Since the war in Kosovo broke out, though, I've wondered whether the argument culture is a total loss. "The Argument Culture" arrived last spring, when the Lewinsky scandal convinced us all that civic discourse had gone down the toilet (flushed, of course, by whomever we happened personally to disagree with). But that concern seems a lot more pressing in a prosperous, peaceful country distracted by a sex-and-perjury scandal. It is a fortunate nation indeed that worries about having too much public argument.

In a prosperous, carpet-bombing country, the picture is a little murkier. With Kosovo, cable news is still doing plenty of what it does worst: casting every issue in GOP vs. Dems. terms, pumping up stories to fill air time and appeal to human interest ("Balkans Shocker! Soldiers Captured During War!"). Still, I can't help thinking of winter 1991, when newspapers, broadcast networks -- and one cable channel -- catered to a yellow-ribbon-sporting audience in covering a popular war, barely squeaking as the Pentagon limited their access and sanitized their adjectives (famously changing "giddy" to "proud" in one description of a pilot) and largely limiting anti-war voices to noncredible Iraqi government mouthpieces. Whatever problems there still are, this time NATO is at least coming in for daily and nightly criticism -- and for that, thank the argument culture.

In other words -- and God help me for saying this -- bless you, Laura Ingraham. Bless you, "Crossfire." Bless you, Hannity and Colmes, or Cannity and Holmes, or whichever the hell of you is which.

Granted, Ingraham, the Lewinsky-era media star now hosting the MSNBC morning show "Watch It!" has been a living argument for mandatory conscription of television personalities, with her flabbergastingly trivializing bon mots de guerre ("I don't think 'Be all that you can be in Kosovo' is going to fly at the recruiting stations!" she sniffed recently). But in 1991 it would have been a relief to have cable channels airing two parties -- even Oliver North and Paul Begala -- nightly debating Bush administration policy mid-war. (Former Clinton mouthpiece Begala last week joined MSNBC's "Equal Time" with North, having escaped the White House only to enter a "Twilight Zone" hell where he must spin the president's meretricious double talk for eternity: "No, he said he didn't intend to send ground troops!")

You can hardly turn on cable news today without finding someone arguing the Serbian side of the conflict -- or, at least, a politico blustering against interventionism (a take that in '91 tarred Pat Buchanan as a possibly anti-Semitic nut job; today, he can barely squeeze into the front row of America Firsters). And like it or not, this is happening precisely because of what we decried last year: that cable news likes nothing better than a fight, that all national issues have turned into partisan politics.

That may not mean refined or enlightening dialogue. It may mean the end of public decorum and bipartisanship. But it may also mean the end of shutting up and supporting the troops. There are times when constant argument -- constant pinheaded argument by former presidential stooges, even -- is better than none.

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