Curs of the Pundit Class

the big idea

Dogs and Democrats
Why Congress won't stop Bush's surge.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007, at 3:32 PM ET


Several decades ago, psychologist Martin Seligman developed his theory of " learned helplessness ." Subjected to repeated punishment, animals and humans often come to believe they have no control over what happens to them, whether they actually do or not. In Seligman's original experiment, dogs subjected to repeated electrical shocks would prostrate themselves and whine, even when escaping the abuse lay within their power.

As with canines, so with congressmen. In theory, Democrats now control a co-equal branch of government. In practice, they seem so traumatized by their years of mistreatment at the hands of a contemptuous executive that they continue to cower and simper whenever master waves a stick in their direction.

The first response one is tempted to make is that if there were no such thing as a self-professed Democrat and political pundit named Jacob Weisberg who supported for nine months the Iraqi war he now suggests Democrats should end, unilaterally, within days of taking power perhaps Democrats might be a tad less twitchy. Weisberg is still a charter member of the The War Was A Great Idea, It's Just Too Bad The Bush Administration Mismanaged It club; as such he might be expected to grant some leeway to Democrats (or wavering Republicans) who agreed with him then and still feel the war is worth one more push. But as we know, that's not how punditry operates.

Our second quick response is a two-parter: that's what you get when you ignore the requirements of Article I, Section 8, in the interests of so-called efficiency and a nostalgic wish for daddy to make those big decisions for everybody; and in a similar minor but controversial conflict in Indochina some years back it took a proposed escalation into another country before a rebellious Congress ever moved to cut off funds, and that was a good six years into complete debaclehood. Expecting the Democrats to do so now in a matter of days is absurd. Blame the voters in 2006 if you'd like; I'll save some for the staff of Slate circa 2003.

But our real answer is that in a less than perfect world (make that far from) it is the right move for Democrats to avoid using the purse at this point. It's wrong on the merits, it's wrong militarily, and it's wrong by all standards of decent behavior, but it's necessary that George Bush be saddled with the complete failure of his handling of the war and the Presidency (and by extension, that John McCain be toasted over the fire of a 120,000-troop "surge", but that's just a tangent). Everybody knows this is a last-gasp CYA and nothing more; not even the Bush administration believes what it's peddling. And the desperate final act is gonna blow up by next autumn, and by then maybe even Jacob Weisberg will have it figured out, provided Ken Pollack explains some of the finer points to him.*

*In that now-famous Slate Liberal Hawks' Mea Culpa coffee klatsch Weisberg said that so long as Pollack was fooled about WMDs then he, Weisberg, felt pretty good about having done likewise. It's a remark which, among other things, demonstrates the almost total lack of interest in fact which was required to have believed the Bush administration in the first place. It's an interesting re-read, since you get to see what sort of self-delusion had, by January of 2004, replaced the original self-delusion.

A Big Bowl of Whipped Cream With Chocolate-Covered Glass Shards

But Baby, I can change!

Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror — and our safety here at home.

"Safety at home" is a multi-faceted issue just brimming with nuance, which George W., of course, doesn't do. But "the direction of the global war on terror"--we're returning to the old brand name I guess--has already been determined by the profligate spending, miserable results, and demonstration of our relative powerlessness that is the last four years in Iraq.

When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together — and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

But in 2006, the opposite happened.

And in 2006 I don't recall you admitting a word of it. Or were you waiting for the year-end report?

The violence in Iraq — particularly in Baghdad — overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al-Qaida terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's elections posed for their cause.

This is, of course, another Bush administration attempt to put an acceptable public face on an ugly idea--this time, making the Sunni the enemy since they're numerically weakest, something that's been floating around on the Right for a couple of months. It's going to be interesting to see how we wipe out the Sunni insurgency, make Anbar Province Public Enemy #2, and rally the Saudis to our side while suppressing Iranian power in the region.

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me.

Since when?

Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

I can't believe that line was vetted. Not that I don't believe George W. Bush and his handlers are capable of saying anything at all if it serves some temporal need; I just can't believe they'd consciously echo that "I can't think of any" bit. Did they think that the admission (sure, he weasels, but whaddya expect?) would convince us this is Bush 2.0? Say it again: these guys spent 25 years talking to themselves. They only know how to convince toadies.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions.

Somewhere along the line the American people are going to have to learn that everyone officially designated The Enemy does not think exactly like us but do precisely the opposite just to bedevil us.

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents.

And there aren't going to be when there's 20,000 more, or 50,000 more, or 100,000, no matter how many virtual Iraqis we imagine to go with them.

And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

Uh-huh. Blowing up the innocent, the time-honored way to convince people you're on their side.

Let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad's nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort — along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations — conducting patrols, setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.

'Cause nothin' gains your trust like the police pounding on your door. I'm not sure how they're supposed to come up with 18 Iraqi brigades, or when, but I am sure that had we taken this sort of approach on our own four years ago it might have prevented the rise of the insurgency. Too late now.

So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence — and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I have committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.

And why 20,000? Brain-trust sessions with the Joint Chiefs? Advanced super-computer simulations at the War College? Nope. It's because that's all we can muster.

Our troops will have a well-defined mission

I gotta admit, that's one we haven't tried in a while.

Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents — but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we will have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared.

Not with 20,000 Americans and some Iraqi vapor battalions we won't. We had more US troops in the field in 2003-04, plus some actual allies. Why didn't we clear and hold then, many listening tonight might ask?

In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter these neighborhoods — and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.

I guess that's one of those unreasonable restrictions we're eliminating. Problem is, of course, that a) we wind up taking sides and b) we wind up running roughshod over Iraqi citizens and we find out they will make common cause of it. So again, we've decided to enforce sectarian divisions in Iraq without admitting we're doing so, in the interest of extricating ourselves from a problem we wouldn't have had if we'd have acknowledged those differences in the first place. Brought to you by New Coke™.

I have made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended.

Another sentence I can't believe made it though a six-week's vetting process. Since fucking when? Or, to put it another way, then who was that man who kept insisting we were there until the job was done? If the "Iraqi government" now fails us, and we leave, doesn't that turn the country over to the bad guys?

This new strategy will not yield an immediate end to suicide bombings, assassinations, or IED attacks. Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering.

Just like our enemies at the networks, then.

America will change our approach to help the Iraqi government as it works to meet these benchmarks. In keeping with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, we will increase the embedding of American advisers in Iraqi Army units — and partner a Coalition brigade with every Iraqi Army division. We will help the Iraqis build a larger and better-equipped Army — and we will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, which remains the essential U.S. security mission in Iraq.

Ever since all the other essential U.S. security missions turned to shit. Y'know, it's interesting how often Iraq has proved to be Vietnam in reverse, and here's another: now we're advisors again. But you do not train an army by putting US officers in their midst; you train one by putting new soldiers into the existing Army structure.
We are, at any rate, about to take Americans we've been trying to protect as much as possible, Americans who are in their third, even fourth tour, and expose them to much greater risk in the name of small political gain at home. I didn't expect George W. Bush to actually do something about the mess he'd made; he long ago decided the only way out was to let it become someone else's problem. All the nonsense about Democratic control of Congress means squat: this is a steaming pile which is going to remain a stinking mess no matter what we do. What little honesty the man now displays might have made a difference three years ago, but of course that might have spoiled the reelection plans the whole thing was designed around in the first place.

It went on, of course, but I gradually withdrew one ear, even as he was telling Anbar Province to Bring It On and threatening Syria. The speech began to resemble what someone (John Simon?) once said about Japanese films: each one has a beginning, a middle, a six ends. But I did perk up again near the fourth or fifth end:

Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.

Right. This one'll be on an aircraft carrier, and it'll come at the beginning instead of the end. Who vetted this thing?

Ghost Dance

It's the season when I eat dinner alone on a too-regular basis as the big Indiana high school arts competitions take place. My Poor Wife and her cohort will hang, tear down, and rehang three shows in the next five weeks, including the two big ones, just so they can be judged by people who, if not actually visually impaired, at the very least have proven incapable of noticing that School X's artwork seems so remarkably consistent stylistically as to appear as if finished by the same, unknown hand.

But I digress. This was how I found myself watching the NBC Nightly News last night instead of the usual 63 channel remote-controlled stroboscope show I get at that hour when my wife is home. And that's how I found out that NBC's two expert commentators on the subject of out latest product rollout in Iraq were...Kenneth Pollack and David Frum! No, really.

This followed having heard (previously, on your local news) at least three plugs, tosses, or exit lines about "Bush's New Way Forward", or whatever the re-branding exercise is being called. You'd think by this point at least one talking hairdo would have had enough of this shit and would refuse to mouth the drivel any more, but it appears not. New Way Forward! Now with Ginkgo Fucking Biloba or Something! And Stool Softeners! Three or Four Stool Softeners, At Least. Hey, that Howie Mandell Show is on later.

Bush's ad men say he wants to Bring the Public Back to the War, which is no doubt the explanation for Blowing Shit Up To No Purpose Beyond Claiming We Think We Got al-Qaeda's #2 Man Again yesterday. But even the purveyors of televised pablum don't operate that way. No one ever says, "We know you hate this show, and that everyone in the country stopped watching it two years ago, but won't you please please please just watch it for the two years left on Anne Sweeney/Les Moonves/Freddie Silverman's contract so they won't have to leave in disgrace?" They just fire 'em. For that matter, nobody brought back the World's Least Funny Canadian just so he could blow up condoms with his nose again.

When I was a student, back in a previous century, you couldn't get through a semester of any entry-level or child- psychology course innocent of the late-60s study where they had young children watch film of an adult taking a ball-peen hammer to one of those always-rocks-back-upright punching bags with the clown on the front, immediately after which they put the kid in a room, seemingly unsupervised, with a hammer and the same punching bag, and they discovered...spoiler alert...that the kid did precisely what the adult had done, thus proving that television causes violence. (If you happened to endure this bit of empiricism on the hoof at Indiana University in the mid-70s, I was the guy in the back making snorting noises throughout.)

Of course the real question there was Who's Getting Hosed? Not the kids, who got to beat a clown with a hammer, something any sensible child would do (and who, one might add, were at least old enough to tell the difference between a rubber blow-up doll and Grandma). It might have been the researchers, except I have a feeling they made out okay; I've seen that thing cited recently as proof that violent video games cause violence, so the study was remarkably upgradable for its time.

Buttressed with the evidence of the Bush years, I can now offer the theory I had only half-formed (the other half of me was asleep) in those days: that the study shows (intentionally or no) that a sizable portion of the population will believe anything so long as it can be connected to the teevee screen somehow. And that's the President's audience tonight.

Crypto Opera Buff

If memory serves I bought exactly two hardback books in 2006, excluding gifts--the third volume of Taylor Branch's M.L. King-centered history in January, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City last month. That's partly because I'm cheap (which is relative, anyway: 12-year-old car and retied shoelaces meet $80 bottles of wine at dinner) and partly because in a three-bedroom suburban dream there's roughly 2-1/2 bedrooms of books, shelved, unshelved, piled on nightstands, queued in the 'loo. Trade paperbacks are at least compressible.

So the Times Book Review gets the short shrift from me much of the time, but if I find myself with time to kill I may go through it with an intensity somewhere between window shopper and toy collecting geek who's just found a Hot Wheels catalogue from 1965.

Sunday was more on the former end of the scale, and I'd seen nothing to change that, although there was this line in Dave Itzkoff's review of Next:

...surely history should reserve a special place for the day in 2005 when Michael Crichton was invited to the White House to meet with George W. Bush. Imagine: the modern era’s leading purveyor of alarmist fiction, seated side by side with Michael Crichton.

And I was about 3/4 of the way through when I turned the page and found myself looking at an improbably young Martin (he was not yet forty when that bullet found him) in 1960, and I looked up to find it was a review of the two volumes of American Speeches, and I looked down and saw the review was written by one William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley's Latinate stuffing has always convinced some people his ear was gold rather than brass-plated tin, and I suppose the Review's editors are all too young to remember the sort of things that slithered across the pages of the National Review while King was still alive (and long after he wasn't anymore). I kept reading, knowing that something was going to turn up. It took two paragraphs:

You can read the enormously influential speech of Ronald Reagan paying tribute to the candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, but you would need to be told by Grandpa, or your history book, that the speech catapulted Reagan from Hollywood to the White House.

Sixteen years later. Wow, that's some catapult.

Buckley seems to have two things to add to the subject. The first is that kids today would prefer to play video games than listen to a two-hour oration. (As such we have to wonder what reader of two volumes of speeches needs his Grandpa to explain Ronald Reagan's career to him, or, needing him, would actually find him still breathing.)

The second is that speechifiers don't always write their own speeches! As exemplified by--wait, I have the note here somewhere--Bill Clinton.

And who (who-all) actually wrote the speech delivered by President Clinton? Parts of it were manifestly in his native tongue: “Folks, in 1957 I was 11 years old, living 50 miles away in Hot Springs. ...” That was Clinton speaking, but changes in gait and style come along a few pages later — at whose prompting?

At least the man gets credit for being to ad lib his own biography.

Reading backward on the contents page of Volume 2, you need at least several decades before you feel safe with your own conjectures. Obviously William Faulkner wrote his own speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize . But Jesse Jackson ’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1984 — who did that? And there are modest questions about a score of others. Robert Kennedy, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Mario Savio, Goldwater, Malcolm X , MacArthur, Margaret Chase Smith, Truman, Oppenheimer, Patton, Huey Long.

Uh, Ronald Reagan? Again, isn't anyone who picks up one of these volumes likely to know that 20th century politicians didn't write every last word of the speeches they gave?

You get to Herbert Hoover, speaking in 1928 on the subject of “rugged individualism,” and you can be confident that the words you are reading are those of the speaker. Hoover was a man of great learning and zero eloquence, here confirmed.

So I'm supposed to know this about Hoover, but how Reagan went from playing cowboy on Death Valley Days to playing one in the White House is lost in the mists of time?

It's allowed as how Martin rolled his own, though, and delivered with flair:

Martin Luther King was grand opera. He deployed his hortatory words to full emotional effect. “Now I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that he’s allowed me to be in Memphis” — where, one day later, he was assassinated. “I can remember [Applause]... when Negroes were just going around, as Ralph [Abernathy] has said so often, scratching where they didn’t itch and laughing when they were not tickled. [ Laughter, applause ] But that day is all over. (Yeah) [Applause]”

I interrupt myself and Dr. King to observe, You can hear his voice, can’t you? (Yeah)

And I interrupt to observe, He must mean on tape, 'cause he sure didn't listen to Martin when he was alive. (Right)

Great. First Day Back From Vacation and I Get Stuck on a Class Project with that Goddam Band Nerd Who Won't Leave His Retainer Alone.

David Brooks, "Making the Surge Work," courtesy the Sunday New York Times which, it needs to be added, has now been publishing his crap for two years beyond the point where he had anything to say, not that what he did have to say way back when was anything important.

Let the record show that when the time came to stand up for the US of A, the Bobo Brookses of the world instead chose to cover their asses to the bitter end.

I know, I know, it's not a surprise to you. But we are now well past the time when people who have been hoodwinked about it need to begin to understand that here--and it was exactly the same thing with Vietnam--that lying about military situations does nothing but cost lives. American lives, if those are the only ones that matter to you.

Oh, not Brooks' lies, which increasingly serve only to demonstrate the folly, on top of the dishonesty and the lunacy, of the Times' insistence on giving "The Right" a voice on its Op-Ed pages, not to mention planting a big wet smooch on all those Red state values voters. They breathe virtue but soon run out of breath, to steal one from Anatole France.

I thought you'd enjoy a bit:

Over (the last three years) a chorus has arisen to oppose (turning over policing responsibilities to the Iraqis). The members of this chorus--John McCain, The Weekly Standard, whispering dissenters in the middling rankings of the military--argue that it's simply unrealistic to expect human beings in these circumstances to become impartial nation-builders. These dissenters have argued, since the summer of 2003, that the U.S. must commit more troops to establish security before anything else becomes possible.

Dissenters. Dissenters! That's like saying someone on the Reynolds American board who argues for aiming more cigarette advertising at children is a Corporate Rebel. Two major warfloggers. The Standard, as befits Bill Kristol's estimation of his personal military expertise, has been nit-picking the war since it started turning to shit. BFD. If they'd said something ahead of time it might have meant something.

McCain, now, I'd like to see where he seriously criticized the war effort before the 2004 elections were over, let alone, oh, you know, used his position as one of the two most influential US Senators on military affairs to actually do something about it.

McCain has no excuses; he well knows we do not have the troops to make a difference in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. He knows we went to war four years ago without sufficient numbers, and he knows we did so for purely political reasons, just as we now plan a CYA "surge" (things are so bad that we can't even brand the thing as a needed correction, because The Best We Can Do is a temporary patch with a three-six month shelflife.)

McCain knows all this. Does Bobo? Does he care? If you move precisely five columns to the right from his breathtaking list of Dissenters you find that Frank Rich has actually read the new Army Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, or enough of it to have calculated a minimal requirement of 100,000 additional troops for Baghdad. Brooks, on the other hand, seems to have read nothing beyond the Standard and some Bush hagiographies, like some weepy dateless sophomore on Prom Night poring over the signatures on her 8th-grade yearbook:

For over three years , President Bush sided with the light-footprint school. He did so for personal reasons, not military ones. Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment.

So the straightforward answer is that Brooks, having gone eighteen months between his "I may need to rethink the overwhelming success of the Iraq war" moment and the 2006 elections, has now decided that Iraq had nothing to do with the Global War on Terror, that its every rationale, all of which he trumpeted to some extent or another and the major one of which his paper famously created, are like last week's Christmas wrappings, and that Bush is to be forgiven for not taking any of that seriously because the main requirement of a President of the United States is to serve as a shining example for future Cub Scouts.

"He Healed Us"

"Didn't you hear me say, 'God bless George Washington'? 'God bless my mother'? Now what kind of Indian would say a fool thing like that?"

"He healed us", no shit, was the comment some guy who identified himself as "sixty years old, so his presidency happened right in the middle of my life," made about Gerald R. Ford sometime last October, when the teevee wall-to-wall coverage of his untimely passing seemed to begin.

I've been busy. Too busy to really feel anything was lost as I periodically turned on cable news the past ten days and admired their willingness to stay with static shots of more-or-less nothing for hours. I'm not gonna jump up and down just because we were subjected to another needless demonstration that teevee news has nothing much to say and very little sense of when to say it. I don't really have anything nasty to say about Gerald R. Ford, Accidental President, though I could if I tried. The Nixon pardon was a long time ago. His family seemed nice. I'm sure he was kind to trick-or-treaters.

But if we owe the dead the sort of respect we routinely deny them in life, we don't owe anything to amateur hagiographers and semi-professional composers of teevee panegyric. It's not that I personally resent the implication that I was somehow assuaged by The Pardon, or that Jerry Ford's remarkable grace in office mended my tormented soul; I do resent it, but that's beside the point. How can someone say a darn fool thing like that? Who's supposed to believe it? Why is it that the same people so enamored of these public displays of meaninglessness are the same ones who aren't satisfied until we're actively lying about indisputable truths in the name of making them feel better? It's one thing to measure out your life with coffee spoons. It's quite another to use restaurant sugar packets (with apologies to Abe Simpson).

Today in History

January 4, 1966: Ronald "I Resent the Implication That I Am a Racist" Reagan tapes his speech announcing his candidacy for governor of California, complaining that "after dark our city streets are jungle paths"; Georgia legislature refuses to seat newly-elected Representative Julian Bond because Bond replied, "Yes, I do" when a reporter asked if he agreed with the SNCC position that concerned Americans should work for the civil rights movement as an alternative to conscripted military service in Vietnam.

Happy Birthday

Maurice Jaubert
January 3, 1900--June 19, 1940
killed in action at Azerailles

My Favorite Holiday Gift

Comes from the unlikely source of A&E, the Arts and Entertainment network, presently plugging the imminent basic cable broadcast debut of The Sopranos with Etta James singing "At Last". Great song, written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, (who, between them, have four first names and four last names, so that if ever I try to change the billing I'm hopeless lost almost instantaneously), and an absolute primer on R&B balladeering, but especially appreciated this time around for finally removing the echo of that American Idol idolesse--the one in Dreamgirls--who belted NPR listeners out of an episode of Terry Gross' Fresh Air last week. "Belted" is used ironically here, as an ethicist might refer to Hiroshima as "an explosion". She had broken the neck of the song on the downbeat, and the first bar was yet to arrive before she had it stripped of watches, rings, cash, credit and debit cards and dental minerals and begun pummeling the corpse with a drill hammer for insufficient blingitude. The audience doesn't fare much better. I was physically exhausted by the second bar, and it took all my remaining strength to hit the off button and keep the truck on the road.

I am about as innocent of American Idol as an American can be and still own a television set. I recognized the woman's name as someone who was a major crowd favorite but lost due to hinky voting or some soft-core porn in her past or something equally mortifying, but I'd never heard her before. Then later that week--thanks to the fact that Dreamgirls seems to have been given the leftover Borat PR account to play with--I got to see a clip of her mugging what may or may not have been another tune from the movie. I can't imagine the circumstances that would make me want to find out. It's supposed to be Motown, but instead of Holland, Dozier, Holland the songs sound like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Whatever Lyricist He Found Out By The Pool This Week. Anyway, the woman is flailing her arms in close approximation to what she's doing to the scattered carnage of the song, which explains why she's such an enormous hit with the American public, for whom "subtlety" means making sure the gate gets closed after you let your six Great Danes attend to their fecal needs among the neighbor's prize petunias.

Happy Birthday

Patti Smith
born December 30, 1946

The Full Newtie

So it turns out that riff on the Roosevelt memorial wasn't Newt spouting off in an interview; it was Newt given an hour on FAUX to prove that Christians are a persecuted majority in this country because our monuments no longer quote the Bible and sweep the sky.

To be sure, that's probably as insightful a comment about Art as one is likely to get from a self-appointed spokesman for Christianity and professional history fabricator, but on the other hand The Wall is without question the most-visited and the most-inspiring (at least currently) monument in D.C. If anybody's taking rubbings off that godawful collection of bronze GI Joes at its base it's probably something actual decent Christians would rather not know about.

The former history professor--I'm still awaiting his response to my exposing his total ignorance of the history of abortion and contraception in this country in the pages of George magazine in 1996, by the way--wrote a blurb for the show on the FAUX site (find it yerself) which began with his usual dedication to accuracy:

It’s like clockwork — every Christmas there’s controversy about religious displays. This year they took down Christmas trees at the Seattle International Airport due to a complaint. A few days later they put them back up, but why was there a problem to begin with?

Well, I'm thinking the real problem was reading comprehension.

As a former professor of history, I can tell you this is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Proving that even a sighted pig can find an acorn now and then. But I'm guessin' Newtie can't tell us why this is so--that even that percentage of the Founding Fathers who were Christian never envisioned anyone celebrating Christmas. Newt seems to imagine the 18th and 19th Centuries as sort of Leave It To Beaver with muskets.

I suppose it's no use to suggest that reading the Founders' intentions through a series of monuments dating no further back that the mid-18th century is a questionable exercise. Dr. Gingrich is the guy with the Ph.D., after all. And the FAUX contract.

ON EDIT: Somebody correct me if I missed Gingrich's protest when the sacred elevator to Heaven's good graces that is the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was used as a backdrop for a Rockettes kick line at the 2000 Bush Coronation Ball.

From The News Hole To The Memory Hole

Senator Tim Johnson, anyone? He was bigger'n Elvis two weeks ago, but the last CNN website mention of him was ten days previous. The Times has been keeping track of his condition, but then the Times didn't drop all other news coverage when he entered surgery.

MSNBC's inexplicable David Shuster was offended that someone at the time termed the coverage "ghoulish". He might explain why he's no longer hovering around Johnson's hospital bed now that his survival seems assured.