THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: I may not be able to post much over the next couple of days. Here's a thought recently expressed by Joe Klein, who recently demolished the political essays of Joan Didion in the New Republic:

Didion's political essays seem very dated now. They are artifacts of the most placid and prosperous moment in American history, a time when allegedly serious news organizations and journals of opinion turned to cynics and stylists--people who knew little about politics and nothing at all about policy--to make pronouncements about public life. These people practiced a form of theater criticism, assuming and sometimes even asserting that politics was a lesser branch of show business, that politicians were merely actors reading lines, that political performance consisted only of public speaking and image-making; while the quiet work of governance, the true work of elected officials, was largely ignored. This was, almost by definition, a flagrantly superficial conceit. It is probably finished now. When reality visits, there is no need for political fictions.

I think this is absolutely true. Writers like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have seemed 98% anachronistic since the pop-culture-ignoramus George W. Bush took office. Since September 11, it's been 100%.