Most of those who cast their ballots for McCain did so, I maintain, with little sense of his flawed character and thin legislative record. Thanks to the manipulations of the Northeastern press corps, McCain’s brittleness, evasions, inconsistencies and hypocrisies were concealed from an electorate that had barely if ever heard of him before the publication last fall of his ghostwritten autobiography, which implicitly offered his early experiences in a Vietnamese prison camp as a credential for the presidency.

I have consistently argued in this column, which has opposed McCain from the start, that there is no necessary connection between being a prisoner of war and governing the nation and, furthermore, that McCain completely lacks the administrative and managerial skills of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as military commander of the fractious Allies during World War II.

If there were any principles left in journalism, at least a dozen high-profile print, Web and TV reporters would have been fired outright or put on probation by now because of their gross mishandling of the McCain boomlet, which they effectively created to disrupt the campaign of Gov. George W. Bush.

The strategy succeeded because of Bush’s own weaknesses and immaturity as a candidate. If reporters actually believed McCain was ever shooting “straight talk” at them, they’re fools and patsies. But if they were playing a cunning game to help the Clinton-tarred Democratic Party, they’re amoral goons who have corrupted democracy and compromised their own profession.

When the strutting McCain started shrilly proclaiming, “I’m Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star!” every rise-of-Hitler red light should have gone on in the dull media mind. It’s frightening in national security terms to think how easily a seething megalomaniac like McCain could gain credibility through the collusion of the press corps. The TV camera has always shown that McCain’s still stuck in adolescence, sulking in the shadow of his dictatorial Darth Vader father, whom he has delusively projected into the scowling faces of the big, bad Republican establishment.

Only the pussy-whipped princelings of a press terrain soaked with feminist cant could mistake a stunted Uriah Heep like McCain for a “real” man. Ironically, liberal journalists’ blindness or malice has enormously strengthened their arch foe, Rush Limbaugh — whose radio show was the one reliable place, day by day amid the saccharine swill, to hear the refreshingly tart truth about McCain. After the McCain fiasco, Limbaugh’s cultural indispensability as an ideological counterweight should be acknowledged by every honest observer across the political spectrum.

The shocking ineptitude of Bill Bradley’s campaign has mortified many Democrats like myself who were praying that he could and would tap the intense anti-Washington sentiment in the country and win the presidency with rousing bipartisan support. Bradley’s humiliating withdrawal from the race last week will not change my vote for him (partly motivated by distrust of Al Gore) in next month’s Pennsylvania primary.

But it’s pretty clear that a basketball player will never make it to the White House until he or she takes time out to study football, the pagan language of modern American warfare. Didn’t Bradley even learn chess, for heaven’s sake? Gore knocked Bradley’s pieces right off the board. Whether Gore the epicene lie-monger can mobilize the disaffected Bradley Democrats remains to be seen, particularly if alternative candidates get on the ballot this fall.

There’s not much to report on the Hillary Rodham Clinton front this week, except for two intriguing letters from Salon readers. Roy Hill responds from Fort Smith, Ark., to my puzzlement at the odd silence of his fellow native Arkansans about Hillary’s touted achievements in that state:

In Arkansas, Hillary was always seen as a bit of a carpetbagging Yankee albatross around ole Billy’s neck. In fact, public dislike of her was an issue in more than one gubernatorial campaign, and she started calling herself Rodham-Clinton, instead of just plain Rodham, in a deliberate effort to soften her image more to the liking of traditional, Junior League, tea-and-cake types who held positions of power and influence in the state.

Hillary seemed to stay out of the spotlight and away from taking credit for policy decisions, which does not mean that she was not involved. She took steps to stay in Bill’s shadow and to soften and magnolia-ify her image, especially when he lost the governor’s office to Republican Frank White.

And as for the “Silence of the Hams” down in Razorback land, let’s just say that Hillary was never really “one of ours” to begin with, and as a group, we don’t really much care where she lands, just as long as it is far away.

Oh, dear, I couldn’t help visualizing Hillary here as a giant pterodactyl menacing Manhattan (see “One Million Years B.C.,” starring Raquel Welch in her famous fur bikini). Get out the umbrellas, you native New Yorkers! Peter Borregard, writing from El Cerrito, Calif., sharply observes about Hillary’s diner dust-up:

Actually, when H.C. stiffed the waitress, she was displaying that she is a woman of iron principle. When H.C. was pushing her notorious health care initiative, she said she opposed medical savings accounts because if people had control over their own health care dollars, they wouldn’t spend the money wisely.

This is consistent with her idea that the government should get and spend all the money, except of course for H.C. and her friends. Thus, when she didn’t tip the waitress, she was actually doing the waitress a “favor” and preventing this working class ignoramus from having money to spend unwisely.

Nice thrusts, Mr. Borregard! Until my party confronts these harsh truths — that Great Society Democrats have become robber barons flying the flag of fake populism — the Republicans will win the economic debate. It’s American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, not Democratic stewardship, that produced this booming economy. Democrats owe their recent political successes, including the survival of the tottering Clinton regime, mainly to the chaos and leadership vacuum in the Republican Party, which often seems overrun by clods, trolls, grouches and buffoons.

We’ll see if Hillary, who’s mostly been mouthing cautious platitudes, will continue her cheek-by-jowl affiliation with Eve Ensler (author of the ravingly anti-male play, “The Vagina Monologues”), whom Hillary handpicked to serve on her exploratory committee for the Senate campaign. In a hilariously scathing piece in the Feb. 11 Wall Street Journal, Christina Hoff Sommers quotes Ensler on women’s “vagina brain” and describes the spread of virulent Ensler propaganda to campuses. According to the New York Times, Hillary has promised to write the foreword to Ensler’s next book.

If anyone is in doubt about the lunacy of this painfully outmoded branch of feminism, please glance at the three foaming-at-the-mouth protest letters against Sommers’ article that were published by the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 25. The screechy yet ponderous and amazingly stupid letter from Ensler herself must be seen. What a dreary, pedestrian, unliterary mind! It’s early Kate Millet all over again.

Sommers has triumphed anew by flushing the feminazis out of the cupboard, where they still crouch like cobwebby pouter pigeons ready to get their tiny claws into women students. I can’t wait for Sommers’ new book, “The War Against Boys,” a deeply researched project that will be published by Simon & Schuster in June.

David Bensey chides me for my continuing references to David Koresh’s Waco property as a “ranch”:

It is not correct that the property was a “ranch” before Koresh acquired it. Koresh did not found Mount Carmel. It was begun in 1934 by Victor Houteff as an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The theological traditions of the group can be traced to the early 19th century. Koresh didn’t show up until 1981.

The Mount Carmel complex is best described as a church camp, a “retreat,” a religious commune or perhaps a seminary. It certainly was not a ranch in the sense that they were engaged primarily in animal husbandry. Neither was it a “bunker,” “fortress” or “compound.” Nothing about the complex suggested any military design. Most of it was constructed with wood stud walls, with sheetrock on the inside and wood siding on the outside. Such a structure will not stop a rifle bullet, and it obviously was not designed to do so.

The significance of all this is to correct the common belief, created by the mainstream press and the government apologists, that Mount Carmel was some sort of armored bunker, built and designed to resist attack by heavily armed government troops. It is implied that the formidable nature of the complex justified sending a company of light infantry to attack the church camp on the first day of the disaster. In fact, the flimsy structure of the Mount Carmel complex was less well designed to resist attack than the typical YMCA building.

Thanks, Mr. Bensey. Many readers have voiced support of my persistent attacks on the major media for their refusal in 1993 to challenge the Clinton administration’s irresponsible actions at Waco. David G. Wrone writes from St. Louis:

David Koresh could easily have been arrested on one of his frequent trips outside the Davidians’ complex. He often went jogging by himself and was a regular patron of local businesses. As the local sheriff repeatedly stated, the BATF could have nabbed him miles from the women and children — but of course chose to send an armed mob of thugs to his front door (after notifying local media so as to ensure the dramatic video footage they intended to present to Congress during their budgetary hearings).

With unflagging assistance from the national media, the feds smeared Koresh as a child molester, illegal gun dealer and general menace to society. They lied. It is no crime to worship in a manner that contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America. It is no crime to own firearms. It is no crime to raise one’s child without first reading a Donna Shalala biography.

No, these were not crimes. But try telling Koresh and his followers that. But why bother? Even had they not been broasted alive, after being gassed by their own government, they were just “zealots.” Right? At least that’s what Bill Clinton told me.

Charles Booker endorses this position:

I have yet to see any convincing evidence that Koresh was engaged in anything illegal, certainly nothing that warranted such violence and murderous intent. The state child welfare authorities had on a number of occasions conducted on-site investigations of child abuse allegations and found no credible evidence.

Koresh was legally selling weapons under a federal firearms license. The charges of manufacturing automatic weapons rests on very questionable evidence provided by the FBI, which had admittedly falsified evidence.

The BATF and FBI lied (and later admitted to it in court) to the governor of Texas in order to get the armored vehicles and helicopter. The agents falsely claimed drugs were manufactured in the compound. The FBI prevented firemen and Texas Rangers near the site until the fire had consumed most of the evidence. They also used bulldozers to pile burning rubble over exit doors.

I see very little honorable or admirable in the behavior of the FBI, BATF, the national media or our federal court system. Koresh is certainly not a hero of mine. I think his theology is nuts. But that does not alter the fact that he was apparently doing nothing wrong, when he and his followers were subjected to a murderous attack by heavily armed thugs in the pay of the government.

While I have no way of factually corroborating these allegations, Mr. Booker, I fully agree with your assessment of the Waco disaster. Given the excesses by government agencies, followed by the massive coverup, liberal Democrats are on shaky ground when they argue that law-abiding citizens have no foreseeable need for arms in modern society. Ronald Brady adds this testimony to my warning that civil disorder can quickly follow a severe climatological disturbance:

When Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida, law and order would have collapsed, except that many people who were not in law enforcement took it upon themselves to go around packing firearms. I think of these individuals as being the militia as described in the Second Amendment. It was the actions of these people that prevented widespread looting in the aftermath of that hurricane. Of course, this did not get reported in the mainstream press.

It’s a premise of all my work that civilization is a frail structure through which the forces of barbarism can break at any time. Although I’m not a gun owner, I strongly suspect that liberal hostility to guns often springs from a sentimental misinterpretation of reality. Tim Hartin, who began our long-running gun debate, writes again on this matter from Mount Horeb, Wis.:

I was delighted at the way the anti-gun responses in your last column proved the very point I was trying to make: namely that support for gun control is an emotional/cultural/class issue that has nothing to do with the facts.

There is almost no correlation between the level of gun ownership in a nation and the level of criminal violence in that nation. In the U.S., we have guns and violence, but guns were not used in nearly three out four violent crimes, and 99.8 percent of firearms will not be used to commit a crime in any given year. In Switzerland, they have an assault rifle in every house and little violence. In England, they recently confiscated all the guns, and were rewarded with a crime wave.

In the U.S., there is a direct correlation between gun control and violent crime. Almost without exception, jurisdictions with gun control have higher crime rates than jurisdictions without gun control. The historical record shows that when gun controls are loosened, crime goes down, and when gun controls are tightened, crime goes up.

Gun controllers continue with their crusade in the face of these facts, demonstrating 1) that they are not rational on this topic and 2) that they are not really trying to reduce crime or violence but are instead after something else.

I speculate that their motives are an unhealthy mix of the following:

1) Fear of the unknown (guns). 2) Fear of those unwashed “others” who might own guns. 3) Insecurity about their ability to protect themselves, with or without a gun. 4) Childlike desire for some big, burly father figure to protect them. 5) Childlike desire for a soft, pink, fluffy world with no sharp corners, threats or dangers. 6) Sublimated fear of penises/male power, as embodied by phallic guns. 7) Deep denial about the roots of violence in human nature and, by extension, their own capacity for violence. A self-righteous belief in their own moral superiority.

When the Second Amendment was passed, a “militia” was commonly understood to be a group of armed citizens, such as those unofficial groups that resisted the British during the early days of the Revolutionary War. The old concept of a militia is best preserved today in Switzerland, where every male of military age belongs to the militia and keeps a fully automatic assault rifle in his house.

Thanks, Mr. Hartin, for yet another eloquent litany on this explosively controversial issue, which the media (with help from a whiny President Clinton) are already maneuvering front and center for the presidential race. As I’ve indicated in the past, I firmly agree with this view of the Second Amendment as the crucial recourse of private citizens against government tyranny, which world history shows can arise with stunning speed.

I’m very grateful for a just-arrived letter from John Coates, who notes of a column of mine from over a year ago that the great sociologist Erving Goffman (from whom Michel Foucault shamelessly pilfered) was not, as I said, American but in fact Canadian. This flabbergasted me, since Goffman’s entire career was spent in the United States. Sure enough, it turns out that Goffman (like Marshall McLuhan) was born in Alberta and received his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1945. He received his graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, where he began teaching.

As a fan of Goffman from my college days, I wish I could have cited his Canadian roots in my Feb. 17 lecture at Fordham University, “The North American Intellectual Tradition,” the Second Annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture co-sponsored by the Canadian Consulate.

While the excerpt published in Toronto’s Globe and Mail did not mention Goffman, the original lecture did. I traced Goffman’s classic 1956 work, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” back to Thorstein Veblen and noted that both Veblen and Goffman were invoked in the pioneering work of Norman O. Brown.

I called Brown’s 1959 book, “Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History,” one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century and declared, “It is what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did.” Throughout the lecture, I denounced the fatiguingly idolized Frankfurt School (notably Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno) for their “overschematic” and yet “imprecise” system of thought, which I find completely useless for analyzing the age of media or culture in general after World War II.

Finally, my top pop moments of the past three weeks:

1) Ava Gardner, with her moist red lips and bright green dress, lip-synching “Lovin’ That Man of Mine” in “Showboat” (1951), broadcast by Turner Classic Movies. This is the hypnotic scene that, when I saw the film at its first release (I was 4), turned me into a lifelong idolater of pagan goddesses.

2) Audrey Hepburn flouncing charmingly about as Holly Golightly (“Quel rat!”) in one of the seminal films of my adolescence, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), also broadcast by Turner Classic Movies. Like Kim Novak in “Bell, Book and Candle” (1958) and Hayley Mills in “The Parent Trap” (1961), Hepburn represented a physical and spiritual freedom that was electrifying in that cloistered, conventional era.

3) Bo Derek being interviewed last week on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Derek’s mediocre acting career as a simpering, vapid Southern California blond did not prepare one for her amazing warmth and natural intelligence. Even her diction has Euro-class. How centered she seems! Derek has matured beautifully in ways that Madonna, for example, hasn’t, despite the latter’s still-manic claims of magical transformation by motherhood.

4) Congratulations to Maxim for yet another sensational cover photo. The March issue, with its blazing red headline, “Return of the Ultra Vixen!” fairly lit up the sky from 500 feet away at airport newsstands. Maxim’s talented art directors sure know how to feature a bust: The smoldering Jenny McCarthy in her bursting black-vinyl brassiere and short shorts looks like a bold ship’s figurehead — the Winged Victory of Samothrace on a midnight pirate raid. Month by month, Maxim is driving the last nails into the coffin of American Puritanism.

– Andrew Ricks

I agree with Hutchinson that black leaders greatly risk losing the moral high ground when they fail to condemn black-on-white hate crimes. In fighting for equal treatment under the law for all individuals, minority groups must show the moral understanding to express outrage when majority groups are attacked simply because of their ethnic or racial background.

While I also share his opinion that there has been little comment by national black leaders, Hutchinson misses the fact that the first group to make a statement about this tragedy here in Pittsburgh was Tim Stevens, the NAACP’s Pittsburgh Chapter executive director. He made it very clear that at least his local group is outraged by the actions of Ronald Taylor, even if the national NAACP has been conspicuously quiet.

– Teddy Carroll

Pittsburgh, Pa.

Unlike Earl Ofari Hutchinson, I’ve heard no silence on black-on-white crimes such as the sickening spree murders last week in Pennsylvania. Blacks, as a group, are deeply upset and embarrassed by the actions of a deranged Colin Ferguson, or this apparently equally deranged gunman. If black folks aren’t taking to the streets over the bestial acts of a few of their members perhaps it’s because no one really believes the justice system will fail in any of these instances whether from inertia or miscarriage.

– Camille Goodison

The premise of the article — that no one in the “black community” has decried the killings in Wilkinsburg (near Pittsburgh) — is false. Here in the city where the crime occurred, the lack of “outrage” seems to have more to do with a sense of sadness and of a violation of the progress that has been made in black/white relationships in Wilkinsburg. Wilkinsburg has made tremendous strides in reducing gang-related crime, in improving poorly funded schools, in creation of jobs and in making available low income housing. In the midst of all this improvement, along came this horrific crime.

That the alleged killer hated whites is probable, based on literature found in his room, and his personal history, including what he said as he shot his victim. But the overwhelming sense that one gets reading the details of the crime is that he is utterly mad. And that madness seems to stand in contrast to a longer history of white on black crimes, where those who committed such crimes were quite mainstream in their behavior.

The easy rhetoric of the author aside, his words do not resonate as true here in Pittsburgh, where blacks and whites together are mourning the killings. The Reverend Healy, a former priest killed as he sat in a restaurant, was mourned by his brother who led prayers for an end to anger and violence, for the recovery of two victims who remain hospitalized, for the family of the man who shot them and for better community support of all people touched by mental illness.

Perhaps “outrage” is not the best response. Perhaps the words of Rev. Healy, chosen before his death for his liturgy, say it best: “God is personal and like a parent; thus we are all related, as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters, as long-lost kith and kin. Life — on Earth and beyond — is the process of discovering and responding to each other as related to and therefore, responsible for each other. The kingdom of heaven is a family reunion: memories and laughs, apologies and forgiveness, promises and hopes.”

– Timothy Murphy, M.D.

The big, less-fat bully
BY ERIC BOEHLERT
(03/04/00)

As a long-time Limbaugh listener (and no-time caller) I, too, am dismayed by Rush’s tirade against McCain. Early in the campaign, when Dubya was expected to take the nomination without any serious fight, Rush emphasized two points to McCain-supporting callers: (1) Republicans should not beat each other up in the primaries, and (2) keep your eye on the ball — the November election.
Rush has obviously abandoned these two guiding principles by putting outlandish spins on McCain (e.g., on Dubya’s BJU visit: McCain — not Dubya — is a “divider,” because he has pointed out the school’s backward racist policies and anti-Catholic stance) and by failing to see that McCain is positioned to take the decisive swing vote in November. It’s obvious that McCain would also get the Republican vote in the general election if he’s the Republican candidate. Dubya, on the other hand, is setting himself up to get a Dole-sized portion of the vote in November. Limbaugh’s eye is off the ball.

– Matt Twomey

May I suggest that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t really want a Republican to win in November? His show seems to be predicated on bashing those he disagrees with. Therefore if Gore succeeds Clinton, Rush will continue to have a good supply of Democratic red meat to feed to his fans! The problem with McCain is that his potential for success creates a problem for the right wing, in that they may need support from those they love to hate.

– Carl Caldera

The truth about the polygraph
BY SUSAN MCCARTHY
(03/02/00)

Susan McCarthy’s article reminded me of the time I “went on the box” in 1978 as screening for the “high-security” job of stock-puller in a catalog store. I passed and got the minimum-wage job; but I felt humiliated by the questions in particular and the experience as a whole. It set a bad tone for my employment and I quit two weeks later. I’m glad those tests went away (mostly) as a routine pre-employment tool.

Unfortunately, they have returned in the form of personality tests. As part of the interview process, many employers are now probing deep into our psyche to determine if we’ll be one with corporate culture, are easily led, er, managed, and so forth. As with polygraphs, there is concern as to their validity.

If personality tests are inaccurate, they do both the employer and employee a disservice. If they are accurate, they are an invasion of privacy.

– Austin W. Troxell

Lessons in consumption
BY NICK GILLESPIE
(03/06/00)

I‘ve never believed in shielding children from the big, bad world of consumerism (or, when they’re approaching their first decade, the big, bad world of sex). It’s always been about education, plain and simple.

My folks let me watch all the TV I wanted and read all the comics I could get my hands on — and while they were at it, they taught me to really pay attention to what was being said (or omitted), and how being told to buy something doesn’t mean I (or they) had to. I’m looking forward to passing on the same kind of media savvy to my kids.

– Emru Townsend

Hooked on tutoring
BY CATHERINE DAVIS
(02/29/00)

I read this week’s Mothers Who Think column, “Hooked on Tutoring,” with interest. I would like to clarify several points raised in the article about Score! and invite Catherine Davis to learn more about us:

Score! Educational Centers work with schools and teachers, not against them. In fact, many students come to Score! as a result of a school or teacher referral. Our staff collaborates with teachers, sharing student progress reports with them at a parent’s request. Schools and teachers in the communities we serve understand Score!’s role: to supplement, not replace, work that students do during the school day. By helping children to build critical basic skills, self-confidence and a love of learning, we enable them to go even farther in the classroom.

Davis points to a discrepancy between the cost advertised on our Web site, “as little as $30 a week,” and the cost she was given on the phone: $129 per month with a $100 registration fee, or $1,648 a year. Kids come to Score! twice each week for hour-long sessions. Based on our calculations, the cost comes to approximately $29 per week, below the price cited on our Web site and within reach of many families.

Score! is committed to providing its services to as many children as possible. One of our most successful locations is in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, one of the nation’s most economically depressed neighborhoods. We offer our services at a slightly lower rate to families in the community, and the center is operating at full capacity. In addition, our newly launched site eScore.com brings free and low-cost educational resources to parents and kids worldwide.

Score! is not a chain of franchises. All centers are wholly owned by Score! Learning Inc., enabling us to guarantee uniformly high quality services at more than 100 locations nationwide.

Score! applauds teachers for the good work they do every day to educate the nation’s children. We offer them our unequivocal support in this mission.

– Robert Waldron

chief executive officer, Score! Learning Inc.

Teachers themselves have collectively done a bang-up job at undermining their own authority and expertise. Davis has conveniently forgotten that most of those parents electing to have their children tutored were themselves once students of public schools. If they do not wish to abandon their offsprings’ education to the tender mercies of that system, one can hardly blame them, since they do know whereof they speak.

Indeed, the entire article was a delicately veiled attack on the judgment of parents. What Davis really wants to do, evidently, is flame those no-good parents who won’t let teachers play god with their children. But since most people won’t sit still to be told how invalid their experiences are, Davis instead portrays parents as dupes of tutoring services. Parents, she argues, are well-meaning fools taken in by the evils of corporate tutoring.

Perhaps that is true. Perhaps tutoring services are nothing more than leeches attached to parents’ pocketbooks. Perhaps parents who recourse to supplemental instruction are the dupes of tutoring services. At least that’s better than being the dupe of an arrogant, incompetent, corrupt school system.

– Vanessa Layne

And the sharp blows have left more than a few Limbaugh loyalists, who happen to be McCain supporters, scratching their heads in disbelief as the self-proclaimed “Truth Detector” gives McCain the full Clinton treatment; questioning his honesty, his integrity and running parodies that make the senator sound like a stammering, incoherent twit. (By contrast, Limbaugh, a Lincoln Bedroom guest during George Bush’s presidency, has found no fault at all with W.)

“There’s a real sense of betrayal among McCain supporters,” says Chris O’Brien, a Republican attorney from Albany, N.Y., who’s been listening to Limbaugh for the last 10 years, and agreeing with the right-wing host “80 percent of the time.” “It’s not the issue of his disagreement, it’s Rush’s vehemence,” says O’Brien. “He’s trying to turn McCain into Clinton, and that’s ridiculous. He’s just out to get this guy, and I think he’s hurting McCain.”

While Limbaugh’s influence in general elections has proved to be negligible over the years, his ability to seriously damage a candidate during the Republican primary season is far stronger.

“He can have that effect because he reaches activists, the people who are highly motivated to go out and vote,” says Randall Bloomquist, program director at news/talk station WBT in Charlotte, N.C., which airs Limbaugh’s syndicated weekday shows. Newsday’s Paul Colford, who wrote an unauthorized biography, “The Rush Limbaugh Story,” agrees: “What Limbaugh has to say during this [GOP] slugfest should not be discounted.”

What Limbaugh has been saying on-air is that McCain is a shameless manipulator who’s borrowing “the deceitful politics of Bill Clinton.” That there’s “intellectual dishonesty” flowing from the McCain camp. That “you can’t rely on what McCain says,” because he lifts policies “right out of the Bill Clinton/George McGovern play book.” And that “McCain is the unsuspecting tool of the Rockefeller Republicans who want to reclaim the party from Christian conservatives.”

Limbaugh welcomes callers to his show who denounce McCain as “an intellectual bigot” who “lies, lies, lies” and is a man who “has no set core values.” Online, at Limbaugh newsgroups, fans are now posting questions about McCain’s Vietnam military service (“Has there been any corroborating evidence by McCain’s fellow prisoners that he was ‘brutally tortured’?”) right next to “Is Clinton a murderer?” rants.

“Limbaugh’s just beating the hell out of McCain,” notes Michael Harrison, the non-partisan editor of Talkers, the talk radio industry bible. “He’s found McCain to be a temporary replacement for Bill Clinton. And Limbaugh needs another Clinton just to be Limbaugh. He’s an entertainer and he’s got a show to do. Talk-show hosts are like movie theater owners — ‘we need new films.’”

Limbaugh’s intense dislike for McCain seems to be due to two factors: the media’s positive response to McCain, and the support he’s attracted from independents and Democrats. When non-Republicans gave the senator a victory in Michigan, Limbaugh decried the, “love-’em-and-leave-’em liberals who, in effect, gave McCain a little Lewinsky.” (Limbaugh seemed to have sex on the mind during his post-Michigan analysis: “Watch the media elite have orgasm after orgasm after orgasm over McCain.”)

Not surprisingly, Limbaugh sees the liberals-are-taking-over-the-GOP conspiracy at every turn of this primary season. When Joe, an Al Gore supporter from Queens, recently called and pointed out Democrats fear facing McCain in November, the recently slimmed-down talk show host coolly deduced Joe’s ruse and announced the caller was trying to trick Republicans, so listeners should take the opposite of Joe’s advice.

“It was a double-cross and it was a nice try. But this ain’t some local show,” Limbaugh crowed triumphantly. (He occasionally allows McCain supporters on the air, but often mocks them after they’ve hung up, like the McCain backer Limbaugh accused of “parsing his language like [former White House council] Lanny Davis.”)

For now, the McCain camp remains mum on Limbaugh, opting to shy away from a public spat. “He’s entitled to his opinion,” the senator told a Seattle radio interviewer who asked about Limbaugh’s relentless attacks. It’s a wise move, says Colford: “That’s not a good fight to pick, not when he has a microphone that big.”

McCain supporters who for years have reveled as Limbaugh lampooned their shared enemies on the left, find the assault on their own candidate bewildering. They insist Limbaugh often contradicts himself, won’t own up to botched predictions (just days before the senator unleashed his public attack on Pat Robertson, Limbaugh told listeners “to keep a sharp eye on this, McCain is going to move to the right”), and distorts the candidate’s record. Sound like familiar accusations?

“We’ve documented for years the problem with Rush’s logic and facts, says Peter Hart, an analyst with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group. “And maybe conservative listeners didn’t pay much attention to those distortions. But now that they’re hitting closer to home, at least with McCain supporters, it might startle them that Rush plays so loose with the facts.”

What also angers some listeners is what they see as Limbaugh’s feverish loyalty to the Republican Party. “Rush really has gone overboard in his bashing of McCain, but I guess it’s understandable since Rush represents the status quo, and Senator McCain is attacking the status quo,” says Tom Abbott, a conservative from Oklahoma who’s listened to Limbaugh for years.

“Nobody should be surprised” about Limbaugh’s aggressive defense of the Bush candidacy, says Bloomquist at WBT. “When Rush started out he was doing guerrilla radio, the voice of conservative reason. Then Republicans took over Congress and suddenly Rush came down from the mountain and became establishment radio.”

No doubt at the outset of his campaign McCain pondered the pitfalls of taking on the Republican powers that be, and plotted ways to get around hostile senators, governors and fund-raisers. The problem is McCain never devised a strategy to combat perhaps the meanest and most influential GOP backroom player of them all: Rush Limbaugh.

Vice President Al Gore, unfortunately the likely Democratic nominee (I’m a Bradley supporter), would wipe the floor with McCain in the general election on matters of both content and form. Try to imagine those two head to head, or rather head to hip! McCain — surprise, surprise — is only 5-feet-7-inches tall, but thanks to the sleight of hand of liberal picture editors, he is constantly shown in heroic photo angles from below. Like it or not, with few exceptions (e.g., Jimmy Carter) the taller presidential candidate always wins.

There’s a primitivistic sorting device going on in most searches for leaders — which is why women have so rarely gained the topmost post in modern democracies. After a slow start, Gore is outgunning Bradley on the road in sheer vitality level, and Bush, an inarticulate lightweight, has come on like gangbusters. It’s brute raw energy that won the presidency for the relatively unknown Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992.

Political reporters keep doggedly judging candidates by their skill in stagy debates, but the electorate is sick and tired of glib Ivy Leaguers who parse every word. Clinton stormed onto the national stage like a barb-tufted Arkansas boar but degenerated over time into a celebrity schmoozer and indolent diddler of big-boobed creampuffs.

McCain’s nastiness nicely surfaced in his concession speech last weekend — forcing his nerdy liberal flacks (who would vote Democratic this fall even if the nominee is Attila the Hun) to tsk-tsk nervously. Hey, wake up and smell the axle grease: This guy was always a jerk! The real victim of Bush’s South Carolina sweep was the credibility of the inside-the-Beltway press corps, who blushingly giggled and sighed their way through McCain’s factitious ascent. What a wok of genderless wet noodles they are!

My long suspicion of McCain turned into utter disdain during those stomach-churning tales of teenagers weeping or being alleged to weep because Bush’s bully boys (terror by telephone!) had maligned McCain’s character and record. This barrel of unctuous schmaltz, straight out of the “Sally Jesse Raphael Show,” was swallowed by the media in one big burp.

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for replaying an exchange on Chris Matthews’ CNBC show “Hardball” when McCain, facing a Clemson University audience three weeks ago, was flushed out of his usual slippery doubletalk about abortion. McCain admitted he believes Roe vs. Wade should be overturned on constitutional grounds and returned to the states for judgment; then he declared he would want the states to declare abortion completely illegal. As a pro-choice member of Planned Parenthood, I condemn the liberal media’s censoring of this vital detail about McCain’s reactionary views.

McCain’s use in campaign events of large onstage posters of himself as a young Navy flier is inappropriate and propagandistic. His experience as a POW, however admirable, is irrelevant to his suitability for high political office. (It was equally objectionable when the feisty Lt. Col. Oliver North wore his Marines uniform to testify before Congress during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings.) The presidency requires managerial and administrative skill — exactly what McCain, the choleric, megalomaniacal loner, has never excelled at in his 17 years as a senator.

Furthermore, McCain’s longstanding open-door policy with reporters is a sign not of candor but of weakness and even neurosis. It suggests a craving for distraction to avoid being alone with one’s thoughts. Those with a strong sense of self and a rich inner life (like the often too-Olympian Bradley) need privacy and know how to draw lines. McCain’s compulsive, seductive schmoozing resembles the sociopathic conference-hustling of the academic elite, who are most themselves when sashaying their whimsical way through shallow, boondoggling panel events.

Many Salon readers have sent support of my anti-McCain position. For example, M. Bateman says:

Thank you for telling the truth about John McCain. To hear the media tell it, John McCain is a family-values moderate with a squeaky clean financial past. Nothing could be further from the truth. He has the same voting record as Jesse Helms, yet his fans in the press, many of whom despise Jesse Helms, shower praise on McCain and portray him as a “moderate.”

It is time somebody told the public who John McCain is. He cheated on his first wife with a string of strippers, he was up to his eyeballs in the Keating Five debacle, and he has consistently voted to help the polluters. The mainstream news media will not tell the public who John McCain is.

A reader signing herself Judy declares:

I’m in agreement with your assessment of John McCain. I live in Phoenix, so I’ve been able to see this guy’s bag of tricks for a few years, going back to the Charles Keating/Lincoln Thrift debacle through the spin control on his wife’s theft of mood-altering drugs from her own charitable organization, and let’s not forget his notorious temperament. I, for one, am definitely uncomfortable with the idea of him having his finger on the button.

Yes, Judy, I too am nervous about the hair-trigger McCain in charge of our military — and not because of his Vietnam traumas. I suspect that McCain’s psychological turmoil started long before in his subordination to an autocratic military father, from whom he got as big a jump-start in life as did George W. Bush from his own father. (Note how we’ve heard more about Bush’s C average at Yale than about McCain’s graduation near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy.)

C.C. Karr writes from Kirkwood, Mo.:

Isn’t it odd that McCain will try to achieve the presidency by stroking his political experience as a loser (prisoner in an un-won war) vs. Eisenhower, a victor as the Allied supreme commander in World War II, who told his GOP lackeys that he would never appear in a military uniform again, practically underplaying his military experience. Hmmm.

Exactly. McCain’s coercive evocation of a glorious military past covers up his lack of genuine achievement in Washington. A disabled veteran and retired major, asking that his identity be concealed out of fear of “retaliation,” writes the following:

I couldn’t agree with you more on the sanctimonious senator from Arizona (I moved here last year from New Jersey). He is more than a Clinton-clone faker. John Sidney McCain is not the war hero he advertises himself as.

Please check Page 47 of U.S. News & World Report for May 14, 1973. In his own words, McCain (apparently prior to getting “political ambitions”) reveals that on the fourth day of his captivity he said: “OK, I’ll give you [his North Vietnamese jailers] military information if you will take me to the hospital.”

There were more than a few POWs who were brutally tortured for four years and still revealed only “name, rank and serial number.” Also, McCain appeared upon release to be much heavier in weight than his fellow prisoners. I wonder why?

Yes, he’s “creepy” all right. Especially that weird “laugh” that makes my skin crawl. If any major media ever did a real investigation into his conduct during those five and half years, John Boy’s “hero” image might be permanently punctured. I wasn’t a flier, but I did serve part of three years in combat with the U.S. Army on the ground in Vietnam. And I know many veterans and POW-MIA family members who simply loathe McCain. Apparently with good reason.

James Kelm adds this interesting point of view:

I, too, have been getting a spooky feeling while watching John McCain’s appearances over the past year. During his tantrum of a concession speech the other night, I suddenly caught myself thinking of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” specifically Ian McKellan’s performance in the recent movie adaptation. I can’t get the image out of my head.

Joy Loth seconds my unease with McCain (which I attributed to “intuition”): “My intuition concerning McCain has to do with his face, which reminds me of a papier-mbchi mask. His eyes seem embedded behind it.” However, Mike Davis sends me a scathing message from Ontario, Calif., titled “Intuition is no substitute for reason”:

Considering your evocation of intuition as a legitimate basis to reject a candidate outright, where, might I ask, was this penetrating instinct when you voted not just once but twice for the man you now concede to be an embarrassment to the institution of the presidency? Maybe your intuition is in need of recalibration, or perhaps Laura Schlessinger was right when she so aptly pointed out that emotions fail us because they have no I.Q.

As for me, I’ll opt for logo-centric rationality every time. It served me well in my early appraisal of Mr. Clinton as a facile obfuscator, as I suspect it has done in my support for the man toward whom you have expressed such an animus. Given that you are 0 for 2, perhaps you might consider a change-up this time around.

Touchi, Mr. Davis! While not an early Bill Clinton fan, I did indeed hope, after his first presidential nomination in 1992, that he would bring the idealism of my baby-boom generation to fruition. However, my very positive article on him for the San Francisco Examiner in 1992 (commissioned by David Talbot before he co-founded Salon) raised questions about whether he would be able to govern successfully. By the 1996 election, I had few illusions left, but there was no chance that I would vote for the robotic, saturnine Sen. Bob Dole, who showed few signs of consciousness of the contemporary world.

Prof. Michael Baranowski, writing from the University of Evansville in Indiana, asks my opinion of Alan Keyes, who he thinks is “the best speaker of the bunch” in the current presidential sweepstakes. Keyes is, in his view, “perhaps one of the few candidates who may actually have a core belief other than political survival (which is clearly not all that important to him — or to Gary Bauer, for that matter).” As an epigraph Prof. Baranowski adds an amusing aphorism from Napoleon Bonaparte, which says a lot about current American politics: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

Amardeep Singh in Durham, N.C., also asks about Keyes. Describing himself as “basically a pro-choice, queer-friendly lefty who disagrees with his entire program,” Singh says that he at first was “simply interested to see an African-American man in the Republican race, bringing in fringe conservative votes with his mad loquaciousness.”

Keyes’ revelation at the Feb. 15 CNN-sponsored debate that he’s Catholic “makes him even more exotic, since African-American religion is usually so strongly marked as Baptist.” Singh wonders if this doesn’t make Keyes in effect “Italian” — that is to say, “dangerously loquacious, passionate and massively in excess of the parched Protestant landscape of the 2000 elections”: “Keyes is weird, fringy, and often loony, but at least he’s not in denial.”

My judgment about Alan Keyes somewhat parallels what I’ve said about John McCain: It’s very dangerous to raise loners to the presidency, which requires complexities of teamwork, persuasion, consensus-building and compromise. Keyes is obviously highly intelligent and endlessly energetic. He has all the bratty baby-boom Harvard College articulateness that the back-slapping, Secret Society, old-style “white shoe” Yalie George W. Bush lacks.

But like Steve Forbes, Keyes has spent far too little time thinking about the president’s job as an administrator or commander in chief. Keyes seems to be running for chairman of the campus debate team. His often snide and disruptive behavior at the CNN event also won him no points with me. Keyes would make an outstanding college teacher or host of an ideas-and-issues TV talk show, but I fail to see that he has a shred of political talent. And his escalating charges of racism against the press and electorate are simply cheap hysteria.

In the three weeks since my last column, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been up hill and down dale, beating the bushes in upstate New York to try to convince someone somewhere that she is a woman of substance rather than a raisin-eyed, carrot-nosed, twig-armed, straw-stuffed mannequin trundled in on a go-cart by the mentally bereft powerbrokers of the state Democratic Party.

It’s been a diverting few months for us charter members of Hillary Watch, but I couldn’t be bothered to turn the TV on for her poorly scheduled and overlong Feb. 6 announcement extravaganza: There are far better things to do with two hours on a Sunday afternoon. Typical of Hillary’s gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight campaign, the big news that trickled out of that cumbersome event was: the playing of a masturbatory Billy Joel song beforehand; the castrated silence of the onstage president; the lopping of the telltale Clinton name off the Hillary banner; and the flaunting of salads and omelettes during the sugar-on-sugar video.

Those eggs hit the fan two days later as Hillary and her aides managed to forget to tip the waitress in a diner in Albumen — sorry, Albion, N.Y., where the male owner comped the first lady her two caloric plates in a row of scrambled eggs and home fries. Big deal, one might have said, had Hillary or her campaign staff quickly rectified the oversight.

But when a reporter asked about it a day later, Hillary’s first impulse as always was to stonewall, calling it a “wild story.” Deny, deny, deny: Here in nuce — or should we say in ovo — is how this country got dragged into the impeachment crisis. It was Hillary’s refusal to settle with Paula Jones, as well as the defamatory attacks on Jones and other complaining women that Hillary countenanced, that led to the unearthing of Monica Lewinsky in the multi-volume Clinton Casanova Chronicles.

Ten days later, after rising publicity and a conservative Web-driven stunt producing a flood of dollar bills from around the country for the stiffed waitress, Hillary’s spokesman announced that a $100 savings bond was in the mail for the waitress’s son. The whole episode was a classic Marie Antoinette Moment: Hillary managed to show that far from being the champion of working women as she claims, she is so used to being treated like royalty that she is now smugly removed from practical reality.

R. Rouff writes to protest my “monotonous criticisms” of Hillary, which “neglect the fact that while Bill was governor of Arkansas, he and Hillary had a solid record of championing progressive governmental initiatives, this in a state that was for many years poverty stricken and, in terms of social services, grossly underserved.” Significantly, “Arkansas’ previous claim to fame before the Clintons was the racist reactionary Orville Faubus.”

The latter point is well taken, but I still need to be convinced that it’s Hillary rather than Bill, the native Arkansan, who should take credit for these achievements — about which Arkansans in general seem strangely silent, by the way. As for the monotony of my criticisms, I plead guilty — but it must be realized that I was an early Hillary fan whose laudatory statements and articles about her beginning in 1992 are on the record in the U.S. and the U.K.

I belong to a group much dwelled on of late in political commentary: the white, middle-aged, Democratic professional women whom Hillary by her own dishonest and manipulative behavior (and not through the occult intervention of any right-wing conspiracy) has managed to totally alienate. More and more are speaking out now, but my changing views were clear in “Ice Queen, Drag Queen,” my April 1996 New Republic cover story that produced a squealing letter to the editor from Hillary’s smarmy show-biz chum, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.

Joy Loth, already quoted above, remarks: “Hillary is the Forrest Gump of politics. Was she really at the rally for Martin Luther King? It seems she’s been there, done that, and is that whenever it suits her political purposes.” Joyce Hathaway writes from Alexandria, Va.:

I am always amazed at the tributes paid to Hillary for her work with children. She has subjected her own daughter to an awe-inspiringly dysfunctional family life. She and Bill subjected a very young Chelsea to questioning (grilling) at the dinner table and claimed that people, saying similar things about her father, were part of a vast conspiracy of liars.

All things considered, I think Hillary exhibits a total lack of understanding of what kids are all about. Why is this never mentioned?

I’m afraid I laughed uproariously at Fred Schreier’s mischievous sally:

I find it odd that in the eight years of the Clinton residency in the White House we have seldom if ever heard Chelsea speak. Is she a mute? Her father never shuts up — so maybe he is not the biological father.

Finally, to leave our Clinton cell for this week, an item in the New York Post’s Page Six reported that Westchester County Republicans have offered “a suggestion for what Bill and Hillary Clinton should call their new home in Chappaqua: Disgraceland.”

The exchange on gun control in my last column produced many fascinating responses. Crow Carter, who describes himself as a “professional handgun instructor with many female graduates,” applauds Tim Hartin’s letter for its description of “the irrational fear of weapons dubbed ‘hoplophobia’ by Jeff Cooper, known as the ‘Father of Modern Handgunning’ [from the Greek 'hoplon', meaning weapon or tool].” Carter supports my interpretation of the Second Amendment:

If one reads the Founders one cannot escape the realization that this amendment, second only to the First, which it protects, was placed where it is precisely to allow the people to take back their government should it fall into the hands of some future Hitlerian despot.

Meanwhile, Gunowners of America, the junkyard dogs of the Second Amendment, asks about your Democratic Party, “What part of ‘infringed’ don’t they understand?”

Bill King similarly declares:

I have thought for some time that this is a cultural issue. In the home I grew up in, the presence of a gun was quite normal. Many of my relatives were farmers, and killing animals for food was also normal. All of my cousins and I were introduced to hunting first as helpers in camp; then as drivers of game; and finally as hunters. We were taught what to do and learned the rules of the game.

A person from an urban background in which guns are only encountered along with a request to part with money can’t understand just how benign a gun is to me. I have several guns and have never understood why the controllers are concerned with how many guns a man owns. After all, most of the troops who conquered Germany only had one gun.

Tim Stinnett sends appreciation for my “defense of decent, law-abiding” gun-owners: “That guns in the hands of responsible citizens pose no measurable problem for public safety seems brutally sensible to me.” However, he questions my use of the word “loophole” for the way that a girlfriend of the Columbine High School mass murderers was able to purchase weapons for them at a gun show:

Private sellers, those who are not in the business of selling guns but wish to buy, sell or trade their own personal firearms, are not subject to federal and state laws regulating gun dealers, just as laws regulating automobile dealers do not apply to “Fred” when he sticks a “for sale” sign in the window of his Pontiac and parks it by the road. That Fred can sell his personally owned Pontiac without being subject to the same laws regulating a Pontiac dealer doesn’t make it a “loophole.” Regulating those engaged in business differently from individuals selling personal property is entirely reasonable and purely intentional.

As you may know, both Harris and Klebold initially attempted to purchase guns from a licensed gun dealer. He refused them because they were not of age. The girlfriend who purchased weapons at a gun show was of legal age to purchase rifles and shotguns from any licensed gun dealer. The seller asked for ID to prove she was at least 18. She would have been able to walk into any licensed gun dealer, pass a background check and purchase the same guns anywhere in Colorado or virtually every other state. Where is the “loophole”?

Thanks, Mr. Stinnett, for the correction. Although I was familiar with these facts, it’s clearly wrong to go on calling the problem a “loophole.” Surely something needs to be done, however, to tighten up procedures and streamline record-keeping so that guns can be kept out of the hands of psychotics while at the same time preserving the rights of responsible gun-owners. Self-regulation by the gun industry and private collectors is infinitely preferable to government intrusion by grandstanding liberal bureaucrats.

Don Baldwin, who describes himself as a National Rifle Association Life Member (“certified by them as a pistol and rifle instructor”) and is president of Democrats for the 2nd Amendment, confirms Tim Stinnett’s point:

The gun show “loophole” is not an intentional oversight in the law. It is an intentional limitation because the federal government has no authority to regulate private sales of firearms within the same state, when the seller is not a federally recognized gun dealer.

That being said, there is certainly room to create a situation in which the gun community can regulate itself. If the NICS “instant” background check system was made available in such a way that law enforcement agents could run voluntary checks for individuals at gun shows — and if sellers using that system were relieved of any liability if someone with a clean background committed a crime with the gun — then almost all gun sales at gun shows would be conducted using the NICS system. It would be a lot less of a ham-fisted approach than the White House suggestion, which is meant to kill gun shows.

My family and I are also members of PFLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays]. Here near Seattle we are presently running an experiment: offering NRA Refuse to be a Victim (and gun safety) classes for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community.

I have the theory that the gun rights/gay rights intersection will be a powerful one, as both groups are taken for granted by the parties with which they are most closely affiliated: gays taken for granted by (my fellow) Democrats; gun owners taken for granted by the GOP.

A very promising political gambit, Mr. Baldwin! The establishments of the two major parties have gotten far too arrogant and complacent, and this is just the sort of thing that could shake them up.

An opposing point of view is taken by Salon reader Jukka Hohenthal in Uppsala, Sweden:

Comparing murder rates between the U.S. and my native country of Sweden is a frightening exercise. And it is not only gang and/or drug- related murders that are the difference. In Sweden, the law-abiding citizen will use his fists on his wife and her lover when catching them in the act, while the American law-abiding gun owner will shoot them. When the police arrive at the scene of the crime in Sweden, they will find people shouting at each other; in the U.S. they will need body bags.

How can you seriously claim that gun-ownership is no big problem? You are much more likely to use a gun if you have one, and since guns’ major function is to kill living beings, you are far more likely to kill someone when using it than you would by using your fists or some other blunt instrument. Or is your claim that the price for the odd father killing his daughter’s boyfriend, in the belief that he is a burglar, is worth paying for the security you say it gives in an emergency? Even in an emergency you are likely to be worse off if everyone has a gun than if no one has one.

These arguments are very compelling. However, what Europeans sometimes fail to fully realize is that the U.S. is enormous — the size of a continent, with many states bigger than European nations — and that our population lacks the ethnic and racial homogeneity of Scandinavia. Whatever its internal disputes, Sweden is historically much more of an extended family than is the U.S., with its massive history of immigration and its competitive minorities.

The American frontier is still open here — a spatial as well as cultural fact. Our people have a thousand forms and faces, and our quarrels and our creativity are in dynamic relation. American guns are the dark side of American genius. Our aggression overflows into violence but also empowers our brilliant entrepreneurship in technology as well as the vitality of our popular culture.

Yes, I must admit, in this country we are more concerned with the restless rights of the individual than with the claims to comfort of the majority. We prefer the adrenaline rush of the random to the consoling drowsiness of cradle-to-grave socialism. I apologize (as a worshipper of Sweden’s national treasure, Ingmar Bergman) if this seems too harsh!

Greg Jorgensen is Jukka Hohenthal’s ally in this deftly reasoned letter from Portland, Ore.:

I’m not a politically correct whiner, but I do think it’s time to abandon the cowboy mentality. With guns and ammunition so easily available, feeding into a culture fascinated by violence — even the fake violence of professional wrestling — we are bound to have a lot of crossfire.

Some of the anti-gun-control arguments are bogus. Here’s my take on a few of them:

1. “We need an armed population to protect ourselves from the government, and to limit the power of the police and the state.” This made sense in 1800, when the government was weak and didn’t control the town and state militias. Today, the police and the military have such superior weapons, and a practically unlimited supply of arms and ammo, that only a fanatic imagines winning a fight against even a small force of them. We already live in a police state, and no matter how many Glocks you own, they have lots more. The government has already demonstrated its willingness to use its superior force and weaponry, and it has done so without any serious organized resistance.

2. “The Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of anyone to keep and bear arms.” The bit about “a well regulated militia” is usually forgotten. Even someone with a public school history education should be able to figure out that the founding fathers didn’t imagine Uzis and AK-47s in every home. They didn’t imagine a police state, the federal income tax, the “war on drugs,” intervention in foreign wars, or much of anything else that is American life today. Over time we abandoned slavery and gave women the vote; we can amend the other parts of the Constitution as well.

3. Hunting. People who need to hunt for food, or want to hunt for sport, should have no problem restricting their gun collection to actual hunting weapons. In England, hunters belong to clubs, and the guns are kept at the club.

My reply to your well-honed points, Mr. Jorgensen, is threefold. First, the abolition of slavery and the granting of suffrage to women expanded civil liberties, while the most extreme programs of gun control would take constitutionally guaranteed liberties away.

Second, my reading of world history, ancient to modern, suggests that law and order can collapse virtually overnight in crisis situations, such as a severe climatological disturbance. This column has warned again and again that the financial markets and long-term investments and pensions will vanish in a poof of smoke if Mother Nature, like Atlas, shrugs. We will all be scrambling for survival again — and those with guns will be able to defend their family and property.

Third, the lessons of Waco are that even a liberal Democratic administration is capable of fascist acts and that a reasonably armed citizenry is the only recourse against government tyranny. I don’t own guns, but I feel more secure that others do.

My prior references to Waco have inspired protests from some readers. Jimmy A. Roberts-Miller, for example, declares:

While I agree with you on the scandalous (criminal!) nature of the government’s actions at Waco, I do have to take you to some task for your reference to David Koresh’s “ranch.” Not only were there some less than wholesome things going on there (deserving of investigation, though not immolation) but that was no more a “ranch” than those 10-acre “spreads” fancied by some yuppies where they keep a horse or two. My dad ran 1,500 acres of real ranch in the scrub brush country south of San Antonio; I know whereof I speak. Calling that place a ranch is both being a bit disingenuous and insulting to real ranch people.

A thousand apologies to ranchers everywhere! The 1956 film version of Edna Ferber’s “Giant,” which I saw when I was 9, burned into my mind forever the image of the heroic dirt-and-steer rancher (Rock Hudson) fighting off the greedy oil barons. In describing Koresh’s compound as a “ranch” (which it was before he acquired it), I was trying to convey the property’s physical look to Salon’s international readership, who haven’t seen the constant aerial images on TV.

James Ravenscroft objects to other matters in my analysis of Waco:

You describe the use of tanks at David Koresh’s compound as an outrageous example of government totalitarianism. Now, believe me, I’m familiar with the excesses of the federal government from Japanese internment in World War II to the use of soldiers as guinea pigs for radiation and biological testing.

The use of armored vehicles at Waco, though dramatic, was no more offensive to a free society than the use of helicopters or armed federal agents. People who have never worked for the government often presume a huge monolithic entity of limitless power and faceless, nameless automatons. The fact is that the federal government is composed of men and women who want to do their job and go home safely.

Four ATF agents were killed serving a lawful warrant, raising the stakes at Waco. Koresh and his followers were equipped with long rifles capable of penetrating body armor, helmets, car doors, aircraft fuselage and practically anything available to law enforcement. You can bet that nobody wanted to be that fifth victim, and yet FBI agents cannot simply go home. There is a job to do. Only tanks could move close to the compound safely. The tanks did not use the considerable firepower available to them. They knocked down the structure to allow everyone to escape had they wished to. And they did take gunfire in the process.

Law enforcement has taken on a more paramilitary look in the past few years. The scene of SWAT teams who are indistinguishable from soldiers with military equipment has been prompted by the increased firepower and organization of domestic criminal groups. I would remind people that if it were you going into a drug lab or cult compound or hostage barricade, you would want all the protection you could get.

My background is that I am an Army Reserve tank officer and Border Patrol agent. I have friends in every federal law enforcement agency. Two weeks ago, I sat in a Border Patrol expedition with steel mesh covering all of the glass to allow Mexicans to throw rocks at me. Last night, I sat in a Border Patrol expedition with bulletproof glass, prompted by a friend of mine being shot in the head while he sat in the same position I did on the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet I am still not allowed to carry a long rifle due to the risk of innocent casualties in Mexico. I think you would agree that I do my job out of patriotism, but I do not wish to die for my country. The body armor and handgun I’m supplied with can do only so much, and I can’t walk away from a dangerous situation that I’m expected to deal with. Your points about guns being inanimate objects incapable of committing their own evil is true of helicopters and tanks as well.

Thank you for your superb and inspiring letter, Mr. Ravenscroft. However, it is not the heroic men on the ground whom I blame for the grotesque 51-day siege and disastrous attack on the Koresh compound, which resulted in the fiery death of more than 70 adults and children, but those in charge, from the clumsy, egotistical regional coordinators all the way up to the Department of Justice, attorney general and White House. (The latter’s command structure at the time remains murky but may have included the first lady and her confidant, the suicidal Vincent Foster.)

David Koresh was a fruitcake, but his remote encampment, however heavily armed, offered little immediate danger to the community or nation. The needless and sometimes manic escalation of that confrontation into a full-scale military assault, where tanks were used against American citizens, was one of the most shocking uses of arbitrary government power in the history of modern democracies.

Those four dead ATF agents were martyrs to administrative stupidity and incompetence, but their lives were not redeemed by the barbaric slaughter of Koresh followers that followed. And the liberal media’s failure to hold the new Clinton administration accountable led directly to the death of 168 innocent citizens in Timothy McVeigh’s moronic revenge bombing two years later at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Two readers write to protest the assertion about Kimberly Bergalis in a letter from a Salon reader in my last column. Ward Chanley declares, “There’s no conclusive evidence that Bergalis contracted HIV from her dentist.” He goes on to cite a Web summary of a 1996 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine:

Centers for Disease Control scientists say that they may never be able to explain how and if Florida dentist David Acer transmitted HIV to six patients, including Kimberly Bergalis. “The science doesn’t provide us with a conclusive answer [on Acer], but it does reiterate the overall safety for both healthcare provider and patients,” says Dr. Donald Marianos, a CDC researcher.

A reader in Hawaii who asks not to be identified recalls admittedly obscure follow-up reportage containing the revelation that Bergalis suffered from a different strain of HIV than did her dentist, that she was not a virgin as she claimed, and that she had been a drug-user: “She scammed the nation, including in her congressional testimony.”

Robert Ames asks to clarify a reader’s reference to a London train imbroglio involving Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife Cherie:

Cherie didn’t have the correct change for the ticket-vending machine at the station she was boarding, but it was at one of the more outlying tube stations where there’s no gate to get past. Hence, she did not “sneak” on; she just walked on like everyone else, intending to purchase a ticket at the station where she got off.

But they now have a policy of fining anyone that boards the Underground without a ticket, regardless of intent. Ms. Blair was unaware of this policy until she went to pay her fare after her ride. So please don’t let people think that she stooped to sneaking onto the Underground.

Thanks, Mr. Ames. A veritable torrent of material has arrived on the sad state of contemporary American education. I hope to quote it all in time, but meanwhile here’s a taste. A reader signing herself Sherry declares:

Being a high school English teacher, I just finished completing a three-year survey to evaluate the quality of my career preparation for the school of education at University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was both cathartic and infuriating.

Questioning and discussion methods are given scant importance in the face of popular, feel-good “theories” of education. Writing quality is pushed aside in the name of “process over product” teaching; indeed, I was never taught how to evaluate for quality in written material.

I learned theories at UW-Madison, not good teaching techniques. I was only taught to value “my emerging style.” Subjectivity ruled the day.

I agree with Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, that schools of education, as presently constructed, are virtually worthless as practical preparation for a teaching career. The teachers unions and education bureaucrats, who have sold their souls to the limousine liberals of the Democratic Party, have poured choking oceans of p.c. mush into the public school system.

And now for a blazing manifesto from Alexis Kirschbaum:

As a recent graduate of Smith College, I felt that I had a personal stake in your comments about the discontinuance of Smith College’s esteemed Art History survey course. The move by the college’s administration and faculty points to a pervading academic laziness within certain camps of academics brought about by a fear of becoming culturally outmoded. Although I did receive a thorough classical education at Smith College from brilliant and engaged professors, the institution is unfortunately catering more and more to politically correct platitudes.

I could never determine if the student body, who experimented illimitably with their own sexual orientation but came to the classroom and dinner table uninterested in any topic that even remotely suggested controversy or erudition, would be considered a cause or an effect of this trend among the administration. As you might well guess, I was considered pretentious in this climate, but in fact, the hypocrisy of the women with blue hair, two girl friends, and an entourage chanting “free the oppressed” over a candle- lit dinner table, four-course meal and bon bons first made me retch and then bored me to tears.

I wasn’t pretentious, just dissatisfied with the company. I would stare at them blankly as they “flouted the establishment” and thought to myself that my coevals have lost sight of the place of true revolution and blur the lines abysmally by failing to recognize the tradition of revolution in art. The confusing of political fact with the delicate knowledge afforded by the arts and the constant overshadowing of artistic inventiveness by ideas of purportedly political advancement left me socially beleaguered and intellectually jaded.

I enrolled in what I then conceived of as a sacred institution, only to become removed from the precious and ensconced in the mundane. So what I want to ask you is, as a professor, have you felt similar tremors in liberal arts institutions? Another thing: the “real world” is even more blasi toward what I consider invaluable, so what in the hell can I do with an English degree in today’s world?

Wow! What a devastating report from what used to be the crown jewel of the elite Seven Sisters colleges. Smith’s slide toward banality is the end result of a quarter century of anxiously p.c. feminist politics in the Lesbian La-La Land of northwestern rural Massachusetts. You of course confirm everything I have been railing about in American education since I arrived on the scene a decade ago.

All I can say to you and to all like-minded independent thinkers is that the best education is self-education. Timorous or trendy teachers can’t stop you from plunging into the treasure house of the world’s great books and art objects. Investigate, assimilate and then propagate your own ideas into the general culture. An intellectually awakened life is possible in any job. Don’t be limited by your environment: It’s just pasteboard walls, easily pierced by the spiritual eye.

And now for our usual pop culture finale. I was gratified by the volume and quality of support I received from fellow Italian-Americans after my latest attack on HBO’s loathsomely over-praised series, “The Sopranos.” I want to use it all but must postpone that to a future column.

Hayley Mills fans continue to respond to my celebration of “The Parent Trap.” For example, George M. Hook declares:

Much thanks for the praise to Hayley Mills. As well as “Pollyanna” (a true Disney classic that evokes a dreamy Americana better than any Norman Rockwell painting), one of Hayley’s great moments was portraying a frisky, rebellious Catholic schoolgirl in “The Trouble With Angels.” In my early youth, I adored Hayley Mills — an English girl with style and sass.

Coby Lubliner writes from Berkeley, Calif.:

In your discussion of the 1961 film “The Parent Trap” you neglected to mention its being based on a classic novel, “Das doppelte Lottchen,” by Erich Kdstner, or the fact that there have been several other movies based on it, including the lovely British “Twice Upon a Time” (1953). I have, of course, the advantage of having been a schoolboy in Germany, where Kdstner’s work is (was?) a staple. But if you just look him up on imdb.com, you will see the huge number of movies, including Hollywood-made ones, that his work has inspired over the years.

Thanks for the tip, Mr. Lubliner, which is supported by Albert S. Zeller’s intriguing note:

I must take serious exception to your characterization of Hayley Mills as “androgynous.” In 1964 my sister dragged me to a showing of “The Parent Trap” largely because she is a big fan of Erich Kaestner, the author of the original story. Kaestner was probably the leading author of children’s books in the German language, and we were exposed to a lot of his work in the old country (Switzerland).

I have to admit, being only a few years older than Miss Mills, of developing a big crush on her and often fantasized about being in bed between her two incarnations as the identical twins. While Hayley was only pubescent at the time and thus girlish instead of womanly, this is not the same as being androgynous.

A striking distinction, Mr. Zeller! It could well be that my career of cataloging sexual personae has made me too amorous of the androgynous. In defense, I would say that Hayley Mills’ androgyny can be clearly seen if stills from “The Parent Trap” are juxtaposed with photos of early Mick Jagger, whom she in some sense prefigured as a mercurial symbol of the high-energy 1960s. Rock on, Hayley!

Only one reader, oddly enough, sprang to the defense of Helen Hunt, whom I cattily maligned for her grand theft of Kate Winslet’s Oscar. Jshannes Birgir Jensson writes from Reykjavmk, Iceland first to defend gun control (“Don’t know about you guys, but the best weapon in natural catastrophes could be a shovel”); then to zing Julia Roberts (“Has she ever played anything? She’s stayed in the same character forever”); and finally to applaud Hunt: “I never liked her until I saw her in the TV show ‘Mad About You’. She is dead good there. Great show.”

I’m not sure, Mr. Jennson, if Hunt’s Nordic persona endears her more to Reykjavmk than to Little Italy — but on the other hand, I’ve always loved Nico, the Teutonic blonde Amazon of “La Dolce Vita” and the Velvet Underground. Benjamin Scuglia, I note, has my Italian take on things:

Helen Hunt gave a competent performance in “As Good As It Gets,” one no different from her television work. Kate Winslet did not merely transcend a banal script, she took her performance one step further, embodying “Titanic’s” Young Rose with layers of sensuality, wit, sadness. Rose was quite different from the women Winslet brought to life in “Heavenly Creatures,” “Holy Smoke” and “Hideous Kinky,” and yet they are all real women, complex and beautiful.

David Brown supports my “right-on appraisal of the talents of the wonderful Kate Winslet” and goes on to protest: “Why that wimpy drip Leonardo DiCaprio emerged as the mega star after ‘Titanic’ instead of Kate is beyond me. She’s beautiful, funny, sexy, loaded with talent, gives good interviews, and seems to be a relatively ‘normal’ gal.” Shawn A. Cullen also goes to the mat for Winslet:

All hail Kate! She is truly a real woman and a superb actress. Put me on the list as one of your “baying, frothing hounds” eager to haunt wimpy Helen Hunt to the grave and pull that ill-deserved Oscar from her pale, cadaver-like hands!

The Winslet Brigade is taking arms across the globe. I issue an appeal to my fellow warriors: Whoever first sees Helen Hunt in public, whether at the grocery store or on the red carpet, please sing out, “Give back Kate Winslet’s Oscar!”

Finally, my top pop moments of the past three weeks. First, Juliet Prowse in a glittery, silver-ribbon-over-nude-fabric dress doing a sensationally provocative, long-legged dance in a nightclub in the American Movie Channel’s broadcast of “G.I. Blues” (1960), starring Elvis Presley. (Boy, does that woman have great extension in her wrists and ankles — unusually balletic for hoochie-koochie choreography.)

Second, Jeri Ryan (a favorite also of critic James Wolcott) as the brusque, blond, half-Borg Seven of Nine on just about any episode of the nightly repeats of “Star Trek: Voyager” being aired in Philadelphia by the UPN affiliate, WPSG. Few entities of heaven or Earth can reduce me to a helpless puddle, but the crisply cool, very pneumatic but divinely svelte Ryan (another trained dancer) sure is one!

However, most of the blame rests on the candidate herself, who skittishly avoided the free exposure of national talk shows where she could have honed her debating skills. As many commentators have observed, running for president without a trial campaign for lower office is probably too much of a stretch. Dole seemed clueless about the sheer range of concrete issues needed to prove a candidate’s viability for the presidency. And her lack of all-pro handlers was quaintly naive. While the once painfully dowdy Hillary Clinton has had a top-to-toe makeover by her Hollywood chums (with pantsuits now concealing her figure flaws), Dole scarcely budged from her early-1980s Joan Collins-as-Alexis Carrington look, which signaled in its own way how culturally sheltered and frozen Dole was.

If the glass ceiling is ever to be broken in politics, it’s women themselves who must rethink their sexual personae. The first woman president will need to avoid Elizabeth Dole’s fatiguing sorority-girl chirpiness and seek a more convincing authority of manner — which is already possessed by both Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Feinstein impressed me anew last week with her performance on CNN’s “Crossfire.” “She should be president,” exclaimed my partner Alison as we watched. “She’s rational and smart, and she seems stable and trustworthy,” Alison said. “She has true self-confidence without egotism. She’s not a flibbertigibbet; she’s not obsessed with herself.”

Whatever reservations some California residents of both parties may have about Feinstein, please note that I have been studying her for years as a national candidate, a seasoned politician with foreign relations expertise who could represent this nation to the world. As a senator and former mayor, Dianne Feinstein, unlike Elizabeth Dole, has long experience with the harsh give-and-take of the day-to-day political process, that dusty bull pit of butting, shoving and goring where both winners and losers must come up smiling.

Feinstein is tough yet cordial and even-tempered. She projects hard-nosed realism yet compassion and concern. And she sure can parry and thrust with the hectoring media, who never throw her off message. Dianne Feinstein is in my view the leading contender for next year’s Democratic vice-presidential nomination. She is manifestly well prepared to assume the presidency in a crisis.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, continues galumphing down her celebrity-studded, taxpayer-gouging primrose path. Coldly calculating, hedging, ethically obtuse and strident on the stump, Hillary does a great job of snowing phony humanitarians like the mama-seeking talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell (who organized this week’s frivolous Broadway birthday bash for the first lady). But unlike Elizabeth Dole, who was Secretary of Transportation and president of the American Red Cross, Hillary has never successfully run anything in her life — not even her dysfunctional family in their decades-long squat in government housing.

Salon reader Fred Dimond calls Hillary a “male chauvinist” because she is married to “a serial adulterer who constantly does her dirt” and because she “not only takes it but covers it up”:

While Hillary masquerades as a defender of women’s rights and upholder of oppressed females, she has been part of the group protecting and defending Bill from the just repercussions of his ruthless predatory behavior toward the opposite sex. In fact, we had a very credible rape allegation on television. No comment from Saint Hillary. No comment on Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Kathryn Gracen and a boatload more. She would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know of these situations, or pusillanimous not to react to them. Why doesn’t she? Because Bill is her ticket to ride, and she cannot afford to get off the horse. She is willing to cooperate in Bill’s subversion of women’s rights for political gain and power.

Dimond calls Hillary’s behavior “hypocritical” and “outrageous”, and I thoroughly agree. In my interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh in the October issue of the Limbaugh Letter, I further explore Hillary’s history of questionable behavior — such as her perversion of her assigned role on the platform at her Wellesley College commencement to embarrass an eminent African-American guest, Republican Sen. Edward Brooke. (In this piece I also hail Rush Limbaugh’s “tremendous intellectual influence” on the American mass audience — which our snobbish fossil leftists, who pretend to speak for the people, of course know nothing about.)

Many thanks to Dr. Richard Tracey of Carlsbad, Calif., who sends a fascinating letter responding to my description of Pat Buchanan as “Irish Catholic” (vis-a-vis the Brooklyn Museum of Art controversy). The Buchanans on their paternal side are actually Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian, “descended from the Scots who benefited from James I’s ‘plantation’ of Ireland with his own countrymen — who displaced the native Irish whose patrimony Pat claims.” Tracey continues:

It was Pat’s mother (of German-Catholic descent, as I recall) who brought Catholicism to the offspring of her marriage to a Presbyterian man whose inherited family values would likely have been pro-English, anti-Irish. Thus Pat isn’t an Irish Catholic, or Irish-American Catholic, as we generally understand those terms. His Irishness is pure Orange. Yet he has cloaked himself in the Green for the political effect of being seen to share Ted Kennedy’s ancestry while standing against all aspects of the Massachusetts senator’s social program. As a supreme rhetorician, Pat too much enjoys the taste of those ironies to claim publicly his descent from the likes of Ian Paisley.

Buchanan’s announcement this week of his resignation from the Republican Party to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party will inject welcome drama into next year’s national campaign, but his bitter attack on his own party is disturbing. Strong, independent voices of criticism and rebuke are desperately needed in this country, but Buchanan has shown little interest in the humdrum details of practical political work. He seems to have only one goal — shooting to the top of the line like a late Roman Caesar. Buchanan appears less qualified for high office than the quirkily long-shot Donald Trump, an articulate, shrewdly observant, high-powered businessman and real estate developer with a genuine common touch.

More on ethnicity: Salon reader Maggie Balistreri, who grew up in Bensonhurst, writes to protest the stereotyping of Italians in the media: “Italians are portrayed by all as either buffoons (Benigni has a lot to answer for) or mobsters (DeNiro is blending the two roles nicely lately). So what happened to the image of the Italian? It used to be the utterly refined dandy, the aesthete. Now it’s the grunting buffoon.”

I applaud this indictment. It dovetails with a letter from Frank Francomano, who remarks, “I have long wondered why my ethnic group remains open to unpunished calumny, especially from supposedly sensitive and politically correct and often Jewish left and far left people.”

Responding to a query last month about “The Sopranos” from TV critic Michele Greppi for Fashion Wire Daily, I denounced that over-praised HBO series about yet another Italian-American Mafia family as “a buffoonish caricature of my people” and “an ethnic minstrel show — Amos and Andy for a TV industry that can no longer get away with demeaning stereotypes of blacks and Jews.” Francis Ford Coppola’s first two “Godfather” films are masterpieces that I adore, but there has been no creative progress in over 20 years. I told Greppi, “I’m sick and tired of Italian-Americans being used as monotonously one-note lowbrow fantasy figures by an entertainment industry too lazy and klutzy to get us right.”

“‘The Sopranos’ is ethnic defamation,” Dominic Amorosa of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations told the New York Daily News this fall. “Our goal is to get ‘The Sopranos’ off the air,” said Frank Guarini, chairman of the National Italian-American Foundation. As a free speech advocate, I wouldn’t go that far, but high-decibel consciousness-raising about this issue is urgently needed.

Two weeks ago, amid much furor, the French Parliament granted legal status to cohabiting unmarried couples, a development I welcome not just for its contribution to gay rights but for its incremental movement along the path toward my ultimate libertarian goal: the total disconnection of civil authority from the realm of consensual personal relationships, heterosexual or homosexual, which the secular state should neither sanction nor monitor. The modern economic liberation of women heralded the end of state paternalism and intrusion into private life, but the latter process remains incomplete.

On the home front, the trial of the second man charged with last year’s murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming has been treated with blatant manipulation of the news by the liberal major media. As I wrote in my column immediately after that tragedy, the issue of exciting but dangerous gay-male cruising for stranger sex cannot be avoided in this case. But despite even the public warning by Shepard’s mother that “Matt was not a saint,” a censored and sanitized version of the fatal evening is being promulgated by newscasters in lockstep with gay activist groups.

It’s now a simplistic melodrama of virtue versus villainy, as if Shepard — who had a history of two known incidents that ended violently and who had just the prior week confessed to a fear of being killed — had been ambushed and kidnapped from the bar because he was gay. Human nature is complex: Shepard, who had traveled abroad, was drawn to his assailants, I suspect, precisely because they were scuzzy punks whose look and manner fairly screamed trouble.

What happened to Matthew Shepard was brutal and barbaric, and as a supporter of capital punishment, I want his killers to fry. (One has already been sentenced to two consecutive life terms.) Both Alison and I have long been in favor of bringing torture back, which I argue would not fall under the rubric of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment if it were a strict replication of the suffering that had been inflicted on the victim — heinous in this muddled, boozy case but even more atrocious in cold-blooded, precisely planned serial rape-murders of the Ted Bundy kind.

But it does not help the cause of gay rights to pump the public discourse full of intelligence-insulting schmaltz over exceptional incidents. Hate crimes legislation — that fascist exercise in thought control — will never make cruising 100 percent safe, particularly not when “rough trade” is involved, a walk on the wild side with besmirched archangels whose zap of primal energy is one step from savagery. To erase the questing, provocative, limits-testing, and even irrational (because id-driven) element in gay-male cruising is a form of castration — which the glorified nurses and pious hand-holders of the gay activist hierarchy know very well how to do.

Check out the sinister finale of “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” (1961), where the stalked Vivien Leigh becomes Tennessee Williams’ proxy for the extreme sport of gay stranger sex. And re-see last year’s “Gods and Monsters” for gay actor Sir Ian McKellen’s scrupulous charting of the tense pas de deux of trolling, needling and bruising masochistic ecstasy that hasn’t changed much in the gay world since Heliogabalus staged his rambunctious porn games in the Roman imperial palace.

There are serious flaws in the sanctimonious iconography that gay rights groups have been fixated on for the past half-dozen years. Is the small, frail, vulnerable Matthew Shepard (who had health problems from birth) really the ideal image of the gay man to be projected to the mass audience? And doesn’t the constant parading of all-forgiving mothers — whether it’s Judy Shepard, Cher or Betty DeGeneres — simply reinforce the impression that contemporary American homosexuality is a condition of whining juvenility aching for parental approval?

Speaking of the House of DeGeneres (where the ever-teenybopper closets are lined with matching Hush Puppies), I was tipped off by an old friend that at a “queer month” event at the Syracuse University Student Union several weeks ago, the visiting Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche kvetched about my saying two years ago that Anne has “the mental depth of a pancake.” “We hate her,” announced the blonde Bobbsey Twins — a tellingly childish locution from outspoken proponents of hate crimes legislation.

Dear, dear, I guess I struck a nerve. But as long as that exhibitionistic duo keeps courting cameras at glitzy Hollywood events and as long as Ellen keeps draping herself over her mom’s lap for the cover of gay magazines, I’ll go on lobbing my Amazonian darts.

Speaking of dizzy photo hogs, Brad Pitt doubtless thinks he’s very clever by posing in a Pop Art mini-dress and a gay-anal cut-off rubber garden glove for the cover of the Oct. 5 Rolling Stone, but I feel very sorry for his putative girlfriend, the talented Jennifer Aniston, whose once very appealing fleshiness has been manically stripped off until she is now nearly unrecognizable. I’m tired of hearing what a great relationship Pitt and Aniston have. His gay-twitting stunts (such as posing bare bum up for W magazine this summer) have become ostentatious acts of aggression toward her and women in general. I hope Aniston gets her kit out of there before obsessive anxiety consumes her promising career as a character actress.

Another actor, Matthew McConaughey, was arrested for drug possession this week when police, responding to a noise complaint, invaded his Austin, Texas, home in the middle of the night and found marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Alison and I were instantly outraged and were relieved when the drug charge was dropped. Though we have no interest in drugs (we favor the ancient Dionysian tradition of alcohol), we believe that the government has no right to interfere in an individual’s choices about his or her body.

The international drug war is a colossal waste of precious resources that should be diverted to social services. Given the massive drug pushing (Prozac, Ritalin, etc.) by pharmaceutical companies, there is no rationale for banning the sale of natural substances like marijuana. I am on the record as supporting the legalization of drugs, consistent with government regulation of alcohol.

Employers are justified, however, in imposing weekly drug tests on those who operate heavy machinery or who, like train engineers, are charged with the public safety. As a professional actor whose work is psychological, Matthew McConaughey has a perfect right to take whatever drugs he pleases in the sanctity of his own home. But please spare the poor neighbors! They have a right to privacy too.

A foreign exchange student signing himself Mark reports his impressions of the University of California at Berkeley: “I am all too often flabbergasted and disappointed by the extraordinary ignorance and mediocrity I find among the students here. With all due respect, the level of awareness and international, cultural, and historical perspective of the average American seems to be about as high as those of a remote jungle tribe. I thought I was coming to an elite educational institution. Don’t get me started on the teachers. What is your view?”

Mark concludes: “What hope is there for an empire that has grown so powerful its citizens are becoming increasingly detached from the rich world around them, and what may happen if conflict forces them into cultural interactions with others?”

This account from a visitor to America should shake the complacency of the academic establishment. It certainly corroborates what I have been arguing for years, beginning with my 1991 Arion manifesto, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” and my 1992 TLS essay, “The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S.” Graduates of even our elite schools know less and less, as the acquisition of hard knowledge has been de-emphasized in favor of “critical thinking” (which sounds good but melts into sloganeering sophistry). In the long run, the security of this country is at risk, as its most highly trained citizens lose the will to defend it.

Paul Ehrlich of Washington, D.C., kindly alerts me to the invocation of my name on the Oct. 4 episode of NBC’s “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” — about which I’d heard only a vague rumor. This was my second prime time epiphany of the season, the first being in the Sept. 20 premiere of NBC’s “Suddenly Susan”: Brooke Shields as a fired reporter defied boss Eric Idle by vowing to follow my example of publishing in Playboy when Ms. wouldn’t have me.

According to Ehrlich, a “Law and Order” detective investigating the murder of a young model makes some “scathing comments about teenage girls in the modeling world”, to which another character retorts, “Well, Camille Paglia calls them modern-day Greek goddesses.” Ehrlich asks, “Did this distort your views?”

Since childhood, I regarded fashion models as works of living sculpture: the flamboyant images from women’s magazines merged in my mind with the statues of Greek goddesses in the Louvre and at Fontainebleau that were pictured in large portfolios that my father brought back from studying Romance languages in France in the early 1950s. The haughty attitudes and iconic gestures of fashion models mesmerized me: as a scruffy tomboy, I had no desire to wear fashion, only to contemplate it.

This early veneration of the fashion model, which I shared with so many gay men but no American lesbian I ever met, is one reason I went hammer and tongs against the anti-fashion, sex-phobic ideology of the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin school that dominated feminism in the 1980s — when the dreary, pedantic, visually inert style of now-defunct Lacanian feminism was also flourishing on campus.

The worship of beauty may be innate in my pagan genes. It’s no coincidence that two Italian-American women (to return to Maggie Balistreri’s earlier point) were instrumental in restoring respect for fashion and beauty to feminism: In a 1991 interview with me, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera headlined my militant prophecy, “Io e Madonna faremo fuori Lacan in USA” (“I and Madonna will drive Lacan from America”).

On Nov. 10, I will be lecturing on “The Romance of Beauty” at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, part of a series accompanying the exhibition “Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century.” When the massive museum catalog arrived last week, I was surprised and pleased to see, emblazoned across a dramatic photo of Madonna ripely bursting out of an 18th century corset, a line from the 1990 New York Times op-ed piece where I fired the first shot in the pro-beauty insurgency: “Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure.”

Italian-American women get it done!