"I used her, she used me, but neither one cared," Bob Seger sang in Night Moves. His lyric could also describe the awkward convergence of Catholicism and Ted Kennedy on display this weekend. Once synonymous with the Church, the Kennedys--through personal scandal and the embrace of political issues such as abortion--have transformed themselves into the first family of the Church of Liberalism. Read my article @ the American Spectator on why the Church's role in Ted Kennedy's funeral has liberal and conservative Catholics crying foul for very different reasons.

Rolling Stone wastes thousands of words explaining in a cover story "Why the Beatles Broke Up." Two words suffice: Yoko Ono.

Why was Ted Kennedy so long the man conservatives loved to hate? Because the rules didn't apply to Ted Kennedy. He got Cs and gained admission to Harvard. He never bothered, save for his brief time in the Army, to get a proper job before he won election to the Senate. He feverishly attempted to cover up drunk driving a woman to her death, and his dronish followers sought to make him president. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to discover why the late Massachusetts senator "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life."

Towering political figures are remembered in one line. George Washington was the father of his country. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. Ted Kennedy? Read my piece @ Human Events to discover how America's third-longest-serving senator should be remembered.

Somebody call the Surgeon General. CIA interrogators blew second-hand smoke into the face of Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, the brains behind the U.S.S. Cole bombing. "An Agency (redacted phrase) interrogator admitted that, in December 2002, he and another (redacted phrase) smoked cigars and blew cigar smoke in al-Nashiri's face during the interrogation," the Inspector General's report noted. Inhaling cigarette smoke is safer than inhaling the fumes from burning jet fuel.

I was introduced to politics on November 7, 1979. My mother brought me by subway to Boston's Faneuil Hall to watch our state's senior senator announce his presidential candidacy. Like other Irish Catholics in the greater Boston area, I was raised to think of the Kennedys as something between saints and gods. I was five. As I matured, I realized that others hadn't. Despite killing a woman, and attempting a cover-up far more shameless than Watergate, Ted Kennedy--the man I had heard speak at Faneuil Hall--had won reelection after reelection. The pull of ethnic and religious politics, sympathy engendered by the family's many tragedies, and four generations of Kennedys in politics had anesthetized Massachusetts voters to the ugly reality of their state's longest serving senator. But Ted Kennedy, like the rascal king James Michael Curley, is now the stuff of Bay State political legend. At around 1:30 a.m., I heard news of Kennedy's death after his long battle with brain cancer. After writing many critical articles on my state's senior senator, let me offer my condolences and a few kind words. Gregarious, self-effacing in his "Barney the Dinosaur" or Elvis costumes, and the athlete of the Kennedy family who caught a touchdown in the Harvard-Yale game, Ted Kennedy accurately pegged his greatest trait: perseverance. That he did through the airplane deaths of siblings Joe and Kathleen, the assassinations of brothers Jack and Bobby, the stillbirth and miscarriage of his own children, and myriad other tragedies. It's indicative of his perseverance that The New York Times, in reaction to the fate of his famous brothers, penned his obituary for reserve before I was born. Ted Kennedy, the third longest serving U.S. senator in history, of whom I will have more on later, rest in peace.

The Bush administration tenaciously pursued terrorists. The Obama administration tenaciously pursues the Bush administration for tenaciously pursuing terrorists. When Rep. Peter King remarks of Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency, "It's bulls#!+. It's disgraceful. You wonder which side they're on," the fact that it's not hyperbole is scary. What side are they on? Whatever side the Republicans aren't. It's the nature of hyperpartisans, like Mr. Holder, to take their cues from the opposition.

The decision in Town Fair Tire v. Massachusetts, a case in which I have taken a great interest, came down today. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court unanimously ruled that Massachusetts illegally sent tax bills to New Hampshire tire stores for sales made to Massachusetts residents. In other words, justice triumphed in the halls of justice. Had the taxman emerged victorious, the ruling would have opened merchants to audits from all 50 state internal revenue services, burdened store clerks with knowing the tax laws every state, and proved an all-around commerce killer.

Remember the Clintonian phrase "jobs saved or created" that Team Obama had been using to tout the positive impact its stimulus package would have on the economy? It turns out that even the dubious claim that the stimulus package has "saved" jobs--How can you prove that you saved a job?--will be harder to make with a straight face. According to the Obama administration, the economy will shrink at 2.8 percent this year, not the 1.2 percent they had predicted. The joblessness rate will average 9.8 percent rather than the predicted 7.9 percent. And next year's deficit--an estimated $1.5 trillion--will be 20 percent larger than anticipated. What a gargantuan health-care takeover will do to these numbers is anyone's guess--just take the administration's guess with a grain of salt.

Guess who trades on his famous name to make millions from interests with business before his father's powerful senate committee? Ted Kennedy Jr.'s "consulting" businesses have pocketed almost $400,000 from Bristol Myers Squibb--and millions more from other health-care and union interests. Ted Kennedy, Sr. is the chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Ask not what you can do for your name; ask what your name can do for you. Read my piece in the City Journal about the power of a last name.

A Nebraskan stole a 300-year-old painting of the Virgin Mary to finance an abortion in Mexico for the 14-year-old girl he impregnated. The perpetrator faces 70 years in prison--and eternity in less pleasant surroundings.

I spent the weekend in our nation's capital, where on a two-hour train ride--delays, connections, delays, connections, delays--I noticed the gratis advertisement the DC Metro provides the president of the United States. On the back of the fare card, there is a smiling picture of Barack Obama surrounded by the words: "Celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama 44th President of the United States." I can't recall DC Metro celebrating the inauguration of George W. Bush in any similar manner, particularly seven months after the event had occurred. But upon googling the matter, I discovered that the Obama Metro card isn't without precedent. In 1993, the transit authority similarly honored Bill Clinton. It's not exactly the North Korean transit system, but pictures of living politicians on subway currency embody too much of the cult of personality for an American city. So too does a 92 to 7 percent vote split among 2008's two major party presidential candidates, which goes a long way to explaining DC's iconography of Barack Obama on its Metro fare cards.

This is a headline at CNN.com about a sixteen-year-old girl: "Miley Cyrus spotted 'full-on making out'." I have two media axioms: 1. Every cable channel not explicitly committed to not becoming the E! Channel will at some point become the E! Channel. 2. Every print or online news organ not explicitly committed to not becoming the National Enquirer will eventually become the National Enquirer.

Ted Kennedy helped engineer a change in Massachusetts law that stripped the governor of the power to fill senate vacancies. That was five years ago, when a Republican served as governor. Now that a Democrat is governor, Kennedy wants a redo--lest a Republican win election to the seat that he wishes to bequeath to one of his Kennedy heirs--just as it got left to him by his brother Jack. Read my piece @ the American Spectator, detailing how Kennedy's drive to empower Governor Deval Patrick to name his successor is just the lastest unprincipled about-face by the Bay State's senior senator.

"The antiwar movement should also be a cautionary tale for those taking part in the tea parties and other anti-spending rallies, which were bascially nonexistent during Bush's big spending, borrowing, and bailouts," Jim Antle writes @AmSpecBlog. "The left used opposition to the Iraq war mainly as a recruiting tool for their various causes (while the respectable center-left and neo-left mostly supported the war until it became unpopular). It was, as...[Cindy]Sheehan admits, mostly an anti-Bush, anti-Republican movement. For the tea partiers to have any real success fighting the growth of government, they have to be more than an anti-Obama, anti-Democrat movement." One benefit of loudly condemning George W. Bush's embrace of oxymoronic big-government conservatism is that when Obama's army cries hypocrisy over criticism of Dear Leader's embrace of big government your conscience is clean. One drawback of muting criticism of George W. Bush's spending spree is that when you turn up the volume on Barack Obama's your authority has a critic has already been undermined. This is why Antle's point is so important. Most observers of the antiwar protests, including opponents of the Iraq war such as myself, realized pretty early that the war served as a proxy issue on which the Left could air a series of grievances--Enron, the Florida recount, tax cuts, etc. Anyone disbelieving this should ask themselves why the antiwar protests have evaporated. Should the teaparty and townhall movement devolve into a strictly anti-Obama movement, rather than an across-the-board anti-big-government movement, they will face similar irrelevance.

Most Americans oppose a "public option," whose bill won't be optional, on health insurance. Most Democrats in Congress support it. After signaling a retreat from the public option over the weekend, President Obama is again siding with the Democrats rather than the Americans on the public option--until his approval numbers, and those on his health care plan, slide even lower. Then he'll reconsider again, or, if he doesn't, voters in 2010 will reconsider the ballots they cast for Democrats in last year's elections.

I had one conversation with Robert Novak back in 1995. I had heard that he was a registered Democrat, which I disbelieved, and, finding myself alone in an elevator with Novak, I took an opportunity to ask him about the rumor. Indeed, he had registered Democrat--but for the sole purpose of voting for Marion Barry for mayor of Washington in the district's primary election. I almost couldn't believe what I was hearing. As a great political reporter, Novak knew what made great copy. In voting for Marion Barry, who had famously been caught in flagrante with a crack pipe and a woman other than his wife just a few years before, Novak, one supposes, was voting the interests of his profession. His profession, it seems, is, if not a dying one, than a shifting one. A newspaperman in a television age, Novak, in his last years, was truly anachronistic--in his trademark three-piece suits--as a newspaperman in an internet age. Novak combined with Rowland Evans to write a long running political column, and, despite being the polar opposite of what you typically see on Fox News every day, pioneered the art of the political talk show as an early panelist on Crossfire, Capital Gang, and The McLaughlin Group. In his last years, the Washington-based Chicago Sun Times scribe found himself involved in numerous controversies, including as a central player in the Valerie Plame affair, as a conservative against the Iraq War, and, immediately preceding his brain cancer diagnosis, as an unwitting participant in a hit-and-run accident that left antagonists feeling vindicated about their dark view of the "Dark Prince"--until the journalist's medical condition instead revealed something dark about those taking a dark view of the Dark Prince. Robert Novak, rest in peace.

Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, calls a government health-insurance company "indespensible." It's not reform if it's not in the bill, he believes. Anthony Weiner, grand cyclops of the liberals' rule or ruin caucus, says that the president dropping the "public option" (it's certainly won't be optional for the taxpayers footing the bill) will cost his and a hundred other House votes. Obama's constituency is the United States of America, which is why he has to yield to national public opinion on aspects of his health-care agenda that are unpopular among the populace. Howard Dean has never been responsible to a diverse national constituency. As governor of Vermont and as the 2000 presidential candidate of the Left party's left-wing, Dean has always the courted the droolers and sandwich-board Sandys. Anthony Weiner, a congressman from New York, hardly represents Middle America. And there lies Obama's problem. So many in his party represent safe, left-wing districts. The hard-left stances that play so well on their home turf endanger mainstream Democrats who represent "purple" districts of Democrats and Republicans. The party cannibals on the left are quick to accuse the Blue Dogs and centrists of treason to the party, but it's the Hard Left, safely ensconsed in their deep-blue ghettos, who undermine the party by pushing hard for policies, such as a government-run health insurance company to compete with (and also regulate) the private insurance industry, that not only stand little chance of gaining majority support in Congress, but help to ensure that next time around they won't have majority support in Congress.

The so-called "death panels," even if misinterpreted as such, have been dropped from the health-care bill. The White House email account set up to receive reports of "false" claims about ObamaCare has been apparently shut down; DrudgeReport reports that emails to it bounce back to sender. Obama's lackeys have made clear on various public affairs programs that a government-run insurance agency to compete with private insurers is no longer thought of as essential. But by placating public opinion on the public option, Obama may have sent the cannibal wing of his party into "eat" mode. This is Democratic Party governance, where liberal presidents perform a balancing act between the demands of the electorate and the demands of Democrats elected, who are often insulated from the broader electorate by representing districts in no way representative of America. Enjoy the show!

"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system," John Mackey writes in The Wall Street Journal. "Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction--toward less government control and more individual empowerment." This is an instance of what was said being less important than who said it. Mackey is the CEO of Whole Foods. Has he not noticed the plethora of Obama bumper stickers on the Priuses and bicycles in his supermarket parking lots? "I will never shop there again," one 45-year-old child emoted to an ABC reporter. Another 33-year-old adolescent, who claims to shop at Whole Foods several times a week, squawked: "I'm boycotting [Whole Foods] because all Americans need health care." Good politics doesn't always mean good business. File under: profile in courage.

I can't name a song by Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff, or Jessica Simpson. But if I saw them walking down my street I would instantly recognize them. I bet the cops who briefly detained Bob Dylan would probably recognize a dozen of his songs. But when they detained him as a suspicious character, they didn't recognize him--even after Dylan identified himself. In a starstruck celebrity culture, it's in one sense refreshing that someone who is famous for being talented rather than famous for being famous gets recognition for his music but not just plain recognized. One of Long Branch, New Jersey's finest admitted, "We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn't sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something."

I will be substituting for Michele McPhee on Friday, August 14 from 7-10 p.m. on Boston's Talk Evolution, 96.9 WTKK. For those outside of the reach of WTKK's powerful frequency range, click the listen live button at WTKK's website. Barring a lack of discipline on my part, which has been known to happen, I will be concentrating on this and other non-FlynnFiles projects for the next two days. With that in mind, what topics do you think are worth discussing on Friday night's program?

Harvey Milk vouched for mass-murderer Jim Jones as "a man of the highest character" to President Jimmy Carter in February 1978. By November of 1978, Jones had orchestrated the deaths of more than 900 people, including a six-year-old boy he kidnapped who Milk had wrongly insisted was Jones's son to the president. Thirty one years later, Milk's aiding and abetting Jim Jones's murder of a young boy is forgotten. Barack Obama awards Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom today. In honoring a man who pioneered the tactic of "outing," concocted stories of victimhood to advance his political career, carried on a sexual relationship with an underage runaway, and routinely likened political opponents to Nazis, Barack Obama dishonors himself. Read about the Harvey Milk that the president doesn't know about, or doesn't want you to know about, here.

If you watched the film Dead Man Walking, you can understand how some people aren't saved until they face death. The same might be said of WBCN, "the rock of Boston," which rocks no more. The station that first played U2 in America, launched J.J. Jackson's career, and featured a pre-J. Geils Band Peter Wolf as an on-air personality went off the air at midnight. In the lead up to the sign off, CBS lifted corporate restrictions on playlists and disc-jockey discussion for the station's final days. It's the corporate equivalent of the death-row courtesy of last words or a last meal. The one-month notice, and the four-day reprieve from the radio dictators at CBS, is a classy move. I tuned in one day to my favorite Washington, DC station, WHFS, only to hear foreign jibberish, so WBCN's coup de grace could have been less dignified. That said, CBS's generosity in allowing a long goodbye revealed the corporate behemoth's mismanagement of the station. Free to their own devices, automatons became disc jockeys--playing Buffalo Tom's Summer (my favorite fall song), The Who's raucus version of Summertime Blues, Whiskeytown, and, in farewell, Pink Floyd's Shine on You Crazy Diamond. The final days gloriously demonstrated what WBCN once was, and more sadly, what it could have been.

After more than a week of condemning "town halls" that they couldn't control as "astroturf," Democrats held a Potemkin Town Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Everyone clapped on cue. Armed guards kept the riff-raff outside. A liberal state representative, a teacher's union veteran, and a little girl from fifty miles away offered praise disguised as questions. There were more African Americans on the dais in Portsmouth than in the entire state of New Hampshire. Isn't this the very definition of "astroturf"? "I don't want people thinking I've got a bunch of plants in here," Obama proclaimed. Too late. The president practically pled for a hostile question, which, even when audience members declared themselves skeptics, never really came. CNN's Kyra Phillips's assurance that the audience wasn't "handpicked by the White House, by the way" sounded as authoritative as when she dubbed New Hampshire the "live (rhymes with five) free or die" state (Damn teleprompters!). Even in the political-climate-controlled setting, Barack Obama couldn't help undermining the case for a government takeover of health care: "UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. Yeah, they are. It's the post office that's always having problems." My point exactly.

The irony of Barack Obama crying foul over getting out-organized over health care is too rich. For years, the president worked as a community organizer in Chicago, ginning up phony outrage over any number of issues. "I stood in the parking lot trying to recruit other parents" to protest the Chicago Housing Authority, Obama wrote in Dreams from My Father. But even after sending letters home with school children and telephone canvasses, Obama only managed to convince eight people to board his protest school bus. Articulating the problems of all organizers, Obama lamented: "They said they had doctors' appointments or couldn't find babysitters." In other words, people have lives, which makes gathering large numbers of them--spontaneous or not--a difficult endeavor. Now that he's the community-organizer-in-chief, Obama and his minions cry "Astroturf!" over grass-roots efforts to defeat his health-care proposal. They know of what they speak.

Eunice Shriver, who experienced the violent deaths of four of her siblings, and the incapacitation of a fifth, before their times, died at 88 today. Joe Kennedy said, a manner more crudely than I do here, that if his daughter Eunice had been born a man she would have been the president. Better for the mentally disabled that she instead involved herself in the Special Olympics in its infant stages, transforming it into an international event. Eunice Kennedy Shriver never ran for office, but she did watch three of her brothers and her husband seek the presidency--and her son-in-law obtain the governorship of America's most populous state. That makes her unique, but so too, perhaps does her advocacy for the unborn within a pro-abortion party. Her husband, Sargent Shriver, was the last pro-life Democrat to run on the national ticket. Given her brother Ted's abortion reversal, and his successful efforts to prevent Hubert Humphrey from selecting her husband as his running mate in 1968, one wonders of the internal dynamics of between the few remaining Kennedy siblings. If the famous family she was born into was dysfunctional, the family she started seemed far from it. Unlike so many of her siblings, she never watched her kids become fare for the tabloids (and if she did, I can't recall it). Above the tributes attesting to Eunice Shriver as a wonderful sister and a servant to the mentally disabled stands the fact that she was a good mother. That simple accomplishment makes a life worth living.

Forty years ago this week, actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Hollywood hair-stylist Jay Sebring, eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, and Voyteck Frykowski, a Polish associate of Roman Polanski, were murdered. Victims were stabbed, beaten, hung, and/or shot, and the word "PIG" was conspicuously written in blood on a doorway in the home. The day after the murders at Roman Polanski's house, Rosemary and Leo LaBianca, owners of a supermarket chain, were killed in a similar fashion.

Suspicion fell on friends of Mama Cass, Tate's husband Roman Polanski, and numerous others until nearly four months after the murders when the police arrested a diminutive career criminal and his suburbanite, younger, hippie followers. By the time Charles Manson was charged with murder, the thirty-five year old aspiring musician had spent half his life in correctional institutions. The son of teenage prostitute Kathleen Maddox, Manson was born "No Name Maddox." Shortly thereafter, according to Manson, Miss Maddox sold her son to a waitress for a pitcher of beer. While the '60s are oft portrayed as a time of liberation, for Charley Manson they were a time of confinement. He spent the entire decade in prison until 1967.

Charles Manson and his "Family" led very different lives. When Manson's murderous associates are discussed, words like "impressionable" and "brainwashed" are tossed about in a manner suggesting that the followers somehow don't have a share of ownership of the crimes equal to that of Manson's. Tex Watson was an "A" student who starred in track and football, for instance, and Leslie Van Houten was twice elected homecoming queen. Could these all-American kids really have done such things? Not on their own, much of society answered; let's blame it on the street urchin who must have put them under his spell. Of course, the discomforting reality was that Manson and his middle-class followers were all murderers.

Charlie Manson may have partially served as the human scapegoat for his fellow murderers, but drugs and insanity served as excuses too. The murders weren't random acts of insanity. They were planned, and conducted, in part, for political reasons. Sandy Good, who was pregnant with Charles Manson's baby at the time of the murders, recalls: "there was a core of people who were very close together and who stayed true to the thought that we had for stopping the war in Vietnam and for protecting our air, our water, our trees and our animals. We were so committed to those causes that the murders more or less evolved out of our desire to change the system." The Weather Underground applauded that "desire to change the system" by adopting at one of their gatherings a spread-fingered greeting representing the fork that the Manson Family stuck into one of their victims. Like the People's Temple, the Manson murders involved a left-wing cult that in part justified their crimes with the political causes they promoted.

In addition to political rationalizations for the killings, Charles Manson had a more practical motivation: to exonerate a Manson Family associate who had been charged in an earlier murder.

A few days prior to the Manson Family murder spree, Bobby Beausoleil, a friend of Charles Manson and a fellow musician, murdered Gary Hinman. According to Beausoleil, Hinman had sold him some phony mescaline that he had in turn sold to the Straight Satans motorcycle gang. Feeling that he had been had and fearing that his life was in danger from reprisals from the Straight Satans, Beausoleil confronted Hinman in his home. The confrontation ended with Beausoleil stabbing Hinman to death. To confuse the police, Beausoleil painted "Political Piggy" on the wall with Hinman's blood. Since Hinman was a Ph.D. candidate who traveled in Marxist circles, Beausoleil painted the slogan to make it seem that one of Hinman's fellow activists killed him.

"Well," inmate Beausoleil recalled in 1980 about the blood-stained graffiti, "it was my idea to do it. Susan Atkins was on that wall. The whole thing was to take the heat off the trail. Gary Hinman was into his revolutionary communism. His whole living room was a library of Communist literature. I figured I'd make it look like one of his cohorts, you know."

The police didn't fall for it, partly because Beausoleil stole the dead man's car and proceeded to use it as his personal vehicle, which had the effect of defeating his scheme. When the Manson Family embarked on their murderous rage a few days later, one objective, it seems obvious, was to spring Beausoleil from jail by committing murders that would appear too similar to the one their friend had been charged with. But again, the police didn't fall for it. Amazingly, they apparently never made a connection between the two murders.

Three murders featured political slogans involving variations of the word "pig" painted in human blood, and the police failed to draw a connection between the Hinman murder on the one hand, and the Tate-LaBianca murders on the other. Rather than helping Beausoleil beat the rap, drawing such a connection would have likely served to have fingered Beausoleil's friends in the later killings in a more timely fashion.

Theories regarding The White Album, a race war, and the Book of Revelations often cloud other, more central, inspirations for Charles Manson's blood lust. These include political motivations, a desire to exonerate a friend on murder charges, and intimidating music industry figures who spurned Manson, including Doris Day's son, producer Terry Melcher, who had previously lived in the Tate-Polanski home. If we do not know exactly why the Manson Family murdered, it is in part because they probably don't exactly know why either. All we know is that they did it.

The 1960s were the age of The Beatles, civil rights advances, and the peace movement. They were also a time of rationalized violence, drug abuse, reckless sex, and societal upheaval. The Manson Family offers a glimpse at all of these ugly traits from the other side of the '60s.

This piece is adapted from two FlynnFiles posts from 2004.

Without John Hughes, would there have been a 1980s? The filmmaker and screenwriter died of a heart attack while walking Thursday in Manhattan. For the uninitiated, he wrote National Lampoon's Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off--directing several of those films as well. Memories of Hughes's Chicagoland pics are as likely to be audio as visual: The Psychedelic Furs, General Public, and Simple Minds were among the acts introduced to a wider audience through Hughes's sonically-savvy films. No John Hughes, no Molly Ringwald; no Molly Ringwald, no 1980s--it's pretty simple. But when the 1980s ended, so did John Hughes. He hadn't directed a movie since 1991, and his work as a screenwriter since his golden age had been spotty. Proof that John Hughes will be missed in death comes from the fact that John Hughes was so missed for the last several decades of his life. The void in high-school movies that transcend a high-school audience is substantial in part because John Hughes stopped making movies. From Justin to Kelly? She's All That? Dude, Where's My Car? They don't make teen movies like they used to--at least the way John Hughes used to.

Rolling Stone iconographically pictures Barack Obama on its cover with a barely disguised halo surrounding his head. The St. Obama issue, like the "Joker" Obama posters, is an exercise in political self-flattery. Would it be that all of our political favorites wore halos and all of our political adversaries wore horns! The long, strange trip from underground newspaper of the counterculture to glossy suck-up to the powerful proves that Rolling Stone has gathered much moss.

The gunman who shot up an aerobics class outside of Pittsburgh hated Christian conservatives. "The worst people by far are the religious types," he wrote in his disturbing online diary. "Especially a right-wing, stiff-faced fundie like Andy." How idiotic it would be if religious conservatives blamed the health-club murders on the people who despise them. Yet, that is precisely what their enemies on the Left do in similar, or even dissimilar, situations. Eric Rudolph, the abortion-clinic bomber who didn't even believe in God, became representative of the "religious right" in the minds of the irreligious Left. When an octogenarian racist, who had earlier attempted an armed invasion of a Reagan administration-era meeting of the Federal Reserve, murdered a Holocaust Museum guard in June, Chris Matthews asked: "Is there something really bad happening out there on the far right?" "Science is my religion," Oklahoma City-bomber Timothy McVeigh remarked. But not in the warped minds of the monomaniac irreligious Left, who preferred the Christian conservative of their imaginations to the genuine article agnostic, whose beliefs didn't fit the script they had assigned to him. Don't imitate leftist ideologues, no matter how tempting to provide comeuppance in such situations, as they are poor role models. Lone gunmen are just that--but not in the imaginations of the politically obsessed, who envision the solitary mass-murderer acting in concert with a cabal of their most despised political adversaries.

It's comforting to imagine our political enemies in the most sinister light. What major conservative figure hasn't been hysterically likened to the second-coming of Adolph Hitler? It makes the crusader feel all the more noble about the crusade when the enemy is depicted as the devil. It is from this tradition that the arresting Obama-as-Heath Ledger's Joker posters spring from. The graphic visual says more about the artist than his subject. Obama isn't a sadistic, homocidal maniac, but the author of the "Joker" posters sees him that way. The jarring visual is a prism into the artist's skewed mind rather a lense showing the true Obama. It would be so much easier for us if our political enemies lived up to our caricatures of them. In place of the intellectual heavy lifting required to rebut Obama's philosophy of bailouts, managed health care, tax increases, and judicial activism, presumably all that would be neccessary would be to call Obama a "socialist" and draw a funny picture upon his face. This artistic catharsis might also be effective propaganda against Barack Obama, but it does nothing to refute the ideas represented by Barack Obama--or the next Barack Obama that comes along.

I'm no sadist, but there is something satisfying, cathartic even, in this public browbeating of Long Island Congressman Tim Bishop (watch it here). The pained look on the congressman's face after angry constituents reacted to his holding up VA hospitals as model institutions is priceless (2:48). "The VA health-care system is a system that runs quite well," an aloof Bishop contends. "Ask most veterans." One veteran took this as an invitation to sternly lecture the university-administrator-turned-politician. "Are you a veteran?," the older vet asked the stunned congressman. "If I'm going to see a doctor, I might have to wait two months.... Don't ever tell us that you know the VA is an efficient medical system." If politicians are "single-minded seekers of election," as political scientist David Mayhew famously theorized, then Bishop, and others of his ilk feeling the heat from constituents on government-managed health care, may think twice before casting a "yea" vote on Obama care.

The reason George H.W. Bush's reneged "Read My Lips: No New Taxes" pledge backfired so fiercely is that people actually believed him when he delivered the line, with such conviction, in 1988. Nobody believed Barack Obama, including Barack Obama, when he said he would only raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans during the 2008 campaign. So, the idea floated by administration lackeys to raise taxes on middle-income Americans will not create the sense of betrayal that Bush the Elder engendered when he raised top rates from 28 to 31 percent in 1990. That's not to say it won't be without political cost. There's a Machiavellian logic in taxing the few for the benefit of the many. Taxing the many for the benefit of the few--in this case, the bureaucrats seeking to manage health care--holds no such political benefits. This is doubly so during a recession because subtracting even more money from a contracting economy, as Herbert Hoover discovered during the Great Depression, can only make a bad situation worse.

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez shut down more than a dozen radio stations this weekend, promising to close nearly two dozen more in the coming days. More than two years ago, Chavez comandeered the national remote control and clicked the "off" button on stations he didn't care for. So the assault upon the airwaves doesn't exactly come as a shock. It is to the eternal shame of Jesse Jackson, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, and Joe Kennedy that they saw a hero in a tyrant. When you call evil "good," you make a statement about yourself more than anything else.