LISTENING TO PROZAC: In a touching yuletide burst of what one might term compassionate corruption, the US House of Representatives has quietly swung into action on behalf of America's mentally ill poor people:

As part of a House budget bill that reduces spending on Medicaid prescription drugs, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. and other businesses secured a provision ensuring that their mental health drugs continue to fetch top price at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the states.

The provision -- inserted by Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), whose district flanks Lilly's Indianapolis headquarters -- would largely exempt antipsychotic and antidepressant medications from a larger measure designed to steer Medicaid patients to the least expensive treatment options. The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved Buyer's amendment this month over the strenuous objections of Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) and the National Governors Association. It survived unchallenged in the $50 billion budget-cutting bill that narrowly passed the House just before Congress left for Thanksgiving recess.

Wow. Newt Gingrich is looking better every day, isn't he?

GUTSY: Via Drudge ... "Speaker of House fights to call it a Christmas tree."

No word yet on when the Speaker plans to fight to cut wasteful federal spending and secure our southern border. Or, if you prefer, to end the war in Iraq and provide health care to America's 45 million uninsured.

That's okay, though. The Speaker's a busy guy. He's fighting to call it a Christmas tree.

Happy Merry Christmas Holidays from the People's House to yours.

SLOUCHING TOWARD ENGLISH CLASS: I realize that the following is going to sound more than a little rich coming from the man responsible for this, but really, now.... The Objective Correlative Watch?!?

Yikes. And worse, consider this: Now that the Objective Correlative Watch is upon us, can Stanley Fish Tales be far behind?

HEARTBURN, INDEED: "Bob [Woodward] has always had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. That’s why people love to talk to him; he almost never puts the pieces together in a way that hurts his sources." (Via Ann Althouse.)

MORE.... Jane Hamsher sums up the Ephron piece nicely -- well, accurately, anyway -- with this: "[Y]ou can trust Bob Woodward to tell the truth because he's too dumb to lie."

Dumb? Well, that's possible, I guess. But let's not overlook the more likely explanation: too much online reading.

AHA! So it's not just me:

I find that the more I read online, the less I read off. I don't think it's even a matter of using up my reading time. It actually destroys brain cells or something, because if I've been doing too much online reading, I lose the patience for following a sustained or subtle argument, or reading a complex novel. One of my reasons for frequent blogging disappearances is recovery: I need to get away from the fast and facile and let my brain heal. It actually feels like recovering a bit of humanity that I forgot I had.

As a fellow sufferer, lemme tell ya, the phenomenon that Jeanne D'arc is describing up there is real, and more than a little worrisome when you first notice it. It just feels so ... organic, somehow, like you've damaged a part of the brain itself. Fortunately, though, Jeanne right about the second part, as well: blog breaks help, and, in my experience, anyway, long blog breaks -- the kind measured in months rather than days -- are completely restorative. (That said, you probably shouldn't rely on my experience with blog breaks. After all -- and as regular readers are no doubt thinking to themselves at this very moment -- some of us may simply have less to restore than others.)

NOTE: Via Kevin Drum, who rightly calls this vexing malady "a real problem."

I SAY GET THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF FIREFIGHTING. Set up a voucher system. Set it up so that citizens have to fork over part of the cost so that somebody will come put their house out if it starts to burn. Once people start having to cough up the dough every month so their memories won't turn to ashes, I bet more people would be careful about leaving the stove on.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm just kidding up there, of course. But you might be interested to learn that we Charlestonians actually tried private firefighting at one point in our city's long and willfully eccentric history, and the results were, shall we say, disappointing, as block upon block burned while private firemen stood at the ready, waiting for the flames to spread to one of "their" houses or buildings.

Needless to say, this early experiment in privatization was abandoned faster than you can say "Milton Friedman," and, in one of history's mildly amusing turns, the people of our fair city eventually went on to build a thriving tourist economy around the grand homes and churches that no longer burned to the ground every time somebody got careless with a match.

Hmmm.... I wonder if there's some kind of a lesson in there someplace?

POOR PLANNING, MALADMINISTRATION, AND PROBLEMS WITH PRIVATE CONTRACTORS: The Bush administration tries its hand at delivering a prescription drug benefit, and the results sound strangely familiar.

THE BENEFITS OF PROCRASTINATION: As one of the laziest men that the good Lord ever saw fit to put on this old earth, I have to tell you that I was genuinely dreading the drudgery that I was planning to let myself in for this afternoon in putting together a halfway cogent response to this post from Ed Morrissey, wherein the Captain argues that Delaware Sen. Joe Biden's recently announced plan for Iraq "gets the entire war on terror fundamentally wrong -- and demonstrates why the Democrats have entirely failed to provide any leadership on Iraq and the wider war." In fact, that damnable dread was really all that prevented me from responding when I first came across Ed's post last night.

But now that the White House has officially embraced the Biden plan, I guess those concerns are all in the past.

The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was "remarkably similar" to its own.

It also signaled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country.

The statement by White House spokesman Scott McClellan came in response to a commentary published in The Washington Post by Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said US forces will begin leaving Iraq next year "in large numbers."

...In the statement, which was released under the headline "Senator Biden Adopts Key Portions Of Administration's Plan For Victory In Iraq," McClellan said the Bush administration welcomed Biden's voice in the debate.

"Today, Senator Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror," the spokesman went on to say.

So it looks like just another day of football and frolic here at O'Toole File world headquarters.

Darn.

NOTE: Via Digby, who, as you might expect, is quite amusing on all this.

SLAVES OF NEW YORK: According to the Times, many visitors to the New York Historical Society's "Slavery in New York" exhibition have been shocked and angered to learn that the "peculiar institution" was once quite common in their city -- apparently, about 40 percent of New York City households contained slaves at one point -- and that it wasn't actually outlawed there until 1827.

"It's terrible to know that the city that I love was part of the slave trade," said a middle-aged white woman from New Jersey. "I'm shocked to hear about it."

An African-American man in the booth with his young daughter said: "It's just a constant reminder that here in New York, like in other places in the United States, we were nothing more than cattle in the eyes of the owners and were treated that way. It's just amazing that people were able to survive and thrive after that."

An elderly white woman who said she had two college degrees said, "I never knew until I walked in here about slavery in New York." Now, she said, "It just breaks my heart."

Yep. As we Southerners know better than most, these sorts of history lessons can be painful indeed. But, as the exhibit's chief historian, Dr. James Oliver Horton, argues, they are also necessary.

"Back in the 90's, when Bill Clinton asked for a national conversation about race, most people didn't have the context in which to have the conversation. This exhibition will help Americans have such a historical context. It will help people start with a common experience."

Pretty to think so, anyway.

'HOUSE' OF HORRORS? So why are six out of NJ's seven Democratic congressmen happily participating in what the WaPo 's Mark Leibovich calls an "elaborate suck-up campaign" to win the appointment to fill now-Governor Jon Corzine's old US Senate seat? "[T]hey see this as a ticket out of their torture chamber," explains Rutgers' Ross Baker.

OF MODERN POETRY: Serbia and Montenegro in the act of finding what won't suffice.

THE GRINCH WHO STOLE BLACK FRIDAY: You're a mean one, Mr. Mannion.

And absolutely right, I might add. In fact, it's almost like a ... a ... a ... war on Christmas or something.

TAXING HYBRIDS: If you can count on anybody -- and I mean anybody -- to understand that taxing something is a great way to get less of it, it's the US Chamber of Commerce, right? Right?!?

NEWSDAY:

Three years and counting after officials took Jose Padilla off an airplane in Chicago and dumped him in a military brig, he has finally been indicted on criminal charges. It's about time. But Padilla's overdue indictment doesn't eliminate the need for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide the critical question: How long is too long for a citizen to be locked up by the government without charges or a day in court?...

No citizen taken into custody in the United States should be deprived of those rights as Padilla has been. So the Supreme Court should accept the appeal filed on his behalf last month and answer the question it posed: "Does the president have the power to seize American citizens in civilian settings on American soil and subject them to indefinite military detention without criminal charges or trial?"

Newsday is right. The Supremes really do need to take a look at this one. And if they don't want to, well, then I guess we'll just have to get Al Gore to make 'em do it!

Via The Christian Science Monitor, whose first-rate Padilla news roundup can be found here.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING (OF A SORT).... Well, now, this is just off-pissing on so many levels:

GODE, Ethiopia - U.S. troops found two cheetah cubs — one of them blinded — being forced to fight each other for the amusement of jeering children in this dusty, forgotten village....

The troops provided medical treatment to the blinded cub, fed them both and tried to persuade Mohamed [Hudle, their keeper,] to hand them over to wildlife officials. They contacted U.S.-based cheetah experts as well as Ethiopian authorities.

U.S. military officials refused to discuss the animal rights turn their hearts and minds campaign took in Gode. But Befekadu Refera, an official of the Environmental Protection Agency in the capital, Addis Ababa, confirmed the U.S. military had contacted his agency about the cubs and even offered to fly the pair to Addis Ababa, 684 miles away for care.

But....

In Gode Wednesday, the rescue appeared to have hit a snag.

"I don't see why I should hand them over," Mohamed said. "When I was younger I looked after goats and camels, so I know what animals need."

Mohamed said he would only give up the cheetahs if he was paid $1,000 for each cub — 10 times the average income in this impoverished Horn of Africa nation with an estimated 77 million people....

"Unless these cubs are properly looked after and cared for they will soon die," said Befekadu of the Environmental Protection Agency.

I'm going to skip any further commentary here because everything I try to write comes out sounding like the easy sentimentalism of a pampered, clueless First Worlder, which is probably exactly what it is. But still, you know....

UPDATE: "Two cheetah cubs held captive and abused at a remote village restaurant in eastern Ethiopia are now in the custody of a government veterinarian and U.S. troops, a senior official said Monday."

GEEZ, I guess Pat Buchanan was right. They are planning an insanity defense.

CENTRISM SELLS: In Israel.

HMMM.... Grover Norquist may be a "mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep ... an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home," but he's not dumb. Which makes this Newsweek report kinda interesting, I think:

On Tuesday, GOP activist Grover Norquist, a top ally of the White House, suggested it was a political mistake for the administration to attack Democrats who claim Bush misled them on pre-war intelligence. "I was not an advocate of, or a fan of this idea of having a conversation about who hit who first in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq," Norquist said. "A debate on where you can go from here, Bush can do fine on. A debate on how we got into this, even if you win, what do you win?"

Now, obviously, you can't take anything Norquist says at face value. (Actually, what he's saying in this instance doesn't even make sense at face value. A president who's currently polling under 50% on basic believability has nothing to gain by winning a big national debate on the very subject that's driving those numbers into the toilet? Please.) So the question is, what's Norquist really saying? And the most likely answer would seem to be that he's examined the relevant data and reached the conclusion that they can't win a debate on "how we got into this."

Like I said, kinda interesting, no?

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and one more thing. Isn't the simple fact that Norquist doesn't appear to be overly concerned about getting f'ed like he's never been f'ed before for publicly criticizing the Rove political operation a noteworthy development in and of itself? As one of the greats might say at this point...

Developing...

A DAY OF THANKSGIVING: "The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God."

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS... "American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians," writes Max Boot in today's LA Times. "The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively."

Okay, so you tell me. What's the real takeaway in all that? The poll's supposedly impressive finding that just over 60% of this nation's military officers are confident that we're going to succeed in Iraq? Or the fact that almost 40% of them aren't?

Via Glenn Reynolds, with whom I occasionally disagree, but certainly not about this: more is better!

FOR MURTHA IS AN HONORABLE MAN.... Don't believe it? "Just ask the president," says Slate's John Dickerson.

"STUPIDITY AND INCOMPETENCE".... Military weapons expert John E. Pike hasn't exactly been impressed by the Bush administration's halting, confused response to the charge that US forces used chemical weapons (in the form of white phosphorus rounds) against civilians in Falluja last year. "The story most people around the world have is that the Americans are up to their old tricks - committing atrocities and lying about it," he tells the Times. "And that's completely incorrect."

UPDATE: John Cole has more -- and I have to say that his oft-displayed willingness to call BS on his own side over the last year or so gives his argument a decidedly, uh, unballoon-like heft.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And speaking of stupidity and incompetence, the normally crack O'Toole File staff appears to have forgotten to rewrite this post's URL when its title and subject matter changed. "And I take sole responsibility for this error," O'Toole said, with Kennedyesque aplomb....

BETTER, SMARTER, FASTER: Over at TPM Cafe, Mark Schmitt makes a point that The O'Toole File had planned to make in its own considerably less thoughtful and erudite fashion later today -- namely, that this president was against having 535 secretaries of state before he was for it.

ACCIDENTALLY: "FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Police accidentally hit a naked man in the genitals with a Taser after he was caught breaking windows and asking women to touch him, authorities said."

BUT, HONEY, I just sat still during the whole lap dance. It's not like I participated or anything.

MORE DEFINITIONAL DIFFICULTY: The Password is ... "controversial."

TORTURE: Though I'm every bit as troubled by this administration's apparent embrace of torture as digby seems to be, I'm less surprised by it, I think -- and less pessimistic about the future as well.

At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them....

Now that we've let the torture genie out of the bottle, I wonder if we can put that beast back in. He looks and sounds an awful lot like an American.

As I said above, I share digby's concern, though not so much his surprise, for like all children of the American South, I have always known that this thing we rather grandly call "civilization" is at once illusory and at best provisional; tomorrow's lynch mob is seldom much further away than today's church social. That's our burden and our truth down here in God's Country, and it's difficult to reach the age of reason without having somehow reckoned with it. And that reckoning, though not terribly pleasant, does tend to leave one with what you might call the long view in these matters.

Which is why I can confidently say this: Sooner or later, we Americans will end torture. And we'll end it for the same reasons that we eventually ended so many other supposedly natural or necessary evils, like slavery and Jim Crow and the legal subjugation of women -- because it's wrong and it's unamerican.

And because millions of good people like digby aren't about to let us forget that.

JAMES JOYNER, a reasonable righty if ever there was one, has this to say about Ralph Peters' latest NY Post column:

Some of the piece is over-the-top in its analysis of the domestic politics of the debate. But he's right about this much: Pulling out of Iraq under the present circumstances would be devastating in our battle against the jihadists.

As is so often the case, I agree with James on the merits: a pullout under the present circumstances would be devastating. But here's the thing. Simply noting that "some of the piece is over-the-top" is not good enough when the nation is at war, and a major American columnist has, in essence, just called a sizable percentage of the American people traitors. At that point, I'm afraid, nothing less than a full-throated denunciation will do, and I wish James had provided one.

As we've noted practically ad nauseum 'round these parts in recent days, the neo-McCarthyism that has become so fashionable in certain conservative circles of late is not helping the president's (or, for that matter, the nation's) cause one damned bit. In fact, it's making it almost impossible for centrist Democrats like me to continue to defend any aspect of our current Iraq policy in good conscience. And if this war loses what little support it still has outside of the the president's conservative base, it's going to fail, and fail badly.

So the real question for war supporters is this: who's actually being unpatriotic here? The folks who are expressing an honest, if in my view mistaken, desire to get out of Iraq right now? Or the angry demagogues whose irresponsible charges will ultimately so divide the country that the war effort becomes completely unsustainable?

You make the call.

ANN ALTHOUSE is irked -- "disgusted," actually -- by the following AP lede.

President Bush, buffeted by unrelenting criticism at home over Iraq, on Monday saluted Mongolia's "fearless warriors" for helping his embattled effort to establish democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

Needless to say, it's that "buffeted by..." clause that's got Ms. Althouse's not inconsiderable dander up, and, frankly, her point's well taken; like Filboid Studge, that kind of commentary -- er, analysis -- in so-called "straight news" reporting can be awfully hard to choke down first thing in the morning.

That said, though, it's also worth noting that partisans on both sides (and I'm not referring to Ms. Althouse here, just making a general observation) tend to develop a bit of a Lone Ranger complex about these things. So, in a perhaps vain effort to help our conservative friends keep Mr Bush's current, rather skeptical press coverage in perspective, let's briefly revisit a classic New York Times "straight news" lede from 1994, penned by none other than then-White House correspondent Maureen Dowd:

President Clinton returned today for a sentimental journey to the university where he didn't inhale, didn't get drafted, and didn't get a degree.

Now, let's be honest. President Bush has never been treated that way on the front page of a major American daily. And that's all to the good, I say; two wrongs don't make a right and all that. But, please, don't try to tell those of us who have been around this block a time or two that President Bush's trials and tribulations are unique. They aren't. Or at least they won't be unless he someday sees a lede like this:

President Bush returned today for a sentimental journey to the country where he didn't plan for the occupation, didn't have an exit strategy, and didn't find WMD.

Until then, I really don't think Mr. Bush and his supporters have much to complain about.

UPDATE: I meant to mention this somewhere above, but I'm afraid it slipped my increasingly enfeebled mind. If you haven't been reading Ann Althouse's droll, almost Dorothy Parker-ish posts on the recently-launched OSM, you're really missing a bet. Just head on over to the Althouse archives and start scrolling.

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to Glenn Reynolds (and I mean that sincerely; as I've noted before, Glenn has gone out of his way to be kind to this blog, and this blogger, on too many occasions to count over the years), he really couldn't be any more wrong about this:

The Administration's "war base" is weakening (and was even before the election) because they feel that it's not fighting the war hard enough, or because they feel that the "war" is over. It's not, but the "major combat" part has been over for a while, and what's left is murky, and -- like all counterinsurgency operations -- takes a while. More elections in iraq will help, but they need to pay attention to this, not keep it off the table and hope people will forget. It's not Bosnia, or Haiti. They're going to have to make their case, strongly and regularly, and not worry that doing so will set off the critics. The critics are already set off.

That's an interesting take on the situation, but it leaves out an important point: millions of members of the administration's "war base," including this one, are now starting to look around for the exits not for the reasons that Glenn suggests, but, rather, because this administration has repeatedly proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend its Iraq policy without demonizing its opponents and dividing the nation. [Like the anti-war folks have been paragons of civility? -- ed. Nope. Far from it, in fact. But the last time I checked, Mr. Bush was the President of the United States, and his critics, well, weren't. Different jobs, different standards of comportment.]

Frankly, the last thing this president needs right now is yet another Rovian PR offensive. Instead, he should do precisely what his presidential role model, Ronald Reagan, did almost twenty years ago, when one of his foreign policy initiatives went haywire: reach out to the broad middle of America by getting rid of the scoundrels, and bringing in the kind of sensible centrists that inspire confidence on both sides of the aisle.

Would that involve swallowing a certain amount of presidential pride? Probably. But, you know, Mr. Bush wasn't wrong when he said that being president is hard work. It is. Particularly when it requires the president to recognize that his personal and political interests may have diverged from the nation's, and that it's his solemn duty to place the latter first -- even if that means firing some of his closest friends, and disappointing some of his strongest supporters. That's hard work because those are hard things.

Time to do hard things, Mr. President.

IN HOLLAND, FOUR MILLION DOMINOES have been painstakingly arranged for a televised toppling. Without warning, a tragically off-course sparrow arrives on the scene. A lone shot rings out. And the scandal rocks a nation.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: And God said, "I think I’ll make me a lemur today," and there were lemurs. (Via John Cole.)

NOTE: As longtime readers know, I'm no fan of those who mock religious faith. But mercilessly debunking the spurious claims of pseudoscience is a whole nother thing, as they say. And I'm all for that.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, back in the real world, Steve Verdon has what he rightly calls some "very, very cool" news about the discovery of a reptilian missing link.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Vatican official tells the ANSA news agency that intelligent design only "pretends to be science," and that it does not belong in the science classroom.

SIGNIFYING NOTHING: "[T]here is no abortion debate. Or at least the debate is unconnected to the reasons people on both sides feel so strongly about it. What passes for an abortion debate is a jewel of the political hack's art: a big issue that is exploited without being discussed."

That's Michael Kinsley talking. And you know something? He's absolutely right.

DAMAGE: I don't pretend to be an expert in matters military, but this would certainly seem to support Rep. John Murtha's contention yesterday that the war in Iraq is doing serious damage to our nation's armed forces:

The Army has suspended plans to expand an unwieldy, 16-month-old program to call up inactive soldiers for military duty, after thousands have requested delays or exemptions or failed to show up....

The Army also announced, in a memo released this week, that it will no longer involuntarily mobilize from the IRR an estimated 15,000 Army officers who have already completed their eight years of required military duty, stating that under a new policy it will offer them a chance to resign instead.

Poor records management has hampered the Army's efforts to draw on the pool, intended to fill holes in existing Army units, Harvey told defense reporters last week.

As I said above, I'm no expert. But when soldiers just ... stop showing up, it sounds like we have a problem. And probably one that another vicious, unprincipled round of Swift Boating won't do much to address.

MODERN DAY MCCARTHYISM: When the preternaturally reasonable Joe Gandelman starts using that kind of language to describe the White House communications strategy, it's a safe bet that The Gang That Couldn't Talk Straight is in even deeper political trouble than we knew.

Hopefully, President Bush will realize this in time to salvage his last three years in office. As I said the other day, we just can't afford a failed presidency at this difficult -- and dangerous -- moment in our national history.

MORE: "[I]t is critical that bi-partisan alliances emerge to address the current leadership dysfunction. There is too much time before the next election to allow a leadership vacuum - America cannot wait two to three years to confront both national security threats and serious domestic concerns."

"AIDING & ABETTING" reads the headline over Sen. John McCain's op-ed in today's NY Post. But I'll be damned if I can find that rather incendiary phrase anywhere in the actual text. Which leads one to wonder: Did McCain (or his people) write that headline? Or did somebody at the Post just stick those unpleasant words in the senator's mouth? And if it's the latter, shouldn't Sen. McCain step out in front of the cameras at some point today and say so? (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

UPDATE: McCain just called the headline "outrageous" on MSNBC's Hardball.

Good. He's right.

NOW THAT'S UNPATRIOTIC: There's been an awful lot of blogospheric sniping recently over the use of the word "unpatriotic" (and for good reason, I think; like racism, it's a terrible charge, and one that should never be used to score cheap political points in a policy debate), but here, perhaps, is an example of unpatriotic behavior that we can all agree on: taking advantage of lax state laws to scam our nation's service men and women on insurance and investments.

According to the article, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are working together on a bipartisan basis to (finally) put a stop to this crap.

Good for them.

KO-KONSPIRATORS? Kenneth, meet Karl.

DENTAL DAMN: Well, now, this isn't good. (Via Will Saletan.)

1987: Ah, what a year. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Jim and Tammy Faye were in trouble. And actor Michael Douglas was rather famously in the grip of a Fatal Attraction.

Oh, and one more thing: If former company researcher Glenn R. Evers is to be believed, DuPont was in the process of embarking on a multi-decade coverup of the fact that one of its chemicals was poisoning our fast-food hamburgers.

Have a nice day.

ANNALS OF DEMOCRATIZATION: "The Muslim Brotherhood says it has won at least 33 seats in the first round of national assembly elections in Egypt.... If confirmed officially, the results would more than double the seats held by the Islamic political group."

Like most people who are fortunate enough to live in one, I'm all for democracy. And I agree wholeheartedly with our friends on the right that liberalization should be a primary goal of US policy in the Middle East. But if we're really serious about that, aren't we all going to have to grow up at some point, and quit pretending that force of arms and a little simple-minded sloganeering are going to somehow make decent governance bloom in the desert?

Of course, that would necessarily involve adopting what one might call a reality-based approach to the whole issue.

So I guess that's pretty much out, huh?

A SPORTS ANALOGY? And why, you ask, did Major League Baseball finally decide to do the right thing on steroids? For one reason, and one reason only: because management and labor both knew that the federal government was prepared to step in if they didn't.

Hmm. I wonder if there's a lesson in there someplace.

VIA DAN FROOMKIN, here's the AP's Tom Raum putting his finger on just one of the many problems with President Bush's current PR strategy: "President Bush's efforts to paint Democrats as hypocrites for criticizing the Iraq war after they once warned that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat could backfire on Republicans.... If Bush castigates Democrats for changing their minds on the war, he might wind up alienating Republicans who have done so, too."

Read it all, as they say.

INSECURITY: Why, the pundits ask, are the American people so down about the economy, when it's actually growing at a fairly decent clip? Well, here's at least a part of the answer: twenty-four percent of them think there's a decent chance they'll find themselves out of work next year.

THE SADDEST WORDS OF TONGUE OR PEN: Yesterday's bipartisan Senate love fest for incoming Fed Chair Ben Bernanke may not have made for scintillating TV, but it did give America something worth viewing: a glimpse of what George W. Bush's presidency could have looked like had he actually been a uniter and not a divider.

Let's be honest. All President Bush had to do after 9/11 was dial down the ideology a bit, and replace the Mayberry Machiavellis in his White House with a team that folks on both sides of the aisle could respect. That was it. Game over. The GOP would have been happily running the country for the next fifty years. Instead, he chose the one sure path of folly for himself and the country: amping up the partisan rancor by aggressively pursuing a right-wing agenda, and further empowering all the worst elements of his administration and his party -- the frauds, the mountebanks, the haters, the lifelong second-raters.

And so here we are today, divided at home, isolated abroad, and filled with a brown-spots-on-our-underwear sense that the future could be a grim place, indeed.

It didn't have to be this way. And maybe -- just maybe -- it still doesn't. There's still time for this president to throw out the rascals and get a fresh start with the American people.

Needless to say, given the record, I don't expect him to do anything of the kind. But I sincerely hope he does. At this point in our national history, with any number of tough challenges facing us both at home and abroad, America simply can't afford its first failed presidency of the 21st century.

LAWS WERE BROKEN: An official investigation finds that the Bush administration's silly and rather ham-fisted efforts to turn PBS into GOP-TV violated federal regulations -- and the law.

A PRETTY GOOD 'SITUATION': I realize that this is unlikely to be a particularly popular observation 'round these parts, but Tucker Carlson's late-night MSNBC talker, The Situation, really isn't half-bad. If you've been avoiding it just because of the host's libertarian politics, do yourself a favor and check it out. (On the other hand, if you've been avoiding it because you really, really don't like bow-tied prep-school boys, you might want to just stick with what's working for you.)

BAD FAITH: According to the WaPo's E.J. Dionne, "The bad faith of Bush's current argument [on Iraq] is staggering." Which is true. But since it really isn't any more staggering than the bad faith of his old argument on this subject, it rather conveniently opens up an honorable path for those of us who've been torn recently between our desire to speak the truth, and our wish not to be labeled "unpatriotic" by our friends and colleagues on the right side of the blogosphere. You see, instead of criticizing President Bush for needlessly dividing the country in wartime with a tendentious and often intellectually dishonest communications strategy, we can now just congratulate him for staying the course!

See? Blog civility. It's really easy when you put your mind to it, you know?

TANNED, RESTED, AND READY: Ah, that's better. Look for blogging to resume sometime today.

POSTSCRIPT: You'll note that comments and trackbacks are now disabled here at The O'Toole File, which means, in essence, that the terrorists spammers have won. Sorry about that. But please feel free to send along your thoughts, complaints, comments, etc. via e-mail. It's always (well, you know, almost always) a pleasure to hear from you.

POSTSCRIPT 2: And, speaking of comments, for some reason, a sizable number of the old ones disappeared when I sucked the archives out of WordPress and injected them into Movable Type. Again, I'm sorry about that. But I've saved the old WP database, and I'll try to find a way to get them back into the system as soon as time and circumstance allow.