Pass the Tanning Butter Popcorn

It was one of those real vacationy vacations. Lots of beach, lots of cocktails, little or no news. The most ambitious I got was on the second day, when we rented a golf cart and toured the entire length and breadth of Isla Mujeres — before lunch. If you ever find yourself at the Privilege Aluxes beach bar, order the hot wings (more of a Jamaica jerk than Buffalo) with a side of habanero sauce.

We didn’t get back until well after midnight last night, so it’s with some trepidation that I’m sticking a single toe slowly back into the news and

OMIGOD THE WHITE HOUSE IS GOING TO WAR AGAINST BOB EFFING WOODWARD???

An infinite and expanding universe is incapable of holding enough popcorn for this show. Imagine Brian Cox joining the Campus Crusade for Christ. Imagine me on a horse with my gentle sidekick, tilting at Glenmorangie. Picture, if you can for just one moment, a day with just three or four links from Instapundit.

All of these things are more likely than a Democrat White House going to war against Bob Woodward. And yet it has happened.

Of course, now is when journalists of every stripe, from far leftwinger to slightly less far leftwinger, will rally ’round the man who inspired each of them to become a journalist! The man who brought down a president!

My, but the crickets do chirp loudly this time of year.

The long knives will come out for Bob Woodward, mark my words. Richard Nixon had to be destroyed because he created the EPA and ended the war in Vietnam and instituted wage and price controls — while having the gall to not be a Democrat. And now one of their own is going after Teh Won? He. Must. Be. Destroyed.

It won’t happen, of course. Woodward is too much of an institution, and far too sane join in his own demise. And there’s a good chance that enough of the press still has enough integrity not to join in, either. But don’t listen for many full-throated defenses of Woodward — not from the White House steno pool, anyway. And already, day and night, the producers and crew at NBC News are deceptively editing old video to make it appear as though it were Woodward who ordered Alderaan to be destroyed, and right after Rachel Maddow had told him everything he wanted to know, too.

So I can’t tell you if I’m this giddy because of eight days of total relaxation, or because of good times spent with my wife and two of our closest and bestest friends, or because of the lingering effects of an irrational number of double-añejo-rum-on-the-rocks. But I can tell you that the White House-Woodward War is the greatest show on Earth.

But first I have to put in a bulk order of enough Orville Redenbacher to cover the hot side of Mercury.