National Treasures...

Your weekly dose of Professor Hanson. Have some dignity and take it like a man. Really, it's good for you; consider it Bran Flakes for the Brain.

Resident Obama is like the proverbial leopard that changes it's spots. Actually, he's more like a chameleon who changes his colors to match his background, although a chameleon at least has the decency to claim an evolutionary -- rather than revolutionary -- reason for doing it.

I didn't watch much of Obama's vaunted "healing" speech this past week, if only because the first five minutes turned me off (really, raucous cheering and cheerleading at a memorial service?), and because I pretty much knew what Obama would say before it flowed out of the teleprompter. He's become that predictable and transparent. Reading the transcript later on, I figure I pegged about 80% of that speech's content in my head without ever having listened to it.

Besides, I don't do grief, especially the sort of over-the-top-made-for-television grief that becomes little more than a new slant on the Reality TV meme in the hands of network spinmeisters.

P.J. O'Rourke has always been one of my favorite writers, although I must admit, I liked him more when he was writing for National Lampoon. Still, you won't find very many who can make a point with this kind of humor and insight.

He makes the case that liberalism, and in particular, that great bastion and champion of liberalism, the New York Times, is on it's last legs (it must be: they interviewed me, after all). But why that wasn't evident already to anyone with the same mental capacity of your typical Irish Setter, is beyond me.

Any publication that would continue to pay Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich is, by definition, unserious and necessarily myopic in it's editorial views. It isn't so much that Paulie, Tommy, MoDo and Frankie are bad people as much as it is that their ideas and thought processes are so incredibly suspect.

Those ideas fail, incidentally, because they bear no resemblance, or have no relevance to, what we normal people call Real Life.

Because Frankie and Tommy, Paulie and MoMo have no conception of what life is actually like to those of us who don't get six-figure salaries to spout complete nonsense from Pinch, or attend the tony cocktail parties of the self-important-but-totally-irrelevant.