Now, there could be some debate over that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" bit, sure. And, in fact, there has been debate over that bit, for 145 years. And everyone has basically decided, repeatedly, that it means that the children of immigrants are citizens. Senators in the 19th century understood what that sentence meant. The Supreme Court has been unambiguous on this point for more than a century. Even if David Vitter is too dense to understand this and too vile to care, Mr. Randy I Love The Constitution Tea Party Paul should not be pretending to not understand this point.

“Closing this loophole will not prevent them from becoming citizens, but will ensure that they have to go through the same process as anyone else who wants to become an American citizen.”

"Citizenship is a privilege, and only those who respect our immigration laws should be allowed to enjoy its benefits," said Sen. Paul. "This legislation makes it necessary that everyone follow the rules, and goes through same process to become a U.S. citizen."

OK, well, what did Paul and Vitter do to become citizens, exactly? I'm guessing they were just born here! Sure, maybe their parents were citizens, but how did they earn that privilege, exactly? These freeloaders should play by the same rules as everyone else!

"I’ll just say I have lots of options for the future, and I’m investigating all my options," she told the paper.

What to make of this? Probably not much. Thanks to cable news and the blogosphere, it's easier than ever for someone like Angle to earn a national following among Republicans. But just because they are familiar with her name and sympathetic to her politics doesn't mean that Republican primary voters -- even those who most strongly identify with the Tea Party movement that fueled Angle's Nevada Senate campaign last year -- will be eager to make her their presidential nominee. The fact remains that Angle's essential claim to fame now is that her nomination enabled the top Democrat in the U.S. Senate to survive an election he had no business winning. Otherwise, her political resume consists only of a failed primary campaign for Congress and a few terms in the Nevada state legislature. Policy-wise, there's almost nothing that Republican primary voters would get with Angle that they won't be able to get with most of the other candidates  who end up running in '12. And stature-wise, those other candidates would dwarf Angle.

For obvious reasons, there aren't many examples of candidates parlaying high-profile but losing statewide campaigns into presidential efforts. John Silber, the volcanic Boston University president, narrowly lost the 1990 Massachusetts governor's race to Bill Weld, then flirted with running as a conservative Democrat in the 1992 presidential primaries (but ultimately declined to do so). And after his three-point loss to Charles Robb in 1994 (in a campaign with remarkable parallels to last year's Angle-Reid contest), Oliver North's fans briefly tried to persuade him to run for president in 1996, but he didn't bite. There's also, for what it's worth, David Duke, who was trounced by Edwin Edwards in Louisiana's November 1991 gubernatorial runoff and who then ran in the 1992 GOP presidential primaries. And I suppose Al Sharpton, who had waged losing campaigns for the Senate and for mayor of New York before seeking the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, belongs in this group, along with Alan Keyes, who lost a 1992 Senate race to Barbara Mikulski before running for the 1996 GOP nod. Otherwise, I can't think of any other modern White House candidates with a background similar to Angle's.

Almost certainly, she won't end up running. But she may not be done flirting with a campaign yet. At the end of Wednesday night's screening, she asked the audience to invite her back to the state.

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.

What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.

Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America's forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.

Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale -- nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.” When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit's much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.

Impregnable Defenses

All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.

Yet the defense budget -- a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought -- remains a sacred cow. Why is that?

The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers.

Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national security crisis. As never before in U.S. history, threats to the nation's existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington, fear -- partly genuine, partly contrived -- triggered a powerful response.

One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits. Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as President Eisenhower described it.

Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts -- government-supported laboratories, university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) -- devoted to identifying (or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.

The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security “debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of the country.

Strategic Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global leadership.

The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity. Policymakers since Kennan's time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position. The effort has been a largely futile one.

By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power held the key to preserving America's exalted status. The presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the country's influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike -- this was the idea, at least.

In postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable success. Elsewhere -- notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and (especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East -- it either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly, the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.

One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection approach -- trillions expended in Iraq for what? -- might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national security strategy. A certain amount of introspection would seem to be called for. Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of America's privileged status benefit from another approach?

Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such debate. Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the pre-existing strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy entails.

Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have healed. The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.

Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government's authority to mandate military service. GI's, the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.

The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation). It was “our army” because that army was “us.”

With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war's supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.

In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who deserved greater admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war? Or was the war resister -- the one who never served at all -- the real hero?

War's end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further. So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was all more than a little unseemly.

Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none -- the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer -- then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?

Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative -- to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work -- people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation's “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today's warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation's increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.

Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation's treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.

Misremembered History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition. Leading proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy Adams. That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in pragmatic realism. What happened to that realist tradition? Simply put, World War II killed it -- or at least discredited it. In the intense and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”

The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat -- Iraq in 2003, Iran today -- replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s -- always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric -- even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he's long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler's Reich and winning World War II, it's Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?

Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors -- institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and misremembered history -- insulate the military budget from serious scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses the money that pours into the national security budget, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Speaking of annoying, this "news" was sort of broken by Mark Halperin, though Salter has not confirmed it. (And why would he? The book has not been well-reviewed.)

There were some clues. Mark Salter fancies himself a literary type. He ghost-wrote John McCain's various books. "O's" opponent in the book is an honorable military type with no glaring and obvious personal flaws. (It is sort of McCain plus Romney, I guess. I have only skimmed it.) A Democrat might've written a book more critical of the way the Republican Party runs campaigns.

In a summer New York magazine story partially about how nu-John McCain has disappointed the man who crafted his modern public persona, we're told Salter retreated to Maine, to stew in his bitterness and "try his hand at writing fiction." But the Daily Beast claimed that Mark Salter would not write a thinly veiled novel about the 2008 campaign, because he has writer's block.

Mark Salter, John McCain’s co-author, and the man most credited with helping him shape his image as an iconic American hero—a maverick willing to buck orthodoxy in the name of principle (an image that McCain is in the process dismantling in his bitter primary fight)—has scrapped his plans to write fiction, and gone back to reality.

“I tried writing fiction after the '08 campaign ended. I didn’t have the talent for it, and returned to more reliably lucrative speechwriting,” Salter told The Daily Beast in an email.
[...]
Salter said he "gave it up altogether because the kind of writers I admire have so much more talent than I do that it discouraged me from believing that I could write anything a tenth as good as they do."

Right. Well, it's not Joe Klein unambiguously denying authorship of "Primary Colors," but it's still funny.

According to the list of scheduled film screenings, at least two movies focusing on the threat of radical Islam will be shown.

First, there's "America at Risk: The War With No Name," which is narrated by Newt and Callista Gingrich. The trailer:

Then there's "The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks," produced by blogger Pamela Geller. There's no trailer for the film, but Geller has described it this way:

This is the first documentary that tells the whole truth about the Ground Zero mosque. Be prepared to be shaken to your core. This movie rips the mask off the enemedia and the malevolent role they play in advancing and propagandizing the objectives of America's mortal enemies.

...

The press has tried to shape the narrative to demonize the freedom lovers and denazify the Islamic supremacists, but the American people no longer trust big media."

Also playing will be "Iranium," the new film from the Clarion Fund, makers of the 2008 classic, "Obsession: Radical Islam's War With the West." The trailer:

Here is the full film schedule:

2011 CPAC Theater Schedule - Sponsored By Citizens United Productions

Why did this happen? Because Smith, the day before, had linked to Esquire's extended interview with Roger Ailes. Smith called Ailes "one of the most powerful men in American politics" and even said he was correct to speak of "the plot to take me down." The only remotely critical thing in the brief introduction to an extended quotation of Ailes' own words was when Smith said it was "ill-advised" of Ailes to call everyone at NPR "Nazis."

Smith seemed baffled by the attack, though he acknowledged that Ailes himself is said to read everything written about him. (Hi, Roger! It would be hilarious if you hired Olbermann. Just a thought!)

As Smith was reminded later, there is a lengthy history of Fox lashing out at people it perceives to be its enemies, and the list goes well beyond liberal partisan critics to include journalists who dare to report on the goings-on at the network without kowtowing to its company line. The New York Times' David Carr wrote a great column on the subject. One frequent tactic the famously vicious Fox P.R. department engages in is leaking damaging material on supposedly adversarial reporters to friendly blogs. But my favorite method is the Doocy smear.

The king of the bizarre on-air smear against an enemy reporter is Steve Doocy, that unintentionally savage parody of a morning news empty grin. After years of yukking it up in the trenches of local news "on the lighter side" segments, "Fox & Friends" finally allowed Doocy to stop repressing his inner asshole. And so, with the soothing cadence of a guy who promises he's just as imbecilic as he presumes his viewers are, Doocy attacks.

(David Carr, of course, has been a target.)

Previous victims also include Times reporters Jacques Steinberg and Steven Reddicliffe, guilty of reporting that CNN's rating were then rising. The Fox crew Photoshopped images of Steinberg and Reddicliffe, making them into grotesque (and in Steinberg's case, arguably anti-Semitic) caricatures without acknowledging that the images were doctored.

In another case that is almost as bizarre as the Smith attack, Doocy went after a P.R. firm that had issued a funny press release about Fox having bedbugs:

Just look how much of a torturous reach this is, shoehorning a counterattack into the rigorously bland and conversational medium of the morning show.

This clip, in fact, illustrates the single weirdest thing about the Doocy smear: Who the hell cares? More than a million people watch "Fox & Friends" regularly. Do you think any of them know what Politico is or understand why they should care about a P.R. firm's CEO? If part of your smear involves not explaining why you're smearing someone, it must just be baffling to the viewer not familiar with all the characters involved. When Bill O'Reilly calls David Carr a "crackhead," the little words on the screen explain why you are supposed to hate him. How many 6 a.m. Fox viewers know what Graydon Carter looks like? Doocy just releases these little non sequiturs of bile into the ether -- a reminder to journos, I guess, that FOX IS WATCHING YOU -- and moves on to the funny animal story.

Why is Doocy so vigilant in defense of his boss Roger Ailes, you ask? Because, as Doocy explains in his book about fatherhood, Roger is like his father.

Aww. Anyway, here is a clip of Steve Doocy reporting on one man's "lucky potatoes."

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"Everybody is getting caught up on the pit -- 'Oh, it was some little thing.' Take the word 'pit' out and put in 'sharp piece of metal.' Nobody would have a problem with suing over that. They're trying to make this about something trivial. A pit in an olive is the same thing as biting into a rock," Dolan says. (One of his clients lost three teeth after biting down on a rock in a salad. Another was burned by cleaning acid in a bottle of water.)

Furthermore, he adds, it looks like Kucinich has a real shot at collecting damages.

To review the allegations, as outlined in a suit filed in court in Washington: In April 2008, Kucinich ate a sandwich purchased at the cafeteria of the Longworth House Office Building. The sandwich "was represented to contain pitted olives" but in fact contained at least one unpitted olive. Kucinich bit on it and "sustained serious and permanent dental and oral injuries requiring multiple surgical and dental procedures," the suit alleges. He has alleged negligence and breach of implied warranty by the operators of the cafeteria and their suppliers.

Dolan says there are two ways Kucinich could win the case: 

"If he's got the label that says 'pitted olives,' and they weren't pitted, that's called an express warranty. They told him the sandwich had no pits. He didn't get what he bought, and it harmed him," Dolan says. "The other area is strict products liability. There is something wrong with the product. He didn't cause it. He had no reason to assume it was in the product. And he got injured."

Dolan also argues that the core issue here -- food safety -- is an important one. "Mr. Kucinich may be trying to make a point as a legislator: Our food must be safe. How many people died from infected peanuts? Many. How many children were given formula in China that killed them? Many. When product manufacturers do not handle or care for their products in an appropriate way, people can die. People are trivializing this because it's a pit in an olive. "

Kucinich has not publicly commented on the case.

And that wasn't the end of it. After Rather cut him off and ended the segment, an irate Bush, his microphone still in place and open, stood up at his desk and began ranting at the CBS technicians in his office:

"The bastard didn't lay a glove on me ... Tell your goddamned network that if they want to talk to me to raise their hands at a press conference. No more Mr. Inside stuff after that."

The confrontation, which dominated the national news for the next few days, was immediately beneficial for Bush. His cool aggression -- note how effortlessly he works in the jab at Rather for walking off the CBS News set in protest the previous fall at the 6:35 mark -- was a revelation to many and helped toughen his image.

But the real impact was with the Republican Party base, which had long doubted Bush's ideological purity, and for good reason: Bush had run in the 1980 GOP primaries to the left of Ronald Reagan, belittling the Gipper's tax cut plan as "voodoo economics" and even expressing support for abortion rights. The factions of the party that Bush had been seeking to rally in that campaign were dying as the "New Right" Reaganites took over. By '88, the GOP's makeover into a top-to-bottom conservative party was virtually complete.  His status as Reagan's vice president (and the fact that he'd spent the entire Reagan presidency trying to make the GOP base forget about the '80 primaries) was enough to make Bush the '88 front-runner, but that hardly meant rank-and-file conservatives were enthusiastic.

Against this backdrop, the Rather interview was the best thing that could have happened to Bush. Among grass-roots conservatives, resentment of the national news media was an article of faith, but special scorn had long been reserved for Rather and his network and their "liberal bias." In the mid-1980s, in fact, Jesse Helms had actually helped launch a campaign to take over CBS, encouraging his national donor base to buy up shares. Richard Viguerie the direct mail pioneer who supported Helms' effort, said at the time: "In order to accomplish what we want politically, there is going to have to be a change in the media." The effort ultimately fizzled, but not before putting a real scare into CBS executives. It shouldn't have been surprising, then, that when the Bush-Rather interview aired just a few years later, the conservative grass roots immediately rallied behind the vice president. CBS' switchboard was overwhelmed with hostile phone calls, so much that the network was initially slow to defend Rather, unsure how widespread the rage was. Within a few days, a poll found that Republicans, by a 43-point margin, believed Bush had come out ahead. Among Democrats, Rather was declared the winner. (Independents tended toward Bush's side.)

It is difficult to quantify the exact impact of the Rather interview on Bush's relationship with the GOP's base, but clearly it didn't hurt. Despite an initial boost in Iowa polling, he did end up finishing a distant and rather humiliating third in the caucuses there two weeks later, behind both Dole and Pat Robertson. But he promptly bounced back to defeat Dole in New Hampshire the next week, and didn't lose a single primary or caucus after that.

There's also a much longer-term significance to the Bush-Rather showdown, in that it vividly illustrated the depths of the right's animosity toward Rather, CBS and the major national news outlets. Remember that back in 1988, there were still only three full-fledged broadcast networks (Fox, launched in 1986, only offered sporadic prime-time programming and had no news division), and when it came to cable news, CNN (and CNN Headline News, which then looped a 30-minute newscast day and night) was the only show in town. Newspaper and weekly newsmagazines were still dominant. There was no Internet to speak of. There were also millions of intensely engaged grass-roots conservatives who hungered for political news and commentary and who hated being forced to depend on the traditional major outlets. The explosion in conservative talk radio, don't forget, coincided with the rise of the New Right. Rush Limbaugh's show went national in '88, and by the early '90s was attracting nearly 20 million listeners per week: When it came to  news-related programming, conservatives represented a massive untapped market.

This, of course, is the market that Fox News sought to corner when it was launched in 1996, its "fair and balanced" slogan calibrated perfectly to resonate with conservatives who believed Rather and his cronies were anything but that. Early advertising on Limbaugh's show surely helped, too. Notably, Roger Ailes, the man deputized by Rupert Murdoch to give Fox News its identity, was a veteran of that '88 Bush campaign (and of the '68 Nixon campaign). Ailes had coached Bush in the run-up to the Rather interview and was in the room as Bush talked to the CBS anchor via satellite. It was Ailes, sensing that Rather would pepper Bush with Iran-Contra questions, who insisted that the interview be conducted live -- an unusual practice for a network newscast. Ailes understood that, when it came to appealing to the conservative base, playing by Rather's rules would do nothing for his candidate. But jawing with the anchorman and even getting in a crack about "those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York"? That was a different story.

Of course, in building Fox News, Ailes has created the opposite anchor-guest dynamic, essentially establishing his network as a safe haven for conservative politicians from the mainstream media and its pesky, biased questions. It's no coincidence that so many of the GOP's potential 2012 White House candidates have Fox News contracts. Generally, it's only when Democrats appear on Fox that the news anchors start exhibiting Rather-ish aggression -- remember Bill Clinton with Chris Wallace in 2006? Or Barack Obama with Bret Baier last year? We're quickly reaching the point when the only time Democrats will appear on Fox -- or when Republicans will appear on MSNBC, for that matter -- is when they want to stage a George H.W. Bush moment of their own.

Unlike many entrepreneurs teaching "concealed carry" classes from sea to shining sea, he urged students to leave their guns at home. He stressed that he couldn't turn them into infantry soldiers with a few sessions in a gym basement. Even most armed assailants, he explained, aren't hell bent upon murder. They use weapons to control their victims.

Anybody pulling a gun must shoot to kill without hesitation. The soldier reasoned that most Rice students simply weren't prepared to do that. Hence the likeliest outcome was that criminals would end up murdering them with their own guns. Heightened awareness, avoiding lonely places at night, and pepper spray or mace would afford more safety than the illusion of power conveyed by a 9mm semi-automatic.

Our instructor further advised that shotguns are the weapon of choice for home defense. Unlike a heavy-caliber handgun, a shotgun will put an intruder out of business without a bullet passing through a wall and killing a sleeping child. He emphasized that anybody suspecting a nighttime home invasion should first perform a thorough bed check -- a procedure that saved me from potential catastrophe one night after my teenage son and a friend sneaked out to howl at the moon under a maiden's window at 2 a.m., leaving an open back door and a half-dozen beagles running through the house.

Creeping back home, the lads overheard me shucking shells from my 20 gauge pump, an unmistakably chilling sound. Fearing that burglars had taken us hostage, they were subsequently apprehended in headlong flight up the street. They'd been running for help, they explained.

Would I have shot an unknown intruder? I believe so. I'm also glad I've never had to face the choice. Killing a human being, almost regardless of provocation, is nothing like hunting game. Never mind legal peril. Contrary to action/adventure films, psychological fallout can be severe.

Anyway, we students next proceeded to the firing range for lessons in loading, unloading and blasting paper targets. "If you can point your finger," I wrote, "you can learn to kill" -- an observation that annoyed almost as many gun fanciers as this column will. Maybe I should have said that I was already fairly good with a shotgun, and had spent half my life aiming balls at things.

Anyway, here's the thing: In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, handgun advocates argue that a well-armed private citizen could have saved lives by putting a decisive end to alleged gunman Jared Loughner's mad act. Never mind that Arizona has the most permissive gun laws in the country. Indeed, the killer had broken no laws until he shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at point-blank range.

Ah, but there was an armed bystander. His name was Joe Zamudio, and he bravely helped subdue the gunman without firing a shot. But he's also admitted how close he came to shooting the heroic retired Army colonel who'd wrested the pistol from Loughner's hands when he paused to reload.

Thanks to the killer's 30-round ammo clip, he'd gotten off 31 shots in 15 seconds. Fifteen seconds! Everything was chaos and terror.

In Hollywood films, shootouts are carefully choreographed. Villains can't shoot; heroes rarely miss. Nobody panics. Melodramatic violence metes out justice and redeems the world.

In reality, as Americans seem fated to experience again and again without learning anything, a gunman walks into a Detroit police station and shoots four cops before himself being killed.

Two cops serving a warrant in St. Petersburg, Fla., are killed and a U.S. marshal wounded by a suspect who escapes.

Two sheriff's deputies are shot at a Walmart near Seattle before a third officer kills their assailant, whose motives remain unknown.

A policeman in Waldport, Ore., is shot by an unknown assailant during a routine traffic stop. He remains in critical condition.

At another routine stop, an Indianapolis cop is shot four times, twice in the face. He's in critical condition too.

All of these events occurred within 24 hours between Jan. 23 and 24.

It's worth emphasizing that the 11 victims were trained, experienced law enforcement officers. But their assailants, who'd found semi-automatic weapons easier to acquire than whiskey, gave them no chance.

Meanwhile, NRA fundamentalists pretend that America will be a freer, safer place if more poorly trained, inexperienced, unfit, would-be Bruce Willis heroes were waddling around shopping malls carrying pistols.

There's a word for people who cling to absurd beliefs against massive evidence. They're called cultists, and they're currently in charge.

And so, according to a recent New York magazine profile of Peretz, they were going to make him stop blogging. Except he kept blogging. And that is because, according to a slightly more recent New York Times Magazine profile of Peretz, he just refused to stop.

Multiple New Republic staff members told me that The Spine would soon be replaced by a rigorously edited weekly Peretz column. In Tel Aviv, Peretz laughed at the thought.

“That’s not going to happen,” Peretz said.

Now, that is going to happen. Sort of. Mostly. "In addition" to the new column, anonymous New Republic editors write, "he will move from writing his blog, The Spine, to writing a column for the website."

But in his rambling, simultaneously self-pitying and self-aggrandizing goodbye to the title he bought, Peretz leaves the door open:

The fact is that I haven't done a serious and long article for the print edition in perhaps half a year. That's what I want to do with some regularity now. (I am keenly aware that articles from the print edition are also served up on the electronic edition.) I suppose I want to have my cake and eat it, too. So I will be writing a weekly column for TNR online but I will indulge in doing a blog post when the spirit moves me.

And apparently the spirit moved him today! At 1:07 p.m. -- seven minutes after the time stamp on the post announcing Peretz's new, diminished role -- The Spine was updated with Marty Peretz's thoughts on Tunisia and Egypt.

The success of the Afghan military is also crucial, of course, to President Obama's plan to "transition" to Afghan control and bring American troops home.

Fields had a remarkable exchange about all this on Monday with a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting, Robert Henke. He says at one point, "there is no plan." Watch:

Perhaps also of note: Congressional Republicans, who say they want to cut $100 billion from the budget, have so far shown little interest in anything but extending the war in Afghanistan.