It's this: imagine, if you will, what a secret operative for the GOP would sound like on a forum like this: he'd repeat every right-wing manufactured perception, whine and bitch and moan, and then make some half-hearted comment or other. He'd call Democrats "lame." He'd zero in on one candidate or another -- most often the front-runner -- and mischaracterize something they said and say what hopeless idiots the majority of Dems were for supporting that candidate. He'd never give a reasonable alternative. His objective would be demoralization and rancor.

Now contrast that to the posters here. Oh, wait a minute, for a lot of the contributors here I couldn't tell the difference. It's obvious that a lot of people take their own poisoned perceptions and spit it out to prove how sophisticated they are, and how superior their brain is to Big Dumb Dems.

I think you're the ones who are gutless, and who have forgotten how to rally together and win.

Dear Anonymous. Thank you for your entry in the Profiles of Courage, viciously lambasting the mass party of the left for not being the Sparticist League. Your comments have been noted. Oh, but I don't have any idea what brave man said them.

If Tammy Haddad has been responsible in the slightest for Hardball, what's the evidence that she's competent? Is this going to be another thing like pro-war muckamucks being guaranteed a spot at the table no matter how disastrously wrong they are? We need more Hardball?

I suspect, as does much of the world, that Apple's Sept. 5 special event will mean spiffy new iPods, Beatles on iTunes, and God knows what else. The market has driven apple stock up like mad. We'll see.

He has it more than others, anyway. It's not "corporate masters," though the culture of the newsroom has sure changed since I was hanging around in one. It isn't simply that they've mysteriously "gone right," though many have. It's the infatuation with the story line. Clinton had been hit right between the eyes with the Gennifer Flowers thing. Why didn't he fall? He was a miraculously good campaigner, and George H.W. wasn't. "Message: I care." No, you don't, George.

But the relentless story line was that Clinton was a backwoods Lothario, completely without morals, and ravenous in his sexual appetites. A figure out of Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren. So scandal after scandal was nourished, yet none of them were real. They were the sorts of things that happened in novels about policians from Dogpatch. They were so numerous that it's a wonder he didn't step down -- they said he had made money off of Whitewater, but he hadn't. They said he had killed Vince Foster. They said his wife was a lesbian. He sold tainted blood, killed 80 people in Arkansas, dealt cocaine at Mena, and sold our secrets to China just to watch us die. This is a completely fictional character, not Bill Clinton.

The media didn't repeat any of the scurrilous stories, but they were silent first about where they were created -- in the dankest of right-wing dungeons -- and also about the fact that none of them made much sense. The reporters had changed, and the watermark was the OJ trial, or maybe before that, the skater with the crowbar, what was her name? We used to have, actually, a reasonably liberal segment of the press. It was gone by 1992. There's the tepid press, the scared press, the pwned press, and mostly the yellow press. Compare the Washington Post during Watergate to the Washington Post during Monicagate.

So, Somerby's advice is, watch out for the storyline. It's usually a lie. And never, never repeat a Republican, or a yellow, or a tabloid story line about a Democrat. Even if it's true, shut up. If it isn't, and it usually isn't, don't repeat it, throw it back in their teeth.

The Border Patrol agent case has always seemed crystal-clear to me: two cops went outside the law and covered it up. Remember the Perez case in L.A.? The facts were presented at trial, and the jury believed it. End of story. But the right wing are masters of retailing the story of put-upon law enforcement officers, accepting every alibi that cropped up late in their case, the fact that fellow agents testified against them. The supporters of this phony crusade for "Our Beloved Martyrs" are listening to a myth, not the facts. The only reason for progressives to go along with this narrative are because they've become too concerned with their cause to care about facts.

Please remember, of course, the many, many political cases of the past. Remember Mumia Abdul-Jamal and his true believers.

Lou Dobbs has a narrative to set the whole thing in. "Evil, drug-dealing illegal immigrants" make a handy scapegoat, and there's no beating the martyrdom of beloved heroes of the Revolution. What Diane Feinstein is doing here, God only knows.

How about, "Longing for Daddy," with duplicate pictures of Mussolini superimposed with Photoshopped heads of the Republican candidates? Waiting for Daddy, with a Godot-type illustration? Or how about the 60s play title, "Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, the GOP's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Bad"?

Only Apple makes products that break. Over at the NY Times blog, there's a ton of people ranting about how they're "fat," and "16GB is ridiculous," and every other thing. One would wonder if a certain company that makes the Zune has paid shills -- or if somehow, the dominance of the iPod is too much for people who always felt that only Bill Gates has the right to dominate any computing field.

That said, I agree. I think this is an amazing field of products. From $79 to $499, including the iPhone at $399, this is a amazing group of products. My only disappointment? No Beatles anouncement, or concert.