SIMON SAYS. I call her the Crazy Jesus Lady, and at first sight this article certainly suggests madness, conjuring images of CJL abandoning her bench and shopping bags to grab an unsuspecting Terry McAuliffe in the street and scream at him, "Confound them, Terry! Come forward with a stand. It is the stand that is the salvation, not mysterious words or codes or magic messages."

But I have come to think that Peggy Noonan is only mad north-northwest, and that there is a canny method to her suggestion that the Democratic Party take a strong, public stand on Christmas (in favor, in case you wondered). One of the advantages of feigned insanity is that you can say and do things the mentally intact could never dare; a sham loon need not concern herself with appearances, and so is free to rail and gibber toward the end making normal people like the Democratic Chairman very uncomfortable.

Thus McAuliffe is told to "announce that from here on in the Democratic Party is on the side of those who want religion in the public square, and the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall for that matter. Then he should put up a big sign that says 'Merry Christmas' on the sidewalk in front of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters on South Capitol Street. The Democratic Party should put itself on the side of Christmas, and Hanukkah, and the fact of transcendent faith." And what can the poor man do? To decree publicly that, as Noonan declares, "the Constitution does not say it is wrong or impolite to say 'Merry Christmas'" would be tantamount to insisting that kittens are cute or that ice cream is tasty. I assume (indeed hope) that McAuliffe is willing, in his quest for votes, to play the fool -- but to imitate a clear and present fool would be disastrous.

To announce that the Democratic Party supports Christmas is not a first step toward consensus-building, but a step (and it wouldn't be the Dems' first, alas) in a ridiculous game of Simon Says that would be followed in short order by patriotic declarations of faith in baseball, clean living, microwavable popcorn, and better-tasting calcium supplements for women -- while outside the field of play, wars rage and the economy collapses. The Democrats would always be a step behind in this game, as their opponents are calling the shots, and would become ever more worried and insecure at the prospect of doing something that Simon didn't Say. Hell, a lot of them already are.

It's a neat trick she's pulled, and suggests that our Crazy Jesus Lady is only putting on her antic disposition. In a way that's reassuring, as it alleviates somewhat the nagging feeling that our national debate is led by the clinically insane. But then you have to worry about the people who listen to her.

SCHADENFRAUD. In classic form, the Crazy Jesus Lady tells some warm, fuzzy stories about her old boss Dan Rather, then concludes that he is a rube who got bought off in Saville Row suits and pseudo-sophistication by evil liberals of the Edward R. Murrow school, and cheers his departure. This really brings to mind the old Gore Vidal line: "All the attributes of a dog, except loyalty."

Bonus mendacity: Noonan fondly recalls Richard Nixon, who in her imagining was harried by smug reporters "because Watergate seemed to illustrate what reporters knew, just knew, was the secret truth residing in Richard Nixon's dark heart: a desire for enemies lists and break-ins and IRS reviews." It does sound awful of them, till one recalls that the reporters were absolutely right. Which, it would seem, is the real reason Noonan is cheered that one of them went down.

SLUMMING WITH THE CRAZY JESUS LADY. You may recall Peggy Noonan went freelance a little while back. She gave the impression that she would be heading into the shit, so to speak, because while she had worked in the White House (insert modest cough here), "There are others, however, lower down on the power pole, who might benefit from another hand on deck. I've called a few this week and they've been welcoming and I'll see if I can add to their fortunes. If I can't I'll at least try not to sink them." Bravely laughing off her unpaid leave from the Wall Street Journal, she added, "This will take a bite out of my finances but I can do it. Actually most of us, when we die, wind up with a few thousand dollars in the bank. We should have spent it! I am going to spend mine now..."

Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Visions of Peggy painting signs and churning the mimeograph in a bedraggled storefront danced in my head.

But look where I found Crazy Jesus Lady will be in a couple of weeks:

...U.S. Department of Treasury Secretary John Snow will address more than 700 restaurateurs from across the country at the 19th Annual National Restaurant Association Public Affairs Conference. During the conference, held September 13-14, 2004 at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington, D.C., restaurateurs will meet with members of Congress to discuss legislative issues and their impact on the restaurant industry, as well as listen to high-ranking opinion leaders, members of Congress and administration officials...

Other guests will include: Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL); Peggy Noonan, political commentator and writer...

A ticket to this conference costs $145. Oh, and there's a story on her in Time this week.

That "few thousand" in her bank account must be looking pretty damn secure right now.

CRAZY JESUS LADY GOES FREELANCE:

I do not think a lot of modern conservatives have taken on their philosophy because they were brought up in it, schooled in it, and swallowed it whole. And I don't think a lot of them became conservatives because they read a book by Hayek or Adam Smith and thought, "Ah ha, this seems sound!" I think a lot of people in our time who have become conservatives did it because they had a certain and particular kind of mind...

...the kind that goes Hey, this is E-Z! I just gots to remember 9-11 and the sancticity of marriage! Such folk will rejoice to know that Peggy Noonan is comin' to inspire them!

...a week ago, while watching the Democratic convention, I made a decision.

I am going to take three months' unpaid leave from The Wall Street Journal and attempt to support the Republican Party in the coming and crucial election... This will take a bite out of my finances but I can do it. Actually most of us, when we die, wind up with a few thousand dollars in the bank. We should have spent it! I am going to spend mine now.

Noonan has been a speechwriter for Reagan and Bush I, a CBS producer, an NYU professor, a Wall Street Journal columnist, an MSNBC and NBC commentator, and author of several books. She also got upwards of 50 grand for services to Enron before they went down in flames. If she only has a "few thousand dollars" in the bank, maybe she had a bad night rolling bones with Bill Bennett.

What the Crazy Jesus Lady will do for the GOP is at present a mystery. All she will reveal is, "I decided it's good to be on TV in whatever venue seems right when you feel you have something important you want to say." Maybe she will stand outside the Today Show studios early in the morning, waving a cardboard placard saying JESUS HATES DEMOCRATS. Maybe she'll replace Dennis Miller's chimp. Or maybe she will get a local public access TV show that features miraculous appearances by the Virgin Mary and denunciations of homosexuals.

I for one will miss her.

I CRY THEE MERCY THEN, FOR I HAD THOUGHT/THAT THOU HADST CALLED ME ALL THESE BITTER NAMES. Some time back, Meryl Streep told the press that to prepare for the evil political mom in The Manchurian Candidate, she watched tapes of Karen Hughes and our own Crazy Jesus Lady, Peggy Noonan.

Catching wind of this, rightwing operatives from the backwoods of Tennessee to the closets of Los Angeles to the lowliest Internet tide-pools came out to insist that Streep was playing Hillary Clinton. Some normally astute people got fooled as badly by this disinformation as did the usual retards.

When operatives were reminded in public forums of Streep's comments, they said Streep was actually wrong about herself, or just pretended not to hear.

The masterpiece of the mobilization is in today's column by Streep's study subject herself, Peggy Noonan, in which she claims "People think the evil woman Meryl Streep plays in 'The Manchurian Candidate' is Hillary because, well, they've seen Hillary make a speech."

This is pure evil genius, friends, right up there with Richard III's turnaround on Margaret ("'Tis done by me, and ends in 'Margaret'"). If I didn't hate the bastards so much, I'd give 'em a golf clap.

YOUR LATEST SLICE OF NUTCAKE. Kerry likes the poet Langston Hughes -- his "Let America Be America" slogan comes from a Hughes poem, and he contributed prefatory comments to a Hughes collection. Since Hughes was a Communist for a while, this shows, by somebody's idea of close reading, that the Democratic candidate presumptive's campaign theme is "Anger, Bitterness, Cynicism, and Communism." Mike Poterma at The Corner decrees that "Just a couple more steps in this direction, and they will find themselves on the wrong side of a Goldwater/McGovern-level blowout." Patriots everywhere concur.

But before they go after Kerry, they'd better get on the hotline to one of their own. The Crazy Jesus Lady recently wrote an encomium to Lorraine Hansbury's "A Raisin in the Sun." "I love this play," Peggy Noonan gushed. "I've seen it several times..." Hansbury, of course, named her play after a line from a poem by Langston Hughes, so Hansbury, by the prevailing logic, is just as bad as John Kerry.

You all better be careful. A lot of your favorite writers might be just as bad. That goes for Euripides and Kit Marlowe, too.

WHY DOES THE CRAZY JESUS LADY HATE AMERICA?

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry.

(insert child's long, querulous "whyyyyyyy?")

He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"... "A return to normalcy," with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

Additional content: Peggy likes pretty flowers. She didn't like them when she was reading Kafka and Sartre, but that's all over now. Peggy likes pretty flowers.

She writes from London, where perhaps she was sent for her health.

THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM. Crazy Jesus Lady wrings a few more laughs out of the Reagan funeral. I've never before heard anyone make reference to Former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's "still-saucy or potentially saucy eyes." I can only imagine what the long version of that reminiscence was like. Hopefully when CJL passes they'll crack open her Virgin Mary statue like a piñata and find it stuffed with Lynne Cheney style bodice-ripping stories starring a cadaverous public servant with fire, or at least sauce, in her eyes.

We also get to see CJL imagine herself in mortal peril again. The first such incident I noticed was when she saw two turbaned men taking pictures of St. Pat's, and made a promise (alas, unfulfilled) that the next time this happened she would be "tackling them and screaming for help." In the present case, she had better reason to worry, if U.S. Capitol personnel were indeed screaming "Run for your lives!" It turned out a false alarm, thank goodness, but even fake crises come with life lessons in Noonanland. "This is when a generational transfer of power occurred within my family. My son turned to me and in a tone both soft and commanding he said, 'Mom: Move it.'" Strong men are always coming to the rescue of the Crazy Jesus Lady, but it is touching that in this case it was not Reagan or John Wayne but a presumably real member of her own family who undistressed the damsel and was rewarded for his firmness with "a Japanese beer." (Manhood rites have deteriorated a bit since I was a boy.)

No personal attacks this time, but all in all a fun read.

MADE FOR EACH OTHER. Peggy Noonan's Reagan funeral coverage contained a strange, hard swipe at some of her former White House speechwriting colleagues ("wrote the same speech over and over... I think he spent the rest of his time getting haircuts," "National Hack Memorial," "malignant leprechaun," etc). I have been directed (thanks, Bill) to a hostile response to Noonan by one Jack Wheeler ("cheap, inexcusable," "For all her self-promotion, the facts are that she never wrote many major presidential speeches and had quite limited access to the president," "she was never part of the team," etc).

Wheeler is a true find, with a fascinating backstory: according to his bio, "He has retraced Hannibal’s route over the Alps with elephants;  led numerous expeditions in Central Asia, Tibet, Africa, the Amazon and elsewhere, including 18 expeditions to the North Pole;  and has been listed in The Guinness Book of World Records for the first free fall sky-dive in history at the North Pole." His fullsome reaction to Noonan, whom he once called his "friend," is not surprising once you realize that he reacts rather intemperately to women he doesn't like. In an article about Janet Reno called "America's Saddam?" he says that "the depravity of Waco" will, "Unless expunged through public revulsion of Janet Reno... remain an ineradicable stain on America's soul." On Hillary Clinton: "There is no lie she won't tell, no friend she won't destroy, no pledge she won't break, no slander she won't spread, no political dirty trick she won't employ in order to reside in the White House again, this time as the POTUS." Of Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, top of the Abu Ghraib chain of command, he writes that her failure to respond to (unmade) calls to resign proves that "She has taken them like a woman -- whining, making excuses, and complaining that it’s not her fault, that she’s being 'scapegoated.'"

Given his disdain for "the current hysteria over the 'abuse of Iraqi prisoners," it is hard to see why resignation would be the manly course of action. Maybe it's the vitamins; in his spare time, Wheeler stumps for Life Enhancement pills. In this service he authored an odd piece in which he included, with evident approval, this quote from LE icon Sandy Shaw:

I think that as a whole, women in general tend to vote for people who promise to take care of them. They seem to have an assumption of helplessness that may lie in a genetic tendency to produce less or be less sensitive to noradrenaline. For example, look at the Republicans' problems with the so-called 'soccer moms' who are upset that government programs may be taken away. They are unwilling to say, 'I can handle my situation and don't need some government handout.' Just look around -- how many women do you see fighting the system and being truly politically incorrect? We need a lot more women like Margaret Thatcher or Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth [R-ID], but unfortunately they are rare.

Wheeler also approves of Mrs. Thatcher, presumably because she hasn't done anything to piss him off yet.

We can see that Wheeler would make a formidable nemesis for the Crazy Jesus Lady. I only hope they draw this thing out.

OUT FOR A SMOKE. Crazy Jesus Lady is freeform today -- young people are stupid liberals, Europeans should bend the knee to Rome, etc. -- but at one point in her unmoored ravings, she lights on the topic of smoking:

...as we all know, the banners of cigarettes are on and of the left, and the resisters of the banners are on the right... Why did the left change its stance on what it calls personal freedom regarding cigarettes and cigars? What was the logic? And please, if you are on the left, would you answer this question for me?

Listen, Crazy Jesus Lady: I'm as Left as they come. I'm talking entrails-of-the-last-priest Left. And I smoke. I'm down from a pack to half a pack a day, with major regressions. One day I'll quit, either by ceasing to smoke or by dying. Meantime I smoke when I write, after meals, when I'm waiting for a bus, between takes -- oh, the list is endless.

And it has never occurred to me, nor to anyone I know for that matter, that the smoke-stopping Nannyism of, say, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg had anything to do with the Rights of Man and the Third International. Some granola types might egregiously wince and fan their faces when I light up. I just assume they're crunchy conservatives.

Politicians make up a tiny percentage of the population. I don't know how many Democratic officeholders back smoking bans and I'm only interested enough to get the names of the ones I can help vote out of office. I do know that none of the Lefty friends with whom I spend the evenings aborting developed fetuses and drinking toasts to the Devil supports smoking bans. Not one.

Oh, and contrary to another deluded generalization popular in your tribe, we also don't believe in restricting ourselves or anyone else to "politically correct" language, either. You stupid fucking cunt.

STRANGE INTERLUDES.This is how the Crazy Jesus Lady portrays to the world the inner monologue of New Yorkers:

I should get a new dress for the graduation at the Saks sale. They could blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. Meg would love one of those little Chanel knockoffs from the street vender. If New York is bombed while we're in Boston, where will we stay? If Boston is bombed while we're at the graduation, how will we get home? Bring cousin Holly's number in northern Connecticut. Pick up mascara.

Allow me to offer an alternate version:

Ugh, I should have stopped with the third bourbon last night. Looks like it's gonna be cloudy. Should I splurge for a bacon and egg sandwich? Oh, go ahead, live large. What's in the paper? That dead Julliard girl, the Mets blew a big lead, and the usual terrorism bullshit. Maybe grab some OJ too. Alright, let's see what's on the web. OpinionJournal's always good for a laugh. Wow, another column by that brain-damaged hag? Lot of nervous energy this week. Must have stopped taking her pills. That reminds me -- where'd I put the Advil?

CRAZY ON THE COUCH.I have to say I was taken aback by the ill-concealed rage in Crazy Jesus Lady's latest, an account of E.L. Doctorow's speech at Hofstra and his comeuppance. Normally she speaks of her many enemies in a dismissively gentle tone, as though it were more Satan's fault than theirs that they have been led unto sin and therefore damned. But she calls Doctorow "Fast Eddy," talks ahout his "boorishness,' and claims that Doctorow "manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill." (I think she means Doctorow uses the quill, not the non-readers. That's how mad CJL is -- she can't even properly place her modifiers!)

Why such spasmodic rage? One idea is suggested by a gag the New Yorker pulled at Crazy's expense in April. In one of their "Hundred Days" multiple-choice questions about current events, they asked readers to match bits of commentary on Bush with their authors. Four of the five selections were devastatingly negative ("worst President ever") and authored by people like Richard Reeves and Michael Kinsley. One, though, went like this: "A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift." And this was the Crazy Jesus Lady's.

CJL has been well-compensated for her speechwriting and is praised in wingnut circles for her columns and books. Insofar as her world extends, this would seem a sufficient Valhalla for a loyal operative. But you can tell by her occasional cracks about "intellectuals, academics, [and] local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants," that Crazy is no less affected than others of her sort by that primitive jealousy stirred by the success of credentialed types who sneer at all that is holy and Republican yet somehow, inexplicably, are allowed by the Lord to enjoy good reviews and tenure. For all her faith that the Lord will one day bring her home, she would yet like to make a stop along the way at Montparnasse, and there be made much of. Alas, the nobs think her a outre Pollyanna, and she must settle for the approbation of think-tank nerds and other Crazy Jesus Ladies and Gentlemen.

How it must sting to be excluded and then mocked for her own exclusion. So the Doctorow booing must have come as a waterfall of balm to her scourged ego. In her ecstasy of vindication, she may have forgotten to behave toward Doctorow as a Christian; but that's why the Lord made confessional booths.

VIEW FROM THE RADICAL MUDDLE. The Crazy Jesus Lady reports (or completely makes up) an encounter with a possible swing voter. Like many in the throes of delirium, CJL's poetic sesibility is highly engaged: the swinger "lives in a $250,000 three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that never quite jelled aesthetically... and never quite jelled in human terms either, at least for her. She told me the neighbors seem nice but she doesn't really know them. Which is odd, as she's lived there 22 years... Years ago she still stopped by with a Pyrex dish of baked ziti when new people moved in, but not so much anymore."

Seeing no other point to this exposition, I can only assume CJL is presenting us here with a Dürer allegorical woodcut: where once pyrexed pasta and good fellowship reigned, now neighbors know not one another, as Satan prefers! The swinger lies on a fault-line between evil, rootless cosmopolitanism and sunny, hearty Americanism. CJL has described these two camps before, but with less metaphorical recourse, because her beloved Bush had just "won a war" and America was going the right way; but now even people she knows are tiring of the Leader, and it's time to stand out on streetcorners singing "Throw Out The Lifeline" and holding up lurid pictures of innocence bedazzled by the Dark Lord.

CJL warns us that she had taken no notes, that this is not, properly speaking, an interview, but no warning could prepare us adequately for the Molly Bloom of the Suburbs speechifying that follows:

But Clinton -- he was very smart and he had a great economy but he was a bum. Not just the sex but the money and the pardons and Hillary probably walked out of there with a couch on her head! Bush is a better person. He gets in and 9/11 comes and he handles it. He brought respect back. But he's always too eager to get involved in things. He pushes too much. He's pretty impetuous! It was good in Afghanistan, we got rid of those nuts. But Iraq -- I don't know. Iraq is very --w ho knows? Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was the right thing -- but now we've got this antiwar mess and it's 10 troops today and the Israelis and the Gaza strip and fighting and suicide and kids with backpacks and -- what a big mess.

Based on these ramblings, CJL offers the President advice, which is useless and need not concern us here, for, if there is any truth to the impression CJL has of her allegedly dear friend, then the candidates' logical response should be to visit the homes of such people and wave brightly-colored baubles, flash bright lights, march Barney out for a song, and otherwise employ tricks designed to win the childlike trust of the simple-minded.

But if (I say "if") voters are less moronic than this, Bush is fucked.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY. New Jersey is becoming a place where politicians don't buckle under pressure from their bishops, and scientists use cloning to cure cancer. Give me the more soulful Jersey of insane, violent mobsters.

BLACK LIKE ME. Some quotes of the day, from an observer of the new production of A Raisin in the Sun:

Shall we, as black Americans, assimilate and become like white Americans? Can we turn back to our African roots to find the truth of our people?...

When the character based on Lorraine Hansbury breaks out in a tribal dance we didn't just laugh with delight, we hooted and hollered.

The author is Crazy Jesus Lady, who looks pretty damn white on TV and in her Wall Street Journal stipple portrait, but what do I know?

Anyway, she is justly proud to see a lot of new people -- her people, one imagines -- in a Broadway audience: "The audience was alive. It was so moving and got me kind of choked. I thought, Maybe this is like what it was like when Shakespeare wrote, 'You tell him, Romeo -- Juliet no, don't!'" (I assume she wrote "Juliet, no you didn't!" but the typesetters mistranslated, not being as fluent as she in black idiomatic speech.)

But later CJL has less fun at the show. "I was startled," she writes (or, should I say, hollas). "I turned to my friend. 'We have just witnessed a terrible cultural moment,' I said. 'Don't I know it,' he responded." The cause: audience members applauded a character's announced intention to have an abortion. Of course it's a strange reaction under the circumstances, and I would be inclined to endorse (or, should I say, give mad props to) CJL's attentiveness to the play's spirit. But it turns out it's the audience's support for abortion, not its reading of the text, that startles her, and she lashes out (or, should I say, goes off) on the "moral dullards" of whom she was previously deceived into approving just because their skin was the same color as hers.

Finally she has a request for her readers (or, should I say, for her peops):

...see this great play, and when the moment comes that the young woman announces she might end the life of the child she is carrying, that you would sit quietly and think about what that moment means. And if anyone cheers or hoots or hollers [sic], give them a look. Let them see your silence. Lead with it. Help the people around you realize: Something big is being spoken of here. And we know what it is. And it is nothing good.

Heretofore I have spoken of this woman's mad propensity for angry stares at blameless people, but I will refrain now. What do I know of the strain she's under as a black woman in this society?

MRS. JESUS & THE GENERAL. Were we following the "Shorter" format (invented by D Squared and prefected by Busy Busy Busy, I keep forgetting to mention), today's Crazy Jesus Lady sidewalk homily would reduce to, "The 9/11 Committee witnesses were poilte and collegial, proving once again that everything is Clinton's fault." Accusing Clinton of being a Very Bad Man has become Noonan's "Carthago delenda est," though while Cato hoped for and got the Third Punic War out of his non sequitur, I assume that with her charges of "moral retardation" etc., Noonan is only bucking for a clear view from God's cloud of Clinton being hurled into everlasting darkness at the Last Judgment. In the words of Madonna, it's like a little prayer.

That's why she shows no gratitude to the Commission for offering her yet another excuse for Clintonophobic coprolalia, declaring it should not have been convened. (What our government should be doing for us, she suggests, is "making sure every citizen has a CBN suit, a regulation gas mask and data on how to recognize and respond to a chemical, biological or nuclear incident." Is that to prepare for attack, Crazy Jesus Lady, or to qualify for employment in one of the Bush economy's few job growth markets?)

And she's not alone: General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters also had enough of this consent-of-the-governed bushwa: "Democracy is, by far, the greatest system of government yet created by human genius," concedes the General (perhaps silently adding, "the greatest, that is, until the coming rule of the RALPH PETERS ZOMBIE MOLE ARMY!") "The problem," the General says, "is the elections." While in peacetime these little electoral rituals do "little lasting harm," wartime requires we be more honest about our contempt for the ballot box. "While many domestic issues deserve debate," says Peters, "the War on Terror demands unity of purpose from both parties. It is essential that our enemies understand that we're united in fighting terrorism." So zip it, Mr. Kerry, till the war is over (by Peters' own reckoning, "decades" from now, if ever).

Those of us who remember President Nixon, the bills you have to pay, or even yesterday, might point out that even during the Civil War and World War II, elections were held in which candidates addressed, sometimes vigorously, the conduct of those wars. Insubordination! roars the General, and what's all this talk about history? "The hearings in Washington are history lessons," he says, "...But America is about the future -- about turning our backs on the past..."

Ignorance of the past would be helpful in advancing the General's agenda, no doubt. And in a conflict designed to last many, many years, time is certainly on his side. Repeat it with me now: America has always been at war with Terra... It will come more naturally soon enough.

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."

JUST A TASTE FOR NOW. There's a lot to deconstruct in the latest batshit burble from the Crazy Jesus Lady, and I'm sure others are hard on the case, but for now I just want to point this one lovely orgasmlet from her paen to George W.:

George W. Bush didn't grow up at Greenwich Country Day with a car and a driver dropping him off, as his father had. Until he went off to boarding school, he thought he was like everyone else.

Yeah, that's what made ol' W the Man of the People he is today: those crucial, formative pre-boarding-school years.

LET'S PLAY SPIN DOCTOR. In the course of one of her typically milky, unfocused novenas, the Crazy Jesus Lady challenges her presumably like-minded readers to take part, without pay, in a White House creative exploratory:

The Bush people have to roll it all into, say, one speech, which can be distilled to one paragraph, which people will distill to a sentence or two to explain to themselves and others why they support the president for re-election... What should the Bush paragraph consist of? How to make it new? How to make it memorable, and true? Readers, you are invited to wrap up in one paragraph what the Bush campaign should say as it unveils itself anew.

I would be much more eager to see the responses if I weren't aware that OpinionJournal very carefully screens them. So the cries of "Free Silver!" "Drive the Dusky Invader Southward!" and "Millions for Ethanol, Not One Cent for Deficit Reduction!" will probably not be seen by a wider audience.

CJL adds that "The White House reads this site. They'll see it." Alas, I cannot promise that sort of attention. But if you guys want to run your own paragraphs past the dozens of sleepless graduate students, weisenheimers, and ne'er-do-wells who comprise my audience, feel free to avail the comments feature to do so. I'll start the ball rolling with one of my own:

Funny how the Lord works: he allows the Antichrist to go to 'Nam and make himself a war hero, while his own true servant is forced by circumstance and a fear of examining rooms to spend his war years playing foosball and contributing to the invention of the beer bong. Now the evil one stands draped in glory, while I, like Job, seem destined for the dungheap. If you folks have read your Bible, though, you know which of us is truly God's favorite. P.S. Remember I'm the one that hates fags.

MONEY QUOTE FROM CRAZY JESUS LADY'S LATEST BLATHER: "I am a conservative and do not hope for a Democratic victory, but I do hope for a Democratic fight..."

The rest of the blood issuing from Noonan's stigmata pools into this:

• The Democratic candidates who are likely to win are awful.
  
• All the people who will not win the nomination are nice.
  
• The awful boomer press is nicer now than when they supported that awful Clinton, they don't like that awful Dean.
  
• The nice Gephardt supporters have mud on their nice boots.
  
• Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.

It's enough to make one miss Father Coughlin.