Lileks, as usual, has General Clark's supporters' number.

...Of course, if the Republicans put a retired general on the ticket, half the chattering classes would take to the fainting couch: bonjour fascism, au revoir America.

But Clark's different! He's pro-choice, pro-high taxes, at least at press time. And he wants "a new patriotism," the old one presumably sullied beyond use by the boot-clicking usurpers who foul the Oval Office now. "No administration has the right to tell Americans that to dissent is disloyal, and to disagree is unpatriotic," he said in a recent speech.

Oh, absolutely. That's why we need Clark: Enough of those big banners in the train stations telling us to SHUT UP AND OBEY, and the endless mandatory TV shows about our Glorious Leader and his plans to increase the radish crop by 170 percent for the next five-year plan. Don't you wish your TV came with an off switch, so you could avoid the propaganda? Don't you wish you could skip the Tuesday night book burnings? Don't you wonder if we crossed the line the night John Ashcroft personally executed Al Franken on "Saturday Night Live"? I miss America, too.

Read all.

In your more sarcastic moments, you could be mistaken by the Liberal Press for one of Maureen Dowd's ghost writers (it's hard to imagine anyone producing such a volume of bilge unassisted).

I thought this was hysterical (oops! sexist remark!). I mailed it to all my outraged, indignant, self-righteous, liberal activist friends.

I suppose there is an outside chance that they may recover sufficiently from the resultant apoplectic fits to pen a fatuous response of some sort. No matter. I will dump a few more such items, from my vast and and ever growing archives, upon them. With luck, the ensuing psychological stress will be so overwhelming that it will be at least a year, maybe more, before I get another email suggesting that we fund a "Department of Daycare" rather than a manned mission to Mars.