Okay, the wishy-washy mod-dem who repeated the "Dems were punished for defunding 'Nam" myth was Mark Shields, not EJ Dionne: http://www.creators.com/opinion/mark-shields.html?columnsName=msh

Meanwhile: Good God, people -- I'm not Joan Walsh's biggest fan, but some of you people are nuts. She wrote a piece that meshed 99% with what y'all are saying and thinking, and you go rip her ovaries out on one place where you and she disagree? Stand back and look at what you've become: reflexive, unthinking rage machines. You're going to be ashamed of what you all wrote to her later on.

I meant to say that in 1974, the Dems picked up 49 House and 3 Senate seats -- some "punishment" for ending the Vietnam War.

1) While 70% of Americans say they oppose the war, they balk at stopping it by defunding it. Poll after poll typically has approval of defunding the war at or below 50% at best.

2) E. J. Dionne pointed out what has become conventional wisdom: The last time the Democrats stopped a war by defunding it -- Vietnam -- the Republicans pushed their Dolchstoß 2.0 "we woulda won if not for the cowardly traitor backstabbing Democrats taking away our funding!" spiel to electoral gains. (Except that they really didn't -- remember, this was 1974, the height of Watergate. They actually did well that year, picking up 49 seats in the house and three in the Senate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_elections%2C_1974 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections%2C_1974.)

And yes, a fourth-tier, barely-accredited madrassa like Regent deserves all the scorn it gets.

Thanks for the good news, Joan -- last I'd heard (http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/they-must-have-bought-him-off/), Wolfowitz was wimping out. But if he makes good on his threat to take down the World Bank's leadership, then we can say good riddance to an outfit which did everything it could to preserve untamed oncological capitalism at the expense of the commonweal.

This is just like what happened with the London Times when he bought it. He was hoping for prestige; instead, his trashing of the paper -- it's nothing more than News of the World with a posher typeface -- has reflected badly upon him. And if/when he gets the WSJ, he won't get any respectability -- instead, he'll destroy whatever respectability the WSJ currently has.

Let Murdoch have the dead-tree physical plant. Nobody will pay for the WSJ when its news content is as worthless as its editorial section -- and then Murdoch will be stuck with an expensive building full of expensive and high-maintenance machinery.

But I can see the axed reporters banding together to form their own news service. If they do it right, they won't even need a "home office" -- they can stay in touch online. The beauty of this is that the people Murdoch's most likely ax are the ones who are the best reporters.

Have you been following a similar exchange between TNR's Jonathan Chait and blogger Ezra (no relation) Klein? Chait keeps trying to move the goalposts on that discussion, too.

Of course Joke Line and Chait have to do everything they can to confuse, distract and divert, because they know full well that if they tried to argue their points honestly, they'd lose.

I posted about this today over at my blog.

What's truly evil about this is not the fact that he was heaved into jail and raped for five weeks on the pretext of an almost-expired (but still legal) passport simply because he dared to sass back at airline personnel over a lost laptop, but the number of goose-stepping spiritual heirs of Benito Mussolini who think that sassing a flight attendant over the loss of a $1000-plus laptop justifies his being jailed and raped.

You people are callous and evil beyond my ability to express it.