A famously overused word. I think it was when I hit upon the fourth occurrence of "famously" in today's Globe that I threw up my hands and said, "Enough!" (Well, actually, I neither threw up my hands nor said, "Enough!", but you know what I mean.) "Famously" has become a verbal tic of first resort for too many writers. The rule seems to be that if you're describing something even moderately well-known, toss in a "famously." Or, as with the Globe's description of the "famously vicious crocodiles" in Lake Tanganyika, use it even if you're describing something not previously known by a single one of your readers.

Using the Globe's search engine, I came up with seven instances of "famously" today. The other six: "the famously liberal leanings of this city" (in a piece on the Cambridge school system); "He ... famously covered 'All Along the Watchtower'" (Jimi Hendrix's 60th birthday); "the famously staid precincts of Boston Common and Beacon Hill" (a reminiscence of a free Haight-Ashbury-style clinic during the late 1960s); "Genena Overholser ... famously wrote in 1989" (on a 14-year-old rape victim who has made the courageous decision to go public); "Thabo Mbeki ... famously rejected world medical opinion that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus" (an editorial on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa); "The Beatles came, most famously, in the '60s" (a piece on the roots of Hinduism).

By the way, that's two "famously"s in the Ideas section alone. Perhaps, in addition to Ideas, they could also use a Clue.

"Famously" has become a crutch for writers either too lazy or too much in a hurry to come up with something better. Try "memorably," "notoriously," "infamously," or -- and here's a truly radical idea -- no adverb at all.

[BigBody]

The crimes of Henry Kissinger. Christopher Hitchens has written a cogent, suitably outraged explanation for Slate on why we should all be appalled that President Bush has put the loathsome Henry Kissinger in charge of investigating the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11. Even the New York Times duly notes that Kissinger "has been called a war criminal for his role in the secret expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and an enabler of [Richard] Nixon's worst traits."

A crisis of common sense II. I can't stand it. I need to take a deep breath and remind myself that we really do need universal health care, if only to protect people like Diane MacPherson and her husband, Mr. X, from themselves -- and from us, when the cost of their grotesequely irresponsible decision not to buy medical insurance for their families falls into our laps.

Today the Boston Globe offers us the downbeat but heartwarming Thanksgiving tale of Craig and Michelle Brenner, both of whom are unemployed as the holidays loom, but who are persevering because of their faith in God and their basic human optimism. Good for them! But there's more. The Brenners appear to enjoy a rather lavish lifestyle, and it's one of recent vintage. In 1997, Craig was making $37,000 a year managing a Bruegger's. He jumped into the burgeoning dot-com economy and, before you know it, was pulling down $135,000. The inevitable happened, and he's been without work since October 1 -- with no prospect of finding a new job that pays anywhere near that.

So what did the Brenners spend their newfound income on? A $400,000 home on an acre of land. And, judging from this photo (online today only), a spiffy new red SUV. Now, I'm not going to get all judgmental here and say that they shouldn't have bought these things. Why not? They were hardly the only ones who thought the New Economy was going to roll on forever. We'd have probably done the same thing.

But then this sentence hit me right between the eyes: "The family has no health insurance because the $750-a-month cost is too steep." Keep in mind that the Brenners have two boys, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. Hasn't anyone told them that, you know, things happen?

It gets better. Toward the end of the article, we learn this:

Finally, Michelle Brenner, who was a social worker before her husband's growing salary allowed her to become a full-time mother, is contemplating a return to the work force if Craig's emergency account -- he's socked away enough to get the family through much of 2003 -- runs out.

Michelle! You could bring home the $750-a-month cost of health insurance working part-time at McDonald's! And Craig could look after the kids. I mean, I know he's really busy, "plot[ting] out new business strategies" in his home office, but couldn't he do that after you got off work? I'm sorry to belabor the obvious, but the Brenners seem to need it.

Bush's sneaky Kissinger appointment. One of the best ways to bury an announcement that you're not too proud of is to make it on the day before Thanksgiving. Today President Bush named geriatric war criminal Henry Kissinger to head a commission that will investigate whatever intelligence failures may have contributed to 9/11. What a shocking and appalling insult to the families of the victims. To paraphrase what Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman, every word out of Kissinger's mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the." In 2001 I wrote an essay in the Phoenix on Christopher Hitchens's indictment of Kissinger as published in Harper's magazine; Hitchens's article was later turned into a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

Views on the upcoming war in Iraq. Judging from the paucity of e-mail traffic during the past hour or so, it seems that everyone has abandoned his or her computer in order to get a jump on the holiday. Soon I'll join them. But I did want to call your attention to this roundup of commentaries on the likely war with Iraq, published in the new Phoenix. To read my contribution, click here.

Somerby and Gore, take 2. Russ Smith, publisher of the New York Press and writer of the unhinged "Mugger" column, sends this:

Bob Somerby, who used to run a comedy club in Baltimore (maybe still does) when I owned the City Paper there (and a very good guy) is more than a Gore "partisan" as you write today. As you know, he was a classmate, and, I believe, a roommate of Gore's at Harvard, which puts him beyond a mere partisan.

Actually, I half-recalled that Somerby had been Gore's roommate, but wasn't sure, so tried to weasel out with "partisan." My bad, and Russ was right to nail me on it. On the other hand, isn't it signficant that Somerby likes Gore after rooming with him in college? Did you like all your college roommates?

Gore's righteous take on the conservative media. Al Gore's interview with the New York Observer is the sensation of the media world today. People are so eager to read it that the Observer's Web server has been overloaded, and it took me several tries to get in. By now, you may have already heard that Gore states the obvious: that conservative media outlets such as the Fox News Channel, the Washington Times, and Rush Limbaugh's radio show amount to a permanent cheering section that gives the Republicans an enormous advantage in framing public debate -- and, of course, in winning elections. What's unusual is that Gore, a once and possible future presidential candidate, would be willing to speak such truth. Gore tells the Observer's Josh Benson:

Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.

Gore's best line is when he describes Fox's slogan "We Report, You Decide" as "the current version of their ritual denial."

The great shibboleth is that the media in this country are biased toward liberals. This shibboleth was given its widest airing in a clumsy, poorly argued, yet bestselling book by television journalist Bernard Goldberg called Bias, which I reviewed for the Boston Phoenix earlier this year. Broadly speaking, the media do have a liberal bias, at least on cultural issues. But Goldberg seemed more interested in imagining Dan Rather as a cross-dresser than in offering a serious argument.

Yes, mainstream media such as the New York Times, the network newscasts, and National Public Radio are liberal on cultural issues such as gay rights and reproductive choice. But what Goldberg and his ilk miss is that they are also cautious middle-of-the-roaders on the really big issues, such as the economy and foreign policy. Moreover, the mainstream is liberal, but it is not a tool of the Democratic Party. Witness the hell that it put Bill Clinton through, from Whitewater at the beginning of his presidency to Monica Lewinsky at the end -- or witness the disingenous attacks it launched on Gore during the 2000 campaign. Read this Bob Somerby analysis of how the media treated Gore. Admittedly, Somerby is a Gore partisan, but there is a lot of truth in his contention that the media had it in for Gore, and that George W. Bush was never subjected to the same scrutiny or, for that matter, to the same sort of dripping disdain. The media may not have respected Bush, but they hated Gore.

In contrast to the conflicted liberal mainstream, the conservative media are openly and nakedly pro-Republican. There is simply nothing like it on the Democratic side. Even now, Gore admits that he's smarting from a nasty piece by liberal Times columnist Frank Rich, snarkily headlined "Do We Have To Call You Al?"

Perhaps the difference is that, because most reporters are liberals, they are hypersensitive to being accused of liberal bias, and thus gleefully pounce on the weaknesses of liberal politicians. Perhaps it's because, as Nicholas Confessore argues in a profile of Times columnist Paul Krugman in the Washington Monthly, liberals in the media overwhelmingly come from the reporting ranks, whereas conservatives tend to come from the world of partisan politics.

Whatever the reason, in terms of ferocity and influence, the conservative media have it all over the so-called liberal mainstream.

Promising premiere. Nice debut by new columnist Howard Manly in the Boston Herald today. Manly was a longshot candidate for a metro columnist's slot at the Globe in 1998 after Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle imploded. He's a smart and interesting guy, and his column will bear watching.

Caveman unavailable for comment. I was doing a little research on a rare genetic condition called cleidocranial dysplasia when I ran across this:

A possible example of this disorder has been found in the skull of a Neanderthal man. (The patient could not be interviewed as to family history).

It's on a website called MedicineNet.com, which promises "Smart Medicine." If only.

It's the monopoly, stupid! I'm a day late in taking note of this Brian Mooney story in the Globe on the state of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. As Mooney notes, the Democrats have lost four consecutive governor's races, and they've done it while trying every conceivable model: a bombastic conservative (John Silber, 1990), a liberal policy geek (Mark Roosevelt, 1994), a reformist outsider (Scott Harshbarger, 1998), and a play-it-safe insider (Shannon O'Brien, 2002).

The current battle, Mooney reports, is between moderates, who think the party has moved too far to the left, and liberals, who complain that their party's candidates have grown so cautious that there's a growing passion gap.

I'm skeptical about all of this. The truth, I suspect, is that the best way for the Democrats to win back the corner office is to let the Republicans capture a meaningful chunk of seats in the legislature, and maybe even a couple of congressional seats and a constitutional office or two. Even during the heyday of Michael Dukakis, the Democrats did not have quite the iron grip on state politics that they do today. The voters, alarmed at this one-party dominance, have not quite demanded divided government (obviously), but they have opted for at least some minority-party oversight. Voting for Republican governors has been the best way they could do that.

This year's race tells the story. Coming out the primaries, O'Brien, a capable career pol who'd done a good job of running the treasurer's office, jumped out to a significant lead over Republican Mitt Romney. The public clearly had real doubts about Romney, who, despite his moderate rhetoric, came across as significantly more conservative on social issues than his Republican predecessors, Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Jane Swift.

So what turned it around? O'Brien's poor campaign, in part. The key, though, was when Romney started running against the "Gang of Three" -- House Speaker Tom Finneran (a staunch O'Brien ally), Senate president-apparent Bob Travaglini (brother of top O'Brien aide Mike Travaglini), and O'Brien herself. Voters took a second look, decided O'Brien would be one Democrat too many, and made a leap of faith by switching to Romney.

The real problem with Massachusetts Democrats is not that they are ideologically divided or out of touch, even though both of those propositions may be true. Rather, it is that they are the victims of their own success.

A crisis of common sense. I don't mean to make fun of Diane MacPherson and her family. I'm sure they're nice people. But they've been shockingly irresponsible, and the New York Times wants you to feel sorry for them.

These Lowell residents are the showcase example in today's front-page story on how the health-insurance crisis has reached the middle and even the upper classes. The family is solidly middle-class, and at the moment they are entirely without medical coverage.

How did this happen? By the Times' account, it began when Diane MacPherson lost her job. It would have cost them $931 a month to continue it through the federal COBRA program, so they dropped coverage except for their four-year-old daughter, reducing their monthly cost to $270. Then, when MacPherson's unemployment benefits ran out, they dumped their insurance altogether.

A sad tale, but there's more, much more. It turns out that MacPherson's husband -- he is never named, perhaps because he was too embarrassed to want his identity revealed -- makes $75,000 a year in construction, although the company for which he works offers no health benefits. So there you have it: a family of three, making roughly the median income for a family of four in Massachusetts (for the math-challenged, that means they're making more than the median), has chosen not to pay for health insurance, not for themselves, not for their child.

Continuing coverage just for their daughter would cost just 4.3 percent of their annual gross income, even if Diane doesn't find another job. Yet the Times says MacPherson and her husband simply can't do it, explaining, "Although her husband earns about $75,000 a year, construction work is seasonal and they could not be assured of enough income every month to pay for health insurance." Paging Diane MacPherson and Mr. X! You can set aside more money during the fat months so that you can pay your bills during the lean ones. It's called budgeting.

My wife peered over my shoulder as I was reading this and, photographer that she is, examined the photo of Diane MacPherson and her daughter and said, "Look at the window behind them. They're in a brand-new development!" And, yes, it does appear that they've living large -- way over their heads, no doubt, especially given their new, downsized circumstances. But what this is really about is the misplaced priorities of two adults who ought to know better -- not an insurance "crisis."

Now, if I were a conservative, I would end my little morality tale right there. But I'm not, and I won't. We do need some sort of universal health care to cover the 40 million or so Americans without insurance. Some are poor. Some are sick, and the insurance companies don't want them. Some are small-business owners struggling to keep their heads above water, and the Times documents those cases, too. And yes, some are like our Lowell family, middle-class but with idiotic priorities, putting their dream home and their lifestyle ahead of their health-care needs. The point is that unless you want to live in a Hobbesian state of nature, with everyone on his or her own, we ought to make health care a basic social benefit.

Still, you can't help but cringe when you take a close look at the choices that some people make.

Howard Dean, President of 2003. God help us, here comes another one. This year's model of the socially liberal, fiscally conservative "reformist" Democrat who's running for president against the proverbial long odds is Vermont governor Howard Dean, profiled in today's Boston Globe Magazine by the estimable Charlie Pierce. Dean follows in the futile tradition of Bill Bradley (2000), Paul Tsongas (1992), Bruce "Stand up for taxes!" Babbitt (1988), and, arguably, Gary Hart (1984).

The good news is that unlike the self-absorbed, self-regarding Bradley, Dean actually seems to be something like a regular guy, openly ambitious, blunt (although not nearly as blunt as, say, John McCain, the Republican version of the Bradley/Babbitt/Tsongas strain), and the sort of political weasel we can all recognize, if not appreciate: he pissed off all sides in the same-sex-marriage debate by signing Vermont's civil-union law with so little fanfare you'd think he was signing pardon papers for Hannibal Lecter. The bad news, at least for the Dean family, is that he's not going to win.

But as Pierce notes, Dean is wowing the pundits, and he stands to be President of the Beltway in 2003. That's as close as he's going to come, though he could get consideration for vice-president or -- assuming George W. Bush can actually be defeated -- a Cabinet post. So do give this a read.

Romenesko verson 2.1. The folks at Poynter heard the cries of pain. The redesign of Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.org, unveiled last Friday, has been rejiggered. Most important, those short, cryptic plugs on the left-hand side of the page, much beloved by Romenesko fans, have returned after a brief time in purgatory. The typeface has also been made smaller to reduce scrolling.

Last week I referred to the redesign as "creeping Poynterization," but, overall, thought there was as much good as bad in the new look -- especially the addition for permanent links for each item, although they seem to have been implemented in a way that is unnecessarily confusing and labor-intensive.

Others took far greater exception, especially to the perception (an accurate perception) that the new page was too much Poynter, not enough Romenesko. The angriest missive came from NarcoNews.com's Al Giordano, who wrote: "Fellow and sister journalists and readers of Media News, our nation is under attack. It's like Pearl Harbor all over again. Poynter's warplanes have just airbombed an island previously inhabited by human journalism." (Giordano's entire letter is worth reading; click here.)

Bill Mitchell, the editor of Poynter Online, confesses all in a memo posted here.

Based on a first glance, it looks to me like the re-redesign not only improves on the redesign, but on the original, bare-bones look as well.

Quotes of the day

"He is a friend of mine. He is not a moron at all." -- Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, on George W. Bush

"The Democrats have shown they can roll over but it's becoming harder to find one that can speak." -- Humorist Barry Crimmins; not posted yet, but check out his website)

Jeff Jacoby's Canadian-style mistake. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby's main quarry today is Senator John Kerry, whose essay in last week's Phoenix Jacoby mocks as "a masterpiece of meretriciousness -- one gaudy bromide after another, paragraph upon paragraph promising everything while saying virtually nothing." (My only complaint about Kerry's piece is this sentence: "We must begin by demanding a different, better, fairer economic policy that grows [sic] jobs and creates wealth for all Americans." Oof! The decline of the language continues apace.)

But Jacoby also takes a swipe at Al Gore's recent endorsement of a Canadian single-payer health plan -- and manages to make the sort of whopping mistake that distorts the debate over what to do about 40 million uninsured Americans. He writes:

A Canada-style single-payer scheme would mean a major decline in US health care -- just ask a Canadian who has had to wait weeks for the results of an AIDS test, or months for cancer radiation therapy, or more than a year for a hip replacement -- and I doubt that Americans are any keener on the idea now than they were when Hillary Clinton was peddling it eight years ago [emphasis mine].

This is very interesting. The actual merits of Canadian-style universal health care aside, the truth is that the plan devised by Hillary Rodman Clinton and Ira Magaziner was, in fact, its exact opposite. The principal feature of the Canadian system -- its crowning attribute, according to proponents -- is that it does away with private insurance companies. The Clinton-Magaziner plan, by contrast, was designed specifically to achieve universal health care while preserving a prime role for private insurers.

James Fallows explained this clearly in a January 1995 post-mortem on the defeat of the Clinton-Magaziner plan that was published in the Atlantic Monthly:

A Canadian-style single-payer system has two big virtues. It is simple to administer, since doctors, hospitals, and patients no longer have to worry about dozens of insurance companies with scores of different payment plans. The single-payer approach also guarantees that everyone in the country has medical coverage. But [Bill] Clinton was dead set against a single-payer plan, arguing that it would require sweeping new taxes and would, in effect, abolish the entire medical-insurance industry.

Fallows doesn't say it, but there were also reports at the time that President Clinton was hoping that, by spurning a Canadian-style bill, he could enlist the political support of the insurance industry. It didn't happen, of course, as the insurers savaged the bill with those misleading "Harry and Louise" ads. And the proposal that Hillary Clinton and Magaziner crafted was much more complicated than would have been necessary if the administration had simply embraced the Canadian system. (By the way, Fallows's piece was titled "A Triumph of Misinformation." The triumphant march on. It's still worth reading, and is freely available online through public-library databases.)

Now, I've got my own doubts about a Canadian-style system. As the father of a child who's at some risk of running into high-cost medical problems that would have to be dealt with immediately rather than on a health bureaucracy's leisurely schedule, my personal inclination is to find a way of helping uninsured Americans without taking any flexibility away from us, thank you very much.

But the debate is corrupted if we can't agree as to what's on the table and what isn't. Eight years after its defeat, the Clinton-Magaziner plan remains toxic. Senator Clinton herself disavows it. Jacoby, by describing it as something that it wasn't, makes it more difficult to talk about the still-vexing problem of health care in a rational and honest way.

Bickering over Birmingham. Massachusetts Senate president Tom Birmingham's press secretary, Alison Franklin, writes: "Regarding today's Media Log, I wanted to let you know that contrary to Michael Jonas's assertions in his article, Tom Birmingham did try to talk to Michael on at least four occasions. I know this because I placed the calls and left the messages. Michael was frustrated that he and Tom kept missing each other. That is understandable but it should not have resulted in a mischaracterization of Tom's availability."

Jonas responds: "Senator Birmingham's office did indeed call on several occasions, hoping to put him on the line with me at that moment. However, despite multiple requests over the course of more than five weeks, including at least one full week following the September 17 primary, his office would not agree to schedule a time for him to be interviewed, even for 10 or 15 minutes by telephone, to discuss his Senate presidency."

What's wrong with the legislature? The tyranny of deadlines has not been kind to Michael Jonas's fine overview of what's wrong with the Massachusetts legislature, published in the current issue of CommonWealth magazine. (The piece, "Beacon Ill," is online, but free registration is required.) Not only had the race for governor not been decided, but Jonas had to turn in his piece even before we knew that state senator Bob Travaglini would be the next Senate president. But this is good stuff, and the lack of timeliness should not stop you from reading it.

One eye-opener: Senate president Tom Birmingham refused Jonas's attempts to interview him. Now, it's fair to point out that Jonas was doing his reporting in the midst of Birmingham's hard-fought campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. But the notion that one of the state's two top legislative leaders couldn't spare an hour to talk about substance is repellant. Farewell, Mr. President. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

There's not an awful lot new here for political junkies, but those who follow State House antics with less-than-breathless enthusiasm will appreciate Jonas's efforts to lay out recent legislative history -- and especially how it came to pass that virtually all power was concentrated in the hands of Birmingham and House Speaker Tom Finneran. Let's not kid ourselves: rank-and-file legislators have never had much influence on Beacon Hill. But during the 1970s and '80s, committee chairs held great sway. It wasn't exactly democracy, but neither was it a dictatorship.

These days even the chairs count for nothing. The symbol of legislative gridlock in recent years is that photo of Finneran and Birmingham, negotiating the budget at a glacial pace on a State House patio. "Now there's no one to talk to," Citizens for Limited Taxation executive director Barbara Anderson told Jonas. "There's no playing field at all. They're just following the leadership."

Jonas also makes two key points. Writing before the gubernatorial election, he asserted that there might actually be more hope for change if Democrat Shannon O'Brien won rather than Republican Mitt Romney. "After all," Jonas wrote, "in the absence of true two-party competition, schisms in the state's dominant party, played out through shifting coalitions and alliances, may be the next best thing for the democratic debate." But with Romney heading up a party so tiny that Republican legislators can't even override his vetoes, state politics is likely to devolve into the Romney, Trav, and Finneran Show. Actually, make that the Finneran, Trav, and Romney Show.

Jonas's other point is simply to remind us of how accustomed we've become to the shameful inertia that now exists:

What is most remarkable about the dysfunction that has set in on Beacon Hill is just how unremarkable it has become. There is little expectation that budgets will be completed on time or that lawmakers will have significant roles in writing them. Members meekly approve major policy changes through outside sections tacked onto the budget, despite misgivings over their implications. Committee chairs stand idly by as the flow and content of legislation is controlled from above.

More than anything else, Jonas's piece underscores the harm that has been caused by the state's devolution into a one-party system. Think of how many times voters -- even liberals -- have cast their lots with Republican governors simply to keep the entire system from falling into the hands of the Democrats: John Volpe, Frank Sargent, Frank Hatch (well, okay, he lost, but he won most of the liberal vote), Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci. Romney is quite a bit more conservative than those Republicans, which is the only reason his margin of victory was even close. It's not surprising that his campaign only caught fire when he started targeting the "Gang of Three" -- Finneran, Travaglini, and O'Brien -- and raised the specter of Democratic insiders running amock.

The single most important thing Romney can do during the next four years is to rebuild the Republican Party into a moderate, reform-minded force that competes in elections and wins enough to make a difference.

The last refuge of scoundrels. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal editorial page claimed it simply wasn't true that Saxby Chambliss, the Republican victor in Georgia's US Senate race, had impugned the patriotism of Democratic incumbent Max Cleland, a decorated war hero who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam. "We thought we'd set the record straight, before the tale becomes one more liberal political legend," the editorial stated. "Mr. Chambliss won by exposing Senator Cleland's voting record on the issues that mattered most to Georgians, such as taxes, missile defense and especially homeland security."

Today the Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi repeats the charge that the Journal attempted to refute, beginning her piece: "Senator Max Cleland of Georgia lost both legs and his right arm in a grenade explosion in Vietnam in 1968. That did not stop C. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican with no military service, from questioning his patriotism in 2002." Was Chambliss rough but fair, as the Journal argues? Or did Chambliss cross the line and stoop to questioning the patriotism of a man who's long been a national symbol of sacrifice?

They say the winners get to write the history books, and the Journal's conservative editorial page is clearly on the side of the winners in the midterm elections. The Journal has every reason to defend Chambliss, who'll enter the Senate under a cloud for viciously attacking Cleland. Chambliss himself got out of serving in Vietnam because of a bad knee. Poor thing!

Nailing this down is important, because the aftermath of the toxic Chambliss-Cleland contest will help set the tone for the next two years. Senate Democrats are said to be furious at Chambliss and, by extension, at George W. Bush, who lent him crucial support down the stretch. The evidence suggests that Chambliss played it cute. You won't find any statements from Chambliss or even from his campaign stating, "Max Cleland is an unpatriotic American." Nevertheless, Chambliss's statements and his strategy point to a slimy assault on Cleland's patriotism, with just enough of an out so that Chambliss could deny it whenever reporters came calling.

Chambliss started warming up months before the election. Consider, for example, a "Notebook" item from the New Republic of June 10, originally reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1997, Cleland had voted against a motion to expand the Chemical Weapons Treaty that would have barred inspectors from any nation that had sponsored terrorism or had violated nonproliferation agreements. (TNR noted that the United States already had the power to ban such inspectors.) Congressman Chambliss, in an opening salvo to the Senate campaign, dredged up that five-year-old vote and charged that Cleland had "directly contradict[ed]" his oath "to protect and defend" the nation. TNR accurately called Chambliss's remarks an "attack on Cleland's patriotism," adding that it was "repulsive" given Cleland's service to his country. I don't think any reasonable person could disagree with that assessment.

But the main event was the homeland-security bill. Cleland supported a Democratic version, but refused to go along with Bush's, which would remove union protections. That earned him, as Vennochi notes, a Chambliss TV commercial featuring the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Chambliss's tactics were sleazy and out of bounds. Essentially he sounded themes of antipatriotism while denying that was ever his intent. In the November 4 issue of AdWeek, columnist Barbara Lippert wrote:

In the most egregious example of Husseinicide, Republican Senate candidate Rep. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia ran an ad against Democratic incumbent Sen. Max Cleland that began with shots of the Mideastern rat pack [i.e., bin Laden and Saddam] and went on to claim that Cleland is "weak and misleading" on homeland security, questioning his "courage to lead."

Ugh. And here's the exact line from the ad, reported by the Chicago Tribune's Jill Zuckman (a former Globe staffer) on October 27. The narrator intoned: "Since July, Max Cleland has voted against the president's vital homeland-security efforts 11 times. Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead, but the record proves that's just misleading." (Speaking of courage, Saxby, how's the knee?) Take away the photos of Saddam and bin Laden (which Chambliss did after he was ripped for it), and it's nasty but basically fair. With the photos, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the ad actually did call Cleland's patriotism into question.

Cleland, understandably, cried foul, which led George Republican Party chairman Ralph Reed to tell Zuckman: "Max needs to understand that when somebody is telling the truth about his voting record, just because he gets upset about it doesn't mean they're questioning his patriotism." Added Chambliss: "He [Cleland] got $600,000 from the labor unions. I'm suggesting the union bosses are telling him he better vote against it."

There's also this intriguing tidbit, from the Economist of November 2: "Senator Cleland, a Vietnam veteran who goes down well with local military people, 'unpatriotically' voted against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security." Why is "unpatriotically" in quotation marks? Clearly the Economist believed that the Chambliss campaign had questioned Cleland's patriotism, and the quotation marks are either meant to express the magazine's skepticism or to ascribe a direct quote. But a direct quote from whom? The magazine doesn't say. (Bad, Economist! Bad!)

There's no smoking gun -- Chambliss was careful enough to make sure of that -- but there's plenty of smoke. Chambliss managed to impugn Cleland's patriotism without ever saying it directly. The ideologues at the Wall Street Journal can believe what they want, but Chambliss ran a miserable campaign against a man with far more courage than he. Max Cleland has been a national symbol since Jimmy Carter made him head of the Veterans Administration in the 1970s. Now a new generation of Democrats can go about the business of turning Saxby Chambliss into a national symbol of a very different kind.

Feds probe alt-weekly double suicide. The Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten reports that the US Department of Justice is investigating the alt-weekly collusion that led to the recent shutdown of New Times LA and the Cleveland Free Times. The details of this sleazy deal cry out for an antitrust probe. New Times Media, headquartered in Phoenix, agreed to shut down its LA paper -- and thus stop competing with Voice Media's LA Weekly -- if Village Voice Media, the parent company of the Village Voice, would shut down its Cleveland paper, which had been competing with New Times' Cleveland Scene. Millions of dollars changed hands as well. (I found this story through Glenn Reynolds's InstaPundit.)

Rutten writes that the nature of the investigation suggests that Justice officials may seek criminal charges, which carry with them the possibility of individual fines of $300,000 and company fines of $10 million.

There is considerable irony, he notes, in the spectacle of media companies that trace their roots to "the insurgent journalism of the 1960s counterculture, being treated like a 19th century cartel." (Although Rutten could use a history lesson. The Village Voice was founded by Norman Mailer and his friends in the 1950s, whereas the Phoenix New Times began publication in 1970.)

And recently, Village Voice media columnist Cynthia Cotts wrote a doleful piece on where it might all be headed: to an eventual sellout to a mainstream daily-newspaper chain. It's not like it hasn't happened before, either. In 1999, Times Mirror (now the Tribune Company) purchased the Advocate weeklies. Among its holdings: the Hartford Advocate, whose mission was to cast a skeptical eye at Times Mirror's daily Hartford Courant.

The mainstream media doesn't have to kill the alternative press if it is intent on committing suicide.