussification, and everything that anyone with a shred of soul -- who is still, in a word, human -- is duty-bound to despise.

Go Marlins.

Well I've been punched and beaten
Though it never shows
I'm going up to Sheffield
I don't know when I'm coming home...
Searching for existence with my red, red wine
It's hard to be,
Hard to be human again

LEARN TO SPEAK WONK AS WELL AS NERD AND DORK. I told you Sasha Castel can give good info. Via SC, here's a current-events pronunciation guide. Never be embarrassed in front of your tight-ass JFK School of Gov friends again.

I LOVE BUSY BUSY BUSY. If not for them, I'd never have known that Mickey Kaus looks exactly like Dan Hedaya.

TODAY'S NUT. Well, he's right about one thing:

Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there?

I and all thinking people say this at least once a day, of course. But Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin answers his own question thusly: Bush was installed by none other than Jesus K. Rist hisself. Read more of his ravings here.

THE DIRTY WORK OF CONQUEST. Electrolite points to a horror story in the Independent, about U.S. forces in Iraq destroying groves of rare date palms to punish intranisgent locals.

I suppose the story could be fraudulent or a misinterpretation of facts. It wouldn't be the first time we got fake testimonials from Iraq.

It passes the smell test, anyway. Because even the nicest occupier will sometimes have to play rough with the citizenry.

And we are occupying Iraq. That thought is seldom expressed these days, as we debate the significance of Governor Wolfcastle and what the definition of the word "imminent" is. But we did invade and take over a foreign country, and we are now running it. And this situation will always entail, along with the statue-toppling and the little girls with flowers, the dirty work of conquest.

We can argue about the right and wrong of this particular case, and we have, and we will. But something else is eating at me now, as my attention has been jerked back to the subject by the aforementioned article. This occupation is going to last a while and it's going to cost a lot. The $87 billion is just the tip of the iceberg. Already we're rotating our troops less often, squeezing more out of each serviceman.

So while the question of Administration prevarication is meaningful, it's also kind of important to look at what their malfeasance has got us into. Even if every story about restored schools and liberated children's jails is true, even if this adventure has been a great net plus for the Iraqi people, what will it be, ultimately, for America? Spare me the children's stories of national greatness, and tell me how this will work out better for us than it did for, say, this guy.

THE BRIDGE DECK AT SAN LUIS REY. I used to live on Staten Island, and the less said about it the better, but the ferry trips were the best part of it, especially when I rode home on the exposed starboard bridge deck available on the older vessels, and enjoyed the lovely views of the Jersey coast and the Statue of Liberty. It never occurred to me that the thing could crash. In fact, I was surprised when, a few years back, one of the boats foundered in a storm. I can't even imagine the hull being torn like a tin can on impact, let alone 10 dead and scores horribly injured.

So the report that the Andrew J. Barberi "appeared to speed up when it should have slowed down for docking" is shocking. I recall the pleasureable sensation of the boat reversing its engines and nosing in between the docks; at worst a clumsy entrance meant the sides of the hull would graze the pylons, causing a small, bracing jolt. This occasioned mild groans, gasps, and laughter among the passengers, especially those of us on the foredeck. That must have been what the Barberi passengers were expecting till the last moments, and I shudder to envision myself among them -- or, for that matter, in the place of the pilot, who apparently tried to kill himself after the accident.

There's a guy in Chicago suffering mightily because he tried to catch a foul ball two nights back and appeared, in the superstitious world of baseball, to fatally reverse the Cubs' momentum in the playoffs. I hope he and his fellow Cub fans understand that fate deals blows hard and soft, according to cosmic whims far beyond our ken, and that this constant rain of suffering is only alleviated by good luck and mercy.

THEY'RE ALL AGAINST US! "Not reviewing Coloring the News was, in my view, the journalistic equivalent to the 'blue wall of silence' that the Times often decries..."

...writes the author of Coloring the News.

Later on, a "friend who works at the New York Times" tells this author, quote, "We're gutless careerists. What can I say? The treatment your book got dramatizes the power that liberals have to dominate the discourse and to shut down--or try to shut down--dissidents or those who have alternative points of view."

Quite a mouthful. I would discourage Mr, Goldberg from applying his talents to the dramatic field until he learns to write dialogue that doesn't sound like a political version of the "I Am Muscular Dystrophy and I Hate People, Especially Little Children" monologue they used to do on the Jerry Lewis Telethons.

My own writings are also sadly neglected. I blame Bush.