but it did its time-honored job of manufacturing consent for elite policies. The desire of the Bush Administration to go to war with Saddam Hussein, and in a very short time, placed unusual demands on the press to manufacture consent for the war quickly and out of whole cloth.

Cast your mind back to September 10, 2001. Was there a single person anywhere who claimed that Iraq was a threat to the US? The answer is "no" for the good and sufficient reason that Iraq was not a threat to the US or even anything approaching same. So that gave the press about 18 months to convince the public that Iraq constituted such a grave and immediate threat to our lives and wellbeing that nothing but war could avert our impending doom. That's a tall order and they carried it out faithfully and, given the enormity of the task and the short time alotted for it, reasonably capably. The gross distortions of reality just couldn't be finessed in so short a time.

in American politics or life in general. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life goes into it in some detail and is, from my point of view, required reading. It explains why Kerry was such a bad choice to be the Dem nominee in 2004. You see it on all the right-wing talk shows. You see it in western movies. Anti-elitism was a huge driving force in religion in colonial America and of course explains the rise of the megachurches today. It explains the fight against teaching evolution.

There is now and always has been a dialectical struggle in this country between intellectual, social, political, economic and religious elites, and those opposed. Contrary to Bill Maher, no one wins and no one loses. The struggle continues.

If liberals want to cease being marginalized in this country, we'd best understand the powerful anti-elitist sentiments here and stop talking down to the huge numbers of people who naturally distrust us because they perceive that we think we know better than they do what's good for them. Maher's piece suggests they're right.

with authority to fire them fired them, then they haven't been fired. This is good news for the "fired" prosecutors. They should go back to work.

of LBJ's council of "wise men" who kept advising him to incease troop levels because "victory" was just a few thousand more troops away. Then at one point, they figured out they were wrong and left old Lyndon holding a disastrous war policy with no end in sight.

do not have an individual right to keep and bear arms. It's a collective right for the maintenance of militias. Any law that doesn't impinge on this collective right is constitutional.

The Second Amendment refers to "arms" not "guns." If it were read to grant and individual right to bear arms, it would necessarily mean that each individual had the constitutional right to keep and bear H-bombs, M-1 tanks, Stinger missiles, chemical and biological weapons, etc. Even gun nuts don't want that.

the best description I can come up with for Gonzales is "lightweight." He seems to entirely lack intellectual heft or gravitas. If I didn't already know, I'd never believe he's the AG of the US.

I was perfectly willing to believe Iraq had some sort of WMD program in effect. I never guessed that all those Administration claims were simply made up. What I said then and what I say now is "even if Iraq had a WMD program, it was not then nor had it ever been a threat to the US." Consequently, our belligerence was and is illegal, immoral and ineffective in the realpolitik sense.

Many nations in the world have WMDs. Many of those countries support terrorism. Many of those countries are our allies. But we don't make war on Pakistan.

seymour hersch

to stay in college or turn pro should be clear to anyone with a brain. Any college player who can get drafted by an NBA team should do so as soon as he can. Spend another year in college, blow out your knee and watch those millions pour down the drain. After you've spent 10 years in the NBA, you can go back and get your degree if that's what you want to do.

about administration claims about WMDs. In fact, no one knew for certain until well after the invasion was complete that there were none. No, what's worse to me is their utter lack of the sort of basic, native skepticism that we all exercise in our daily lives. Think about it. In all the years between the first Gulf War and 9/11/01, how many people in government or out sounded alarms about what a threat Saddam Hussein posed to the US? Was it an issue in presidential elections? Congressional elections? Did editorial pages raise the issue? Op-eds? The answer to all those questions is an overwhelming "no." The situation in Iraq was mainly thought of as Hussein as a potential threat to his weaker neighbors like Kuwait, the oil-for-food program and the horrible toll the sanctions regime took on everyday Iraqis.

And yet somehow, between 9/11/01 and the US invasion (about 18 months), the US press managed to convince itself that Saddam Hussein was not only a threat, but an immediate threat to the US. That was arrant nonsense then and the slightest skepticism would have told them so.