First of all, John, you weren't in New Orleans.

You were in Kenner, Louisiana. I have spent a fair amount of time in both Kenner and New Orleans, and believe me, the people who live there are acutely aware of the difference. (And, should they forget, they can always check...

In a medium full of revolting displays of hypocrisy and self-importance, Tom Brokaw gave a performance last night that was so hypocritical and so self-important that I wanted to make like Elvis watching Robert Goulet and shoot out the screen with a .38. Fortunately, I was unarmed, and the TV...

The Fat Lady has not only sung; she has showered, changed from her sequined gown into jeans, air-kissed the conductor, and already gone back to the hotel, where she's lying in a bathtub, drinking wine and daydreaming about her next gig. Back at the opera-house, one lone janitor is sweeping...

"Words matter," as Hillary Clinton so often reminded us; and like all campaigns, hers lived and died by the spoken word. Of the millions of dollars she poured into her own campaign, much of it no doubt went into paying speechwriters.

She has grounds to sue them for incompetence, and...

I've been thinking a lot about George Bush lately. About those strange tics and contortions he makes with his face, like a Neanderthal Man playing Grand Theft Auto. About the fact that you and I still pay his salary. And about what, exactly, his real job is. He's not "president"...

Somewhere today George Bush and John McCain are wandering around like two punch-drunk fighters, trying to explain to their dwindling entourages how they got KOed in this week's big fight. "I t'ought I had 'im on the ropes wit' my big 'Appeasement' Punch!" "He shoulda been a sucka for the...

I think I speak for a sizable portion of the American public, of all political stripes, on this one: I wish James Carville hadn't forced me to consider the issue of Hillary Clinton's balls.

It's a ticklish subject, of course, but Hillary's supporters won't leave it alone....

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and John McCain are sending a razor-sharp message to the fighting men and women of America.

It's underlined again in bright, fresh, blood-red every time a tank in Bahgdad is blown up by an IED and shrapnel rips into another soldier's flesh.

It's written in script-letters...

After all the pontificating on TV, in the end it didn't come down to sideshow jive like the Reverend Wright Imbroglio or the Great Sniper Fire Lie. It didn't come down to micro-demographics, or gas prices, or the war in Iraq. Incredibly enough, it didn't even come down to the...

"Liberty is connected with prose, and bureaucrats who want to destroy liberty tend to write and speak badly." -George Orwell

George Orwell: meet Tim Russert.

And all his blowhard kin.

Tuesday's biggest winner was not Barack Obama -- though it's impossible to overstate just how stunning his victory was, scoring...

Reeling from Tuesday evening's results, a desperate Hillary Clinton today promised voters an extraordinary new platform that, while making no mention of pressing political issues, includes "zero-calorie" Hershey Bars, a month's-worth of free Marlboro Reds, and--somewhat controversially, in certain quarters--a mysterious new kind of crystal methedrine, which while having all...

As we stagger out into the middle of the ring for Round 1,293 of this heavyweight title-fight between two battered contenders for the Democratic Party crown, the cumulative effect of all the punches, head-butts and knockdowns has been to make us all feel soul-weary and half-concussed. As one who's become...

Whoopee, kids! George Bush III and Hillary Clinton have called for a Gas-Tax Holiday! Let's celebrate in style! Whaddaya say we all kick our Magic Tax Rebates into one big kitty, put on our flag lapel-pins, car-pool out to the desert, and throw an End-of-the-World Celebration--a Woodstock of the Apocalypse!

Obliterate.

All week this word's been haunting me.

Ever since Hillary Clinton channelled her inner Doctor Strangelove on ABC-TV, vowing to "totally obliterate" Iran for some imagined attack on Israel in the future, that word's hung in the air like a tiny mushroom cloud. Of course, to the corporate...

It's zany hi-jinks a-plenty when a desperate, ambition-crazed politician (Hillary Clinton, playing herself) suddenly finds her power-base crumbling. Forced to team up with her doddering Republican opponent , John McCain (played by the corpse of Ted Knight), to plot against an upstart black candidate named Barack Obama (Blair Underwood), Hillary...

I grew up in the decaying mill town of Utica, New York, among gas-station attendants, nuns, glass-workers, alcoholics, conveyor-belt workers, and factory-hands. They were mostly devout Catholics--Italian, Polish, and Irish--and, when offered the chance, equally devout in their devotion to their labor unions. Utica boomed during World War II, churning...

As Iraq-war-fatigue infects our Wolfs and Katies and Brians and Tims and Times and Newsweeks and all our daily papers, too -- with the percentage of news-time devoted to the war now shaved to a pitiful 3% -- the same flu-like torpor is filtering down to viewers and readers: when...

When an outhouse-supply rag like The National Enquirer trumpets a headline like "The Most Shocking Story You Will Ever Read!", as it does in its current issue, its 7-11 readers have every right to expect something truly juicy -- hard-core proof that Elvis' ghost impregnated Katie Couric during a...

As campaign politics in America lurches, zombie-like, deeper and deeper into the muck, with Hillary Clinton desperately flogging the Reverend Wright "scandal" in all its idiotic glory, it's time to study the true masters of smear-ology -- the supermarket tabloids. Here, in the sick, teeming id of America, tales of...

No one in American political history has squandered his reputation so wantonly, so publicly, and so quickly -- and in the pursuit of so little -- as Bill Clinton. As he desperately chases the impossible dream of a thousand more nights in a White House bed, he has laid bare...