I remember when Clinton first took office that he got pilloried for having a $200 haircut on Air Force One on the runway at LAX.

Even worse, he made other planes circle while his hair was so expensively doted on!!

Of course, that part of it was never actually true, though you wouldn't know it from the same newspapers that had reported it a fact on the front page for a week. But like all folklore, the story of the populist with the insanely expensive haircut is bigger and scarier the next time around.

Perhaps we'll learn that Edwards, in fact, had his $500 haircut IN THE MIDDLE OF A MILL JUST LIKE HIS DADDY USED TO WORK AT! He disrupted all those millworkers and endangered the jobs -- no! the lives! -- of the common working man THAT HE THINKS HE REPRESENTS!

Damn hypocrite! Doesn't he know that the mill worker is really just like the average Republican oil and investment banking millionaire? Why do these liberal elites think otherwise?

...since as a liberal he must have hated guns and supported gun control! And then he goes and buys guns despite not being allowed to have them because of his mental status!

BTW, Rush, it's not just liberals who have a problem with the privileges of wealth. It used to be part of the conservative evangelical tradition in America to see godlessness in the excesses of capitalism, and they would quote the book of James (5:1-6) from the New Testament:

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you."

So be careful whom you call a liberal, Rush. It may be some of your best listeners.

Is there really any difference between what Dana Perino says in these briefings and the "wah wah wah" adult voice in the Peanuts cartoons?

"Mission Accomplished?"

"Wah wah wah, wah wah, wah."

"Timetable for withdrawl?"

"Wah wah. Wah wah wah wah, wah wah, wah wah."

"Alberto Gonzalez?"

"Wah wah wah, wah wah."

"The will and trust of the American People?"

"Wah wah wah."

"Good grief!"

For my money (as a Premium subscriber!), best thing on the Web since 1999.

And then Dana had the reporter whacked. By Cheney.

I meant January 2009.

Humanity, throughout its existence, has consistently done two things well: tell stories and destroy societies. Both, I would argue, are related to the fundamental religious impulses to make meaning of and control the world. And these are, for the most part, very rational responses to life.

Religion is many things, and in much of its history, it has been specifically about reasoning out human experience, be it to come to grips with the power of sheer beauty, or the arbitrary cruelty of history or nature, or why some people live while others die. Even something as anti-rational as many forms of religious fundamentalism proceeds with a rigorous logic from certain, not completely unreasonable observations about the word: the real is less than the ideal, people are prone to selfishness and destructive behavior, and certain texts impart the feeling that there's a solution available to these problems.

The scholar Ninian Smart categorized seven dimensions of religion: experiential, doctrinal, ritual, legal, social, material, and narrative. To pull a very specific kind of belief (doctrine), emotion (experiential), or morality (legal) out of the larger context of any religious tradition is intellectually dishonest. I am as professionally and personally concerned as Hitchens with the destructive and coercive direction of much of what we see in the religious world today, but to play as if no one can figure out why these "religious nuts" do what they do and think what they think is as bad is claiming that 9/11 happened because terrorists "hate our freedom."

And on that note, how can Hitchens be so committed to a faith-based proposition like Bush's invasion of Iraq and yet proclaim the danger of others' irrational beliefs? He may have rejected Marxism, but that part about the powerful manipulating the powerless to achieve their own material ends has got to be ringing a bell right now.

"Ye shall reap what ye have sown."

June 17, 2004:

Q Mr. President, why does the administration continue to insist that Saddam had a relationship with al Qaeda, when even you have denied any connection between Saddam and September 11th. And now the September 11th Commission says that there was no collaborative relationship at all.

THE PRESIDENT: The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

...Is like asking why Picasso's so great if he can't even get the eyes in the right place on someone's head.

Oh, and by the way, the Beach Boys are emotional because they write about themselves (or at least Brian Wilson does), but the Beatles aren't because they write about other people? Sure, and autobiography is always a far superior read than fiction, 'cause, you know, it's like real and stuff.

You can't make this stuff up, right?