STUNNING NEWS: The cover story of the current New Republic's dead tree edition is on how the Bush campaign co-opted Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, who allowed such an egregious crime to occur in order to advance their own political careers. Let me see if I've got this right: two prominent Republican politicians are supporting the Republican Party's candidate for the Presidency. The nerve of them! The rank opportunism! The sheer effontery of it all! Where is Claude Rains to tell us how shocked he is? I mean, politicians calculating how to gain higher office? What is the country coming to? You can bet your bottom dollar that fine upstanding gentlemen like Bill Clinton and John Kerry never spent a minute calculating how they could be elected to the Presidency; it wouldn't be like them at all.