“Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines lives,” he said on Tuesday, explaining how he came to his decision. “That’s the currency of this fight.

“I don’t want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda [National Naval Medical Center, in Maryland] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction.”

OK. He obviously thinks highly of Marines, if he thinks that the mere knowledge that one of his colleagues is gay will distract a trained, professional Marine so much that his legs will fall off.

That’s what he thinks is going to happen, right? A Marine will just be so inattentive that he’ll forget to keep his legs attached to himself? Because that interpretation is actually less insulting to the Marines than thinking that gay people will make them less effective in actual combat situations.

(I’d guess that Amos’ opposition to lifting the ban is informed less by realistic concerns about the safety of his Marines than by his particular brand of born-again Christianity. And the fact that he’s crazy.)

Amos might not think much of his Marines, but there’s reason to believe that the majority of them will deal with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal much better than he thinks. While a majority of combat arms Marines surveyed said allowing gay people to serve openly would negatively affect their unit, a vast majority of the Marines who’ve actually served with gay people said there’d be no effect or a positive effect.

Marine Corps Infantry Capt. Nathan Cox — not gay, by the way — respectfully destroyed his commandant’s reasoning in a Washington Post Op-Ed on Thursday, writing, “[in] the end, Marines in combat will treat sexual orientation the same way they treat race, religion and one’s stance on the likelihood of the Patriots winning another Super Bowl.”

And Cox added a fact that Amos would probably deny: Some of the Marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital — and some of them buried at Arlington — are almost certainly gay. And they all served honorably, even though American politicians were too cowardly to allow them to serve openly.

But just because a story smells a little off, that doesn’t make it completely rotten. It shouldn’t anyway — unless you’re Wolf, who, in a snippy open letter to Interpol this week, decided Assange had been a victim of “the dating police,” because he’d been “accused of having consensual sex with two women.” Actually, among other things, one of the alleged victims accused him of having decidedly nonconsensual sex with her while she was asleep, and the other has accused him of “using his body weight to hold [her] down in a sexual manner.”

Oh no, not our Julian! Instead of considering the veracity of the claims, Wolf quickly pieced together a tale in which “both alleged victims are upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first,” a drama of “what appears to be personal injured feelings.” Or maybe not, given that the charges arose when one of the alleged victims contacted the other, and the two compared their apparently very similar stories. They have also retained the same counsel.

Wolf is clearly up in arms about the way the U.S. government is gunning for Assange. She used her Friday Huffington Post column to decry the possibility of Assange becoming the victim of the Espionage Act, pausing only every few sentences to congratulate herself. “I predicted in 2006 that the forces that wish to strip American citizens of their freedoms, so as to benefit from a profitable and endless state of war … would pressure Congress and the White House to try to breathe new life yet again into the terrifying Espionage Act in order to silence dissent,” she wrote, adding, “I knew, based on my study of closing societies, that this tactic would resurface.” Gosh, Naomi, however did you achieve such a slam dunk of prognostication? Well, “If you study the history of closing societies, as I have, you see that every closing society creates a kind of ‘third rail’ of material, with legislation that proliferates around it.” Told ya so, America.

If Wolf wants to get a little full of herself, that’s one thing. If she wants to make a point about how easily, how frighteningly the Espionage Act can be exploited, fair enough. But a woman who knows all too well the bitter mudslinging one can endure for accusing a man of sexual misconduct (as Wolf herself did) might want to give another woman the benefit of the damn doubt. She might want to consider — just consider — that while Interpol’s response to Julian Assange may have been politically motivated, the accusers’ might not have been.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Two years ago, when Wolf was criticizing the Bush administration for sex crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, she explained that “having worked at a rape crisis center and been trained in the basics of sex crime, I have learned that all sex predators go about things in certain recognizable ways.” That must have been a hell of a crisis center. Because I did not know that all predators are exactly alike. I did not know that gray areas regarding consent do not exist! Thank you, Naomi! And now, in 2010, I did not know that she has the magical ability to determine whether a man is a sexual assailant or just the victim of two angry chicks.

Nobody ever said feminism means the person with the vagina is always right and the one with the penis is always wrong — unless I just didn’t get that version of the Manifesto. And, indeed, throughout her career, Naomi Wolf has been wrong plenty of times. Like, say, this week, when she condescendingly dismissed a rape allegation by comparing it to a guy who “did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut — even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER.” Yes, sex crime and not giving sufficient props for your girlfriend’s hairdo are exactly the same, Naomi Wolf. Also, can I just say, on behalf of every person, male or female, who has ever been sexually coerced, victimized or assaulted, one thing? Blow me.

It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who once wrote, “Only when people start to speak out and tell the truth about rape and sexual assault can the healing begin.”  The “truth,” however, extends only as far as Naomi Wolf’s personal determination of it. And if you don’t pass her impeccable muster, honed via a litany of credentials she will eagerly trot out for you, you’re just a pouty little Swede who isn’t getting enough attention. I may not have Wolf’s extensive background in rape recognition and truth sniffing, but I have been doing This Week in Crazy for a while now, and I sure know self-delusional bonkers when I see it. It’s always the same. And it looks like Naomi Wolf.

For those playing along at home, John McCain conditionally supported the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” until Barack Obama got elected and began pushing the Senate to do something about it. Once military leadership told McCain the policy should be repealed, he said, he would vote to repeal it, and now that the Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have told McCain that it should be repealed, he is vowing to fight it with everything he’s got.

But, like, he had excuses before. Not great ones, but they sounded coherent on Sunday shows. Once the commanders came around, he wanted to wait for the results of the Pentagon’s review of how repeal would be implemented. That review is done. Then McCain just needed more time to read it. Then he had a problem with some of the survey questions. Then he was upset that more Marines oppose repeal than other branches. Then he was upset with the survey’s response rate. Transparent straw-grasping, but at least those objections had something to do with the issue at hand.

Now, well, shoot: John is opposed to repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” because of non sequiturs. “My friends, I will not vote for this bill to go forward because Ke$ha did not receive a single Grammy nomination, and the American people want us to focus on that as a priority.”

McCain’s vaunted “independence” was always something closer to incoherence. He’ll hold wildly different positions on issues depending on the weather, or, more specifically, depending on whom he’s friendly with and whom he resents today. The boxing enthusiast who once campaigned to ban Ultimate Fighting for no reason other than he didn’t like the looks of it has always been intellectually inconsistent, to say the least. But he’s lost his mind on the simple question of whether or not gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve their country openly and with honor.

If he thinks the answer to that question is no, he won’t just come out and say it. In his attempts to avoid endorsing bigotry while simultaneously doing everything he can to keep discrimination enshrined in the law, he’s clearly completely cracking up. Even his partner in irritating independence Joe Lieberman is being reasonable this time around. Could one well-crafted question on “Meet the Press” send McCain completely over the edge?