LRC* picks
The curious rise of anti-religious hysteria
Or why, though I like C.S. Lewis very much and enjoyed the Narnia books as a kid, I’ve sat out this culture-wars red herring

... and speaking of such tempests in a teapot, did anybody else catch on the news the Bushling’s aw-shucks performance on being asked if he’d seen Brokeback Mountain? (No, I don’t want to see one cowboy roll another over, then spit in his own hand either.) Possibly sincere but he is rather people-smart. (He’s been cultivating his likeable-rube persona — ‘nucular’ — at least since Andover.) He knows what his fan base want to hear.

The worst word in the language
Or the linguistic lesson taught by Paul Fussell in Class — my marching orders as a newspaper sub-editor — nicely summed up

*A site that Lew started 7 years ago tomorrow to protest Clinton’s bombing of Serbia. You can hear him describe this in the first hour of an interview with Karen Kwiatkowski. Clinton looks relatively good now in comparison but back then it was Wag the Dog for real. Bush campaigned in 2000 on a platform against ‘nation-building’ unlike them pot-smokin’, blowjob-gettin’ libruls, but those who were paying attention knew what the PNAC had up their sleeves and could predict the war hysteria coming from people like Mr Goebbels Rove today (it’s post-9/11, doncha know). Praise the Lord and shred the Constitution.