... that ABC should be considered nothing but a mouthpiece for the White House. "Well, the White House said we were wrong, so that's our admission of error. Because obviously you can believe anything the White House says. We do - even when it says we're wrong."

... so much smarter than everyone else, sometimes they can't comprehend the truth. When we finally find that pony and Krauthammer's paradise-on-earth (guns, oil and war) comes to pass, those of us who are left will thank him.

When you're ...

... so much smarter than everyone else, sometimes they can't comprehend the truth. When we finally find that pony and Krauthammer's paradise-on-earth (guns, oil and war) comes to pass, those of us who are left will thank him for his lies.

Sorry. I omitted the last three words in my previous post.

If getting an expensive haircut makes Edwards a hypocrite because he says he cares about poor people, does that mean that the Republican candidates, who have expensive suits, get expensive haircuts and drive expensive cars, are OK because they don't care about poor people?

I just want someone to come out and say that.

Whether it's feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, queer or racial criticisms of literature, history and sociology, no one, not even conservatives (with the possible exception of Harold Bloom), has held to the silly belief that writing, or any other form of human expression, is simply "interesting and worthwhile" and not invested with ideological significance. This silly liberal shibboleth died decades ago with the eclipse of the New Criticism.

I'll take your word on this stuff, not being too educated in this area myself, but there's a simpler way to take this silly belief apart: WHY is something "interesting and worthwhile"? Because of its ideological or humanistic or whatever kind of significance.

The Edwards haircut story is NOT "intersting and worthwhile." Because it is about nothing.

... rhyme. That made them much harder to write than the Frist manifesto.

Pardons used to be for people who had already served their time and had led exemplary lives for decades, or in whose cases new exculpatory evidence had been found or someone else had confessed. On the state level, as far as I know, it still basically is this way.

The casual, off-handed "conservative" acceptance of the idea that the president can, and should, simply and imperially undo any criminal conviction that he doesn't like is reaching new heights. (You could argue whether it started with the Bush/Iran-Contra pardons or the Ford/Nixon pardon. And yes, yes, droolers, some of Clinton's pardons were kinda sketchy.) And it shows where they're at - someone who is On the Side of Good simply should never go to jail for anything.

For now, that is - under a Democratic president, watch the whiplash begin.

World War II was a leap in the dark?

... is really where the hypocrisy lies. Pardons, historically, are for people who have served their time and led exemplary lives for decades, or for people for whom exculpatory evidence has been dug up. The idea that a president can just wave his hand and free a convict, especially someone who was convicted for something he did on the president's behalf, is so completely undemocratic that only the Republicans could've dreamed it up.

Yes, I throw a bone to the drooling right - some of Bill Clinton's pardons were sketchy. But nothing like the Nixon pardon, the Iran-Contra pardons and any prospective Libby pardon. Those real and potential pardons really show where these guys are at.

... the Justice Department serves at the pleasure of the president, doesn't it?

In World War II it was called "window." Excellent analogy.

There's going to be hell to pay in September if there isn't Progress in Iraq by then.

In other news, there's Progress in Iraq! A general told me!

... not a real covert agent.

Like the shape-shifting T-1000 cyborg of Terminator 2, Patrick Fitzgerald's claim that Valerie Plame was a covert agent, and that therefore Scooter Libby deserves a harsh sentence for supposedly outing her, not only won't die a proper death due to lack of proof, it keeps mutating into new forms. Of all the curious behavior associated with the Libby case, that of the CIA's director for the past one year, stahnds out for its puzzling obtuseness.

Nearly 20 years after the defeat of communism, the rise of Stalinist thinking in the West as presented in Glenn's last two columns is still breathtaking. It never occurs to Tony Blair, or to this American "Thinker," that they might be, um, mistaken.

They will never believe that Plame was a covert agent. In order to fit this into their already fully-formed view of the world, they say things like, Plame couldn't have been covert because she traveled under her real name ...

Aw, c'mon. Real covert agents never use their real names. Any right-wing foreign-policy expert who has watched a bunch of James Bond knockoff movies knows that.

But the underlying point here, the thing that drives their continued denials of obvious facts, is their conviction that the CIA is weak, liberal, anti-Bush, and therefore traitorous. Nothing the CIA ever says will hold water with Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, or the "great minds in their own minds" over at NRO. The CIA is the enemy.

That enemies list is getting longer every day. This really is lapsing into mental illness.

I think basically what it has accomplished is what Bill Maher (and perhaps others) have called "the wash." Maher's example was Kerry and Bush's respective Vietnam War records; the RWNM basically tore at it fact-free untli people just said, "Oh, whatever. There's no telling what the truth is."

Now, a certain percentage will always wonder whether about the CIA.

Is this what you meant?