…as a more dynamic, more forceful speaker. Most recent example: His rant calling Bush “the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon:”

“They resent any constraint as an insult to their will to dominate and exercise power. Their appetite for power is astonishing. It has led them to introduce a new level of viciousness in partisan politics.”

…almost-vaguely-sort-of, for some of its past pro-war cheerleading: “…We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.”

Elsewhere on the same shovelware site, our ol’ pal and Oly indie-pop legend Lois Maffeo defends the right of oldsters such as herself to keep going to rock shows, and the right of youngsters to make their own music even if the oldsters don’t approve. (Here’s the original essay to which Maffeo’s responding.)

…for the sleaziest, dirtiest, most despicable campaign ever.

…yet most charming, piece of protest music this year comes from none other than Mr. “Look on the Bright Side” himself, Eric Idle.

…as you might expect, has a lot to say about the dichotomy between the Iraqi prison pictures and the words Administration officials have uttered about the pictures.

…that the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal is simply the most visible recent symptom of a decades-long decline in U.S. values; a decline driven, he believes, not by sex and liberals but by corporate power-madness and individual greed. Smith quotes urban historian Jane Jacobs:

“A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.”

Foreign journalists?

Philip Kennicott writes in the Wash. Post that the Iraq torture pix present “A Wretched New Picture Of America”:

“These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There’s nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.”

…about the Feds’ current war against sex: “Mrs. Ashcroft should tie her husband up in front of a sinfully large television and make him watch Footloose. While drinking an Irish coffee.”

…never publish photographs. Today, it’s got photos licensed to the AP and running on front pages around the world, depicting the now-familiar U.S. military atrocities.

…”With immoral U.S. leadership, is it so shocking to find torturers in the ranks?”

Not only have the Mariners descended to the depths of their ’80s suckiness, but during their current road trip the joint was rented out to pious hatemonger James Dobson. He held what his staff billed as a stirring crusade-service defending “traditional marriage.”

In Dobsonspeak, “traditional” (i.e., heterosexual) marriage is simultaneously the strongest, most sacred bond in human society AND something so frail as to require government-sanctioned monopoly status, via the clad-iron banning of all other possible romantic combinations.

Fortunately, many upright area citizens were more than willing to vocally disagree.

This chalk-art slogan reads, “Love Thy Neighbor.* (Some Restrictions May Apply.)”

…of US “private contractor workers” torturing Iraqi prisoners, the Guardian wonders why U.S. newspapers are so eager to not discuss it.

…of Bush’s appointment to the Presidency, Todd Gitlin equated his rise with a “renaissance of anti-intellectualism.”

None other than ex-Python boy Terry Jones has written a short fantasy story imagining Bush as a voluntary lobotomy recipient. (Excuse me for asking, but wouldn’t a Bush lobotomy be as impracticable as a female vascectomy?)