Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your contract can do for you.

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Both Ahmadinejad and Bollinger achieved their goals. Ahmadinejad showed that he could be dignified in the face of crass American bullies, which will play well abroad -- and may even buttress his dwindling prestige in Iran. And Bollinger showed that he can be a crass American bully, which, in our current political climate, is what passes for "courage."

So fine, let's congratulate ourselves for showing Iran just how many freedoms we have in America. But when we get done congratulating ourselves on our fancy freedoms, let's figure out why we can't be bothered to put them to use.

It was Gravel who raised the real issue coming to the fore in this campaign, and that is the looming confrontation with Iran:

"There was a vote in the Senate today – Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq resolution, has offered another resolution, and it's essentially a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to congratulate Biden for voting against it, Dodd for voting against, and I'm ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it. You're not going to get another shot at this, because what's happened if this war ensues – we invade and they're looking for an excuse to do it.

"And Obama was not even there to vote."

How that last barb must have stung the self-righteous Obama, whose self-backslapping – "I was against this war [in Iraq] from the beginning" – was an embarrassment. Hillary's sinister laugh, when given the opportunity by Russert to answer Gravel, ought to have curdled the blood of even the hardest of the antiwar movement's hardcore Democratic partisans. What followed was a pretty faithful recitation of the War Party's talking points regarding Iran.

At the Dartmouth College debate Wednesday evening, not one of the three leading Democratic candidates could pledge that all US combat troops would be out of Iraq by the end of his or her first term as president.

One thing we don’t know is whether Bush will have sought to tie the next president’s hands by ordering some kind of attack on Iran. Yes, that would complicate the situation in Iraq. So why did Clinton vote Wednesday for a Senate resolution encouraging Bush to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization? Having voted to authorize the Iraq war — she says Bush pulled the wool over her eyes — why would she vote for anything that Bush might try to use as justification for yet another potentially catastrophic war?

Hillary Clinton, who also voted to grant Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq in 2002 and staunchly supported the war for the next three years before reinventing herself as an Iraq War critic, now has reverted to her old hawkish self, jumping out ahead of Bush in urging a more hostile policy toward Iran.

She thinks you're weak. She has no respect for you, and her lack of respect amounts to loathing -- the kind of loathing that the powerful feel for the powerless. She's confident that progressives are too impotent, divided, and disorganized to deny her the nomination.

Enter the Bill O'Reilly twilight zone. Late one night, on his way home from the Republican Convention , a hungry Tom White mistakes Rufus's Chicken and Ribs for a Cracker Barrel. His worst fears are realized when a major riot breaks out after Tyrone Jackson slips on a watermelon slice and knocks over Mack da Knife's bottle of malt liqour. Running through a hail of bullets, hot sauce bottles and other assorted weapons, Tom barely makes it back to his Volvo alive. Good thing that the bullet proof vest that he wore under his Brooks Brothers suit also protected him from spears...

This is what the adults brought with them from Hollywood to Bonanza: competition, class, and consumerism. In the very first episode, the children were directed to form four armies for color war. And they did. They were told that victory would determine their class status. And it did.

In a scenario Karl Marx couldn't have made up, the winners of the war were dubbed "upper class," the runners-up were labeled "merchants," then "cooks," and finally "laborers." The little capitalists were allowed to use their very unequal paychecks for very unequal chores to pay for goodies at the town store. The producers did everything but deny the lower-income children their health coverage.

Cutthroat competition, class divisions, unrelenting consumerism. Maybe it is reality programming after all. Aren't these the basic three C's of the culture in which we are all raising children?

Larry Craig's bathroom stall! Haggard's meth hotel! See all the sites of GOP shame. Fun for kids!