The problem with this argument is that it ignores the much more straightforward possibility that the Democrats were simply wrong on Iraq -- both in the policy they supported and the way they arrived at it. After all, if voters were really dead-set on sending a message of opposition to the war, was it really so hard to know which party to vote for?

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Snipers are skilled specialists in the U.S. military -- particularly in Special Operations units -- and to a lesser degree in police department SWAT teams, which often use snipers as a tactical component in police raids and in hostage rescue operations. For military snipers particularly, precision marksmanship is only one of several skills required. Others include stealth, stalking, and concealment -- basically the ability to conduct surveillance in the field and get away once you've gotten off the key shot.

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And that raises an interesting question about whether the anti-globalization movement, which had become the domestic umbrella group for those disenchanted with the U.S. government, had become, just a few years after its zenith, outdated. Last weekend sure looked like a denouement.

Early on, it looked like it would be a turbulent weekend. Friday morning, D.C. Metro police arrested 649 demonstrators in a series of nonpermitted marches in downtown Washington. That startling number was larger than the total arrested in the massive and highly publicized protests in Seattle in 1999. But novel police tactics really accounted for the sizable haul. In massive numbers, police coaxed protesters into what amounted to carefully constructed traps, with walls of police officers in riot gear on three sides. Once the police corralled the protesters into the trap, a fourth wall of riot-gear-clad police would swing the door shut. From that point, hapless demonstrators were trapped, and the police arrested them at their leisure.

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After weeks of saber rattling by administration hawks led to widespread speculation that the United States was prepared to launch an invasion even without U.N. sanction, President Bush's speech before the world body last Wednesday decisively recast the Iraq debate, swelling the president's support at home and getting erstwhile allies like Russia and France -- who opposed American unilateralism -- to start pressuring Iraq to readmit inspectors or else.

The speech was rightly hailed as a triumph for the president. But much less attention was given to the change of policy that brought that shift in debate or its implications.

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Rhode told Al-Jubeir that once the new administration got its affairs in order there'd be no more pussyfooting around as there was in the Clinton days, according to a source familiar with the meeting. The United States would take care of Saddam, start calling the shots in the region, and the Saudis would have to fall in line. Al-Jubeir demurred. These were issues the two allies would certainly discuss, Al-Jubeir told the American.

Rhode then shoved his finger in the diminutive Saudi's chest and told him, "You're not going to have any choice!"

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Administration oilmen apparently think they may find fresh reserves of crude under those hills, but others wonder if they are going to uncork a gusher of self-parody instead. Come visit the new Yellowstone National Wells! Or maybe the new Enron Field, now relocated to the Canyonlands!

All kidding aside, the prime targets for new drilling and exploration projects are located in areas of land and national forests that you may not have heard of. One is Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, located mostly in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. Others are in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. In 1997 the then-supervisor of the Lewis and Clark, Gloria Flora, put 356,000 acres of undeveloped land in that forest off-limits to drilling for 10 to 15 years. Recent remarks by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman (whose agency administers the land), however, have thrown that ban into doubt.

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On Friday afternoon, less than a day after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was overthrown in what later turned out to be an unsuccessful military-backed coup d'etat, Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, summoned senior Latin American diplomats to the State Department to discuss the sudden turn of events in the oil-rich South American country. For months last year, Reich's nomination was stalled in the Senate because, among many reasons, Democratic senators feared Reich was less than fully committed to democracy in Latin America. (Reich had a reputation as a Latin American hard-liner in several posts he held in the Reagan administration.) According to accounts provided by Latin American diplomats who attended the meeting, Reich's performance last Friday would have done little to assuage those fears.

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Bush, you may remember, raised eyebrows last January by telling a Saudi Arabian audience that the "U.S. media campaign against the interests of Arabs and Muslims, and the American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could be influenced [by] a sustained lobbying and PR effort." Long before that, in the late 1980s, Neil Bush made bigger news for his controversial role as a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, which collapsed and cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion. (Federal regulators accused Bush of various conflicts of interests, but he was never charged. A civil suit against Bush and other Silverado officers was later settled for $26.5 million.)

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If Al Gore runs again in 2004 -- and by all signs, that's just what he's gearing up to do -- he'll face one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune in modern political history. Now it's the insiders, the members of Gore's 2000 leadership circle, who appear to be cozying up with other aspirants or busying themselves in private-sector jobs with little desire to join another national campaign. Among top Washington power players who once carried Gore's water, the former veep is now viewed not so much with anger -- post-2000 disappointment has faded too much for that -- but with a sort of contemptuous pity. "He's a front-runner who no one wants to work for or give money to," a former staffer says with a chuckle.

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There is no evidence of any lawbreaking, but the scandal does threaten to expose the type of political influence-peddling that Washington is both renowned -- and reviled -- for.

On March 20, two Taiwanese media outlets, Taiwan Next magazine and the China Times, published articles based on secret documents leaked from Taiwan's National Security Bureau (NSB), one of the main arms of Taiwanese intelligence. The leaked documents appear to show the existence of a massive secret slush fund with assets of more than $100 million, which former President Lee Teng-hui used for covert diplomatic and espionage activities abroad. Those efforts included spying in the People's Republic of China, cash donations to developing countries willing to extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, and cash payoffs to politicians and foreign policy hands in Japan and the United States.

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An article by Washington Monthly's Joshua Green claims that while Bush's main pollsters billed $346,000 in 2001, the total bill for White House polling was "closer to $1 million." The story was picked up Wednesday by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who repeated the "closer to $1 million" estimate.

"The Bush White House," wrote Dowd, "is giving the Clinton White House a run for its polling money. Karl Rove ... devours polls as rapaciously as Dick Morris."

That didn't go over well with Jim Dyke of the RNC, who promptly called Green to give him a piece of his mind. Dyke was pissed, Green later told Salon, and questioned where Green came up with such a figure. Green said the estimate came from conversations with GOP sources who were unwilling to provide a precise figure. If Dyke disputed Green's numbers, Green asked Dyke to provide the actual figure.

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Conservative foreign policy hands have long believed that American failures in the Middle East were due in large part to the inconstancy, weakness and equivocation of American leaders. Quick successes in Afghanistan seemed to bear that theory out. Despite naysaying from around the globe (and claims that an attack on Afghanistan would only inflame the Muslim anger that spurred the 9/11 attacks), the actual result was quite different. Equivocating allies and some former foes ended up supporting American resolve, and the hated Taliban regime quickly gave way to a far more tractable and even pro-Western government in Kabul.

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The White House, for its part, insists that Ridge is just a presidential advisor, with no department or budget, who should not be forced to testify before congressional committees. And this time, the White House is telling the truth: Ridge really is just an advisor with little say about budgetary matters or what goes on in the various homeland security-related departments. And that's the problem. He was supposed to be much more.

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The highlights of the report -- as judged by the headlines of the major national dailies -- were Robert Ray's criticism of President Clinton for disparaging the Starr-Lay investigation, and Ray's claim of inaccuracies in now-Sen. Hillary Clinton's testimony about billing records for Madison Guaranty, the failed S&L whose owners, the McDougals, were partners with the Clintons in a real estate company named Whitewater.

But both missed the real shocker in the report: new details of how the scandal was fueled in its early days by the Justice Department of George H. W. Bush, who was facing a daunting election against the upstart governor from Arkansas.

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How good was the evidence Ray had? We still don't know. The report sheds almost no light on the quality of his case against Clinton. We've known for years that during his deposition in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against him, Clinton's answers to questions about Monica Lewinsky were comically evasive, even to the point of lying, if we mean "lying" in the common-sense, colloquial sense of the term. There's almost nothing new here.

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In the brewing battle over the release of Vice President Cheney's energy task force records, Cheney says he's taking a stand on principle. And he has a point: From its earliest days, the second Bush administration has demonstrated a deep ideological commitment to restoring the prerogatives of the executive branch. Right out of the box, the White House put a freeze on the release of Reagan-era records scheduled to be made public last year. Whether or not the White House has something to hide, Cheney's refusal to turn over the energy task force records is in line with this stance.

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So who was right?

On Thursday evening, the people running Al-Jazeera went pretty far toward answering that question.

CNN broadcast that evening what is apparently the only interview with Osama bin Laden conducted before cameras after Sept. 11 and the U.S.-led bombing missions began in Afghanistan. There have been al-Qaida-produced tapes, of course, some of which made it onto American airwaves. There was even the notorious "home video" in which bin Laden discussed his involvement in the attacks. But until Thursday, we had never seen an interview in which anyone got to ask questions and follow-ups of the head of al-Qaida.

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As recently as this week public health departments in affected areas like New Jersey were still insisting that the question of who contracted anthrax was simply a matter of how many spores a particular individual inhaled.

But it seems clear that people who are middle-aged and older are more susceptible to contracting anthrax than those in their 20s and 30s, and substantially more susceptible than teenagers and children. What's more, evidence supporting this conclusion was published almost a decade ago.

Consider the numbers. Have you noticed how the victims of inhalation anthrax tend to run toward the older side? The numbers are fairly striking and there's good reason to believe it's no coincidence.

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But this chilling image has obscured an active debate among intelligence officials and area experts over just what degree of control or direction bin Laden exercises over far-flung groupings of militant Islamist terrorists stretching from North Africa to the Philippines, and indeed into Europe and North America. Is bin Laden really a criminal mastermind coordinating and controlling these atrocities or more of a first among equals?

Either way, many believe, the United States played a unique role in bolstering his global power.

To Ken Katzman, a counter-terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, there is little question that bin Laden has ultimate control over most of the high-profile terrorist events attributed to him over recent years. But even Katzman is uncertain about how much operational control and direction bin Laden exercises.

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Obviously it didn't turn out that way.

Condit was well-prepared and on message, but resolutely refused to discuss his relationship with Levy or even concede any errors on his part in the months since she disappeared. In fact, while Thursday night's interview was the first time the American public got to hear Condit speak, his statements were not materially different from what his camp has been doing for months: avoiding answers to questions about his relationship with Levy and insisting he's been entirely cooperative with the police investigation, even though there are very good reasons to believe that this is not true -- starting off with statements to the contrary from the police.

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