Roger _ You write, “no one stands for anything substantive anymore, only the preservation of their own power.”

On the contrary, Little Pinch Sulzberger and the Times, as well as those who read it and stand for what it stands for (you really have to come up with a term for them you find acceptable; I’m going to start using “70′s reactionaries”) are fighting for their entire world view, hence their venom and the neurotic denial of everything that doesn’t fit. There can’t be sarin shells. Wilson can’t have lied. We can’t be establishing democracy by military action. The Iraqis and Afghans must be writhing in a Bush-induced Gehenna, not slowly taking charge of their own lives for the first time in decades. If any of these claims are false, then the whole world they’ve constructed for themselves in the coffeehouses of New York and San Francisco, around the pools of LA, and in faculty lounges across the nation is a sham, and a fiction. It reminds me of Wellington, in his post-Napoleon years as Prime Minister, listening to the angry mobs in the street smashing his windows… with the difference that none of the 70′s reactionaries have ever done for this country a fraction of what Wellington did for Britain.