HITCH ON DAILY SHOW: Here's video of Hitchens and Jon Stewart jousting. Note Hitchens' last jab at Stewart, where he cleverly notices that Stewart is implying he's on the same side as Bush if only he'd do a better job of explaining himself. Yeah, right.

ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, WHAT THE HELL ARE WE FIGHTING FOR? Thank God for Christopher Hitchens. The next time somebody looks at me with incredulity in their eyes and asks me how I can support Bush and the war in Iraq, I'll point them to this article. He says everything I think, and does so far more comprehensively and eloquently than I could ever dream.

A WINNING TICKET: As many of you have seen, I've been assailed of late by one "JD" in my Comments. He's even challenging my mom. The nerve!

Nonetheless, JD's comments link to a blog that's called Grok Your World. I'm not sure if he publishes it or not, but I do sometimes read it. Although I find much of it murky and wrongheaded, a recent post there is pretty smart. Basically, the argument is that what the Dems lack more than a good candidate are two big things: principles and balls. The poster even concedes this is what the Republicans have offered in spades.

Anyway, I read the post, thought about it, and wrote a comment on the blog. I wanted to share it here:

As someone whose politics have moved rightward in recent years, I have to say: I completely agree with you. I'm not sure I fully understood why I've moved away from the Dems in recent years, because quite often I find myself not happy sidling up to the Republicans. The answer is: I moved away from the Dems because there's no there there, to steal a phrase. I admire Newsom's strong stand on gay marriage, and I admire Hackett's service and his principled stand. Although I'm still feeling like a McCain guy in '08, I'd be far more interested in Newsom/Hackett than I would in Hillary Clinton or John Kerry. It's odd, given that I've become more conservative, and yet I'm preferring what might be more liberal options. Perhaps what I crave is what you cite: principles and balls. Now there's a ticket I'd vote for: Principles/Balls in '08!

FLY BY NIGHT AWAY FROM HERE: Some really melodramatic poetry jumped outta me this morning. Feels a little like something I might have written in seventh grade, inspired by Rush lyrics, but that's no reason not to reprint it here for your entertainment, consideration, and ridicule.

PAGING BOBBY MCFERRIN
If all you write is sour poetry,
all you say is dark prophecy,
all you believe are tossed calumnies,
all you hear are pained melodies,

is it any wonder the world
weighs heavy on your heart?

SUV B.S. FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN: Andrew Sullivan is blabbering on against SUVs. Seems like a bunch of B.S. to me, and so I sent him this e-mail:

I agree with you far more than I disagree with you. And usually when I
disagree with you it's fairly minor, and I just shake my head and
smile. But your diatribe about SUVs really rankles me. Either you've
hit a nerve or you've got a lot of nerve...

Here's what I don't get: If I drive a giant gas-guzzlin' SUV six miles
roundtrip to work, am I aiding and abetting the terrorists more than a
guy who drives a Honda Civic (with a big fat Ben & Jerry's
bumpersticker on it) 100 miles roundtrip to work every day? It seems
like the endgame to your way of thinking is that everyone should be
allotted a "responsible" amount of fossil fuel to do with as they
please, but should pay out the wazoo if they go over that amount.
Right? You've gone daft. (I think that's the saying. What do I know, I
live in Chicago.)

Where does it end? Don't imported wines implicitly require more fossil
fuel to bring them to your local wine shop than do California or
Oregon or Washington wines? If I drink Australian Shiraz, am I doing
Osama's work? Etc. Ad infinitum.

Why focus on SUVs? Seems like anti-family sentiment masquerading as
anti-Islamofascist sentiment. Seems like class envy masquerading as
eco-responsibility.

If you continue to send overnight parcels, the terrorists win! Bring
back the Pony Express!

Own a boat? Why not just send a check directly to the Taliban?

Mowing your big lawn? You selfish Muslim-lover!

- Scott

MY MIND, IT IS A'CHANGIN': Once again, to my great shock, I find myself nodding along with a sensible conservative. (In this case it's the bowtie-wearing George Will. As badly as I feel about bowties on men -- on humans -- I can't help but agree with nearly everything the guy writes in this article. His basic point is that all the latest crazed pronouncements on high oil prices, among other forecasts of economic armageddon, are mere piffle.)

Bluster and hyperbole make better copy and better newscasts, but they're bad medicine for a punch-drunk electorate that's gooped up on cynicism and conspiracy theories, IMHO.

CJ'S DARNDEST THINGS: Sometimes it's just fun to listen to my three-year-old think out loud. Among his greatest hits of late are:

"What did I did?" (anytime he senses he's about to be in trouble)

"Is that the bellybutton?" (referring to a big circle on a tree trunk where a branch had been excised)

"I got a lotta Ingles in me." (in response to his dad trying to speak Spanish with him, something he generally reserves for his Guatemalan nanny)

"Can I be in our family?" (asking to join Mommy and Daddy's hug)

"When I'm a 'dult and you're a baby, I can drink black fizz and you get leche." (advancing his theory that he's getting older and adults are getting younger, as well as his hope that, as he ages, he will be able to drink unlimited Coca-Cola while his father is relegated to milk)

NO FREAKIN' WAY! Here's my favorite Snopes entry in a long while:

Claim: An ex-congressman who had sex with a subordinate won clemency from a president who had sex with a subordinate, then was hired by a clergyman who had sex with a subordinate.

Status: True.

SULLY ROCKS IN ABSENTIA: I've been on record many times saying that Andrew Sullivan and his blog have been major, major influences in my political...well, it's not a conversion, really, but in my...political...opening up...? The fact that I no longer reflexively self-identify as a Dem is at least partly due to the stuff I read and thought about as a result of AndrewSullivan.com, plain and simple.

Although I don't always agree with Andrew, I generally admire his writing and his thinking. Turns out now I have something else to admire: his ability to judge talent.

Guest-blogging for Andrew in the past few weeks have been some smarmy editor from TNR (yawn), and then two incredibly captivating raconteurs.

The first was Dan Savage, who I knew dimly from the profane sex-advice columns (or something like that) he contributes to the Chicago alt-weekly THE READER. Dunno if he still does that or not, but what I do know is his week helming Andrew's blog was a romp, full of funny and smart and "I'd like to be his friend" stuff. Loved the guy by the end of the week.

The second star is Walter Kirn, a novelist and TIME contributor whose plain-spoken essays over the last couple days have been just fantastic. Here's an excerpt of Kirn, from earlier today:

What big-time Washington journalists largely do these days, in my experience, is to get as close as possible to power, socially and in every other way, while maintaining the legal fiction that they aren't implicated in its workings. They send their kids to school with power's kids, they marry it, they go to parties with it, they jabber with it on the phone, they watch the game with it from adjoining seats, and, as a natural result, they keep its confidences - until, that is, some secret leaks out anyway and they have to pretend that they didn't already know it but will get to the bottom of it immediately or that they knew it all along and just weren't telling their audiences because they were bound by some lofty code of ethics that allows them to do the jobs they rarely do. They're profound double-dealers, is what I'm saying, who pay for their access, influence, and by going along and getting along until it's simply too embarrassing not to. They reserve their best stories for one another, publishing them only when they have to and feeling very nervous when they do, because it might screw up the Great Arrangement. And afterwards, once the secrets are on the street, it often comes out that they were common knowledge among the people whose jobs it was to tell them.

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Avenue party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I'd seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he'd been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn't just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was a vague reputation, all myth and gossip, while the intoxicated wreck in front of me was as vivid and specific as a car wreck. How many thousands of times, I wondered, had such behavior as I was witnessing been quietly countenanced by journalists, and how much other wild, scary stuff pertaining to other movers and shakers who had a shot at ruling the free world, say, had they deftly slipped into their back pockets in return for the right to attend such parties as this one?

I was a kid then, in my early twenties, and I couldn't answer that question. Now I'm older, I've seen more, and I can. A certain kind of job in journalism can only be kept if its holder, for the most part, refrains from doing it.

Bottom line: Cruise by the Sullivan blog and read the past couple weeks' stuff, if you haven't already. No newspaper, website, or magazine has better writing and thinking these days, in my humble opinion.

WE HAD 'EM: This story -- that a military effort to uncover terrorists had ID'ed Mohammed Atta as a terrorist cell leader well before September 11 but was prevented by military lawyers from passing that info on to the FBI -- strikes me as huge. It's also reassuring, in an odd way. It says that we had these f-ckers, if not for bureaucracy and protocol. Post 9/11, it seems like we're willing to dispense with some of that bureaucracy and protocol, in service of safety. To me, that's what the much-maligned Patriot Act is all about, not to mention Guantanamo. Are the aforementioned a pair of slippery slopes to invasion of privacy and torture? Left unchecked, perhaps. But are they better than leaving Atta alone so that he can pilot a plane into a skyscraper? Surely they are. We are not living in a perfect world with perfect choices. In the real world we live in we simply must be able to take out the Attas before they can do us harm.

At the risk of sounding barbaric, would that we could have "rendered" Atta and his cellmates to Guantanamo in advance of 9/11. Right?

ON SAVING MADONNA AND LIVING THROUGH TURBULENCE: I'm writing this while sitting on a flight from Newark to Chicago, watching an "NBC Inflight" segment. Right now it's Matt Lauer interviewing Madonna, and you know what: This chick is totally ape-shit. Her accent is even odder and more profound than ever. She's really struggling with Matt's questions about Kaballah. (She's ostensibly on here to promote some bizarre children's book, and Matt's unveiling the fact that it's basically a Kaballah parable in illustrated clothing.) She looks uncomfortable, overserious, and shut down.

Okay, okay, now Madonna scores with her cockiness. Matt holds up a recent cover of something like LADIES' HOME JOURNAL where Madonna looks matronly, then juXtaposes it with a ten-year-old cover of ESQUIRE where she's wearing leather undies. He asks, referring to the LHJ cover, "Can you really be a pop star with this image?" Madonna easily fires off an accent-invisible, "Watch me," and for just a flash she's that cheeky babe who was smart, savvy, and sexy all at once, the one that mesmerized me rather than sickened me.

This tiny verbal parry seems to relax her, and she does much better with the rest of the interview. She smiles more, she gestures and improvises and becomes nearly real. I could swear her accent fades as her comfort level becomes more palpable.

I have the odd thought that if I could just show her this little leap -- from ice queen back to pop princess -- I could not only help her career, but I could remind her what it was like to be happy. What an odd thing to think. I know I'm shackled and driven by a desire to save the world and everyone in it -- that old "savior complex" you hear about -- but now I'm even plotting Madonna's emotional rescue.

Thank God. Now it's Conan O'Brien, who's probably the funniest man in America. And now we're bumping around like crazy. Big bumps. Yuck.

If this post makes it to my blog it means we made it through.

CUE WILLIE NELSON: Tough week ahead. Sitting in Red Carpet in advance of an 8AM flight to L.A. Then tomorrow I fly to New York. And then Thursday I fly home.

Going on very little sleep. My big boy (C.J.) was up with a high fever and the pukes last night, so my wife and I were up, too. There's nothing worse than seeing your kid suffer and not being able to do much to help. No fun at all.

I'm a bad plane-sleeper, but I'm gonna give it a try today. I gotta work when I land.

HO HO HO! I'm afraid this old blog has been a little too full of itself of late, too serious and blustery. So...

Herein please find a light e-mail I sent to a few traveling colleagues this morning, alerting them to an unfortunate event in the shared bathroom on our floor.

The e-mail was titled "Krap Kringle" and said:

Dear Male Colleagues:

A stout gentleman who resembled nothing if not a close-shaved Santa Claus just unleashed a weapon of mass destruction "across the hall." Be thankful you are on the road. That room will not be suitable for use the rest of the day.

If there is a record to be held -- for richness, noxious potency, and staying power -- this gentleman surely owns it.

Yes, I think I'm awfully clever. Or, as a junior high teacher once wrote, "Scott is always trying to be 'cute' and 'the funny guy'."

What can I say?

PRAY TELL, RAFAEL: Wow. Something's really weird here. Palmeiro says he doesn't know how the steroids got into his body. And yet they're there, and he's suspended. There's more to this than meets the eye. Can't wait to read more.