In a column appearing in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post, Peter Perl, the paper's director of professional development, heaps scorn on Tom DeLay and in particular on his strong religious beliefs. The column approaches parody, so much does it seethe with secular, elitist condescension.

The headline sets the tone: "DeLay's Next Mission From God".

Excerpts:

• "DeLay may be leaving Congress, but he will be back with a vengeance [note choice of phrase], in a new and potentially more powerful role, because he is a ferociously determined man who believes he is on a politico-religious mission from God."
• "DeLay's crusade [again note choice of term] will not be sidetracked by the acts of mortals such as states' attorneys, crooked lobbyists and disgraced former staffers who are poised to testify against him. In DeLay's world he answers only to a higher power, and his personal Armageddon has only just begun."
• "He will artfully squeeze a load of money from the Christian Right as he makes his thunderous argument from multiple pulpits in the weeks and months ahead."
• "The new Tom DeLay will combine aspects of the Revs. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and Lee Atwater, the late right-wing political consultant with the legendary killer instinct."
• "Looking back, I see DeLay as a somewhat pathetic figure."
• "What struck me as truly pathetic, though, was his shambles of a family life."
• "We will see DeLay constantly smiling as he delivers his message because in his heart he knows that we hopeless sinners will always hate the messenger."

In keeping with the religion-themed nature of Perl's column, let's undertake a little exegesis of his parting shot at DeLay - that he will be "constantly smiling because . . . he knows that we hopeless sinners will always hate the messenger." If DeLay is a devout Christian - as is the gist of Perl's column - why would he believe that sinners are "hopeless"?

Here's a few more recent examples of impending "Today" co-host Meredith Vieira sounding liberal on ABC's "The View," courtesy of the MRC Cyber Alert archive:

June 9, 2005: Vieira insisted to Sean Hannity that Hillary’s no puppet of her husband, and whacks away at abstinence-only sex education: "Why does the federal government deny funding then in terms of [sex education] classes for kids if they don't preach anything other than abstinence?"

January 22, 2003: As "The View" crew ganged up on pro-life actress Jennifer O'Neill, Vieira argued: "But prior to abortion becoming legal that’s when things were really secret much more so than after it became legal, and very dangerous. So there is going to be abortion one way or the other."

WND

A judge in Los Angeles yesterday dismissed Sen. Hillary Clinton from a lawsuit by business mogul Peter Franklin Paul that alleges her husband, former President Bill Clinton, reneged on a $17 million business deal.

President Clinton however, remains a defendant and will be subpoenaed early next week to testify in a deposition. A trial date has been set, and Paul plans to depose Sen. Clinton as well.

Represented by the public-interest law firm U.S. Justice Foundation, Paul claims Bill Clinton agreed to promote Paul's Internet businesses after leaving office in exchange for his financial backing of a Hollywood gala and fund-raiser for Sen. Clinton's Senate campaign in 2000. ...

Any faithful watcher of “The McLaughlin Group” knows that one of the most transparently biased members of the antique media over the past two decades has been Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. Week in and week out, Eleanor rips apart every Republican on the political landscape while oozing nothing but adoration for those on the opposite side of the aisle even when they are found guilty of serious transgressions.

Clift’s op-ed posted at Newsweek’s website on Friday is a fine example. After somewhat misrepresenting the seriousness of the recent allegations that have emerged from Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis Libby concerning unclassified information from a National Intelligence Estimate by President Bush, Clift went right into a stump speech: “The only way the American people can stop Bush’s imperial expansion of power short is to turn out in massive numbers to take back one or the other body of Congress from Republican control.”

When things got a bit contentious this morning between conservative Jim Pinkerton and liberal Ellen Ratner on Fox & Friends Weekend's 'Long & the Short of It' segment, Pinkerton proposed a peace plan that other warring parties might well wish to adopt: "let NewsBusters.org sort this out."

The bone of contention was just what what it was that President Bush declassified - some would say leaked - and that Scooter Libby is in turn alleged to have provided to the press - presumably in the person of Judy Miller of the NY Times.

Ratner: "This was a Nixon bad-list kind of trick [presumably a reference to Nixon's 'enemies' list] to get . . . "

Host Kiran Chetry [back from maternity leave - and beautiful as ever, I might add]: "Why?"

Two conservative writers have harshly criticized the instant reaction of bloggers and commentators to the propaganda tape that captors made kidnapped Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll make in Iraq before she was released. In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby opined:

I have always believed that racing to report a story makes a lot more sense than racing to express a point of view about it. No doubt there are some sages who don't need time to reflect -- or to wait for more facts, or to see how a story turns out -- in order to generate some well-chosen words of genuine wisdom. My own experience is that insight and good judgment don't usually work that way. I find that thought and a bit of distance vastly improve the odds of coming up with something worth saying -- and that rushing to tell the world what to think of the latest headlines makes for shallow, half-baked, or unfair commentary.

Reminiscent of Al Franken on the Late Show last October, on Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, actor Ben Affleck charged that President Bush “probably also leaked” Valerie Plame's name and so “if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” In full rant, an apoplectic Affleck asserted: “You could be killed. That's not a joking around Tom DeLay 'I'll do a year, I bribed the state officials with corporate money.' That's like they shoot you in the battlefield for doing that.”

Affleck appeared on Maher's panel with Senator Joe Biden and Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner. A couple of minutes later, after Sammon suggested Tom DeLay's resignation means the loss of a “poster boy for the left” so they can't use him anymore to raise funds, Affleck besmirched DeLay as a “criminal” while simultaneously demonstrating his political naivete. Though the Texas redistricting orchestrated by DeLay made his district less Republican, Affleck contended: "Tom DeLay personally gerrymandered that district so severely that it looks like a map of Italy....There won't be a Democrat elected in that seat for a thousand years. You can't say he's the poster boy for the left. He happens to be an incredibly powerful Republican who is a criminal and now you blame Democrats for pointing it out!"

Video clip of Affleck talking about hanging and shooting Bush for treason (35 seconds). Real (1.1 MB) or Windows Media (1.25 MB), plus MP3 audio (200 KB).

Completely off-topic but since it's a weekend, here goes. It seems as though the "Star Wars kid," a roly-poly French Canadian boy whose awkward copying of a light saber fight made him into an ironic web celebrity, apparently wasn't happy with being made the object of fun. (Or was it that the petition to get him into the third SW prequel failed?)

In any case, Ghyslain Raza, now 18, reached a settlement with three former schoolmates who put out the video which has since spawned scads of derivative works. The deal, whose terms are not known, averted a lawsuit that was supposed to go to trial Monday. Canada's Globe and Mail has the story:

Lawyers for the three schoolmates had suffered a setback after they were not allowed to introduce as evidence a transcript of a phone conversation Mr. Raza had with a blogger, Jishnu Mukerji.

The blogger had posted a transcript of the exchange on the Internet.

Conducted a month after the video and parodies of it began circulating, the conversation has Mr. Raza calling the spoofs "interesting" but not expressing much distress. [...]

In the transcripts, Mr. Raza said the experience left him unable to attend school.

"It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Mr. Raza said.

Camille Paglia, the famed, feminist social critic that calls herself a Democrat, gave an interview to The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, recently (hat tip to Radio Equalizer) in which she attacked a wide array of American media icons. For instance, she stated that the writing of The New York Times was, “‘Upper middle class comfortable elitist liberalism.'"

She then blamed a lot of the left’s difficulties on Hollywood: “‘It's the reason my party, the Democratic Party, is in such bad shape. It's because of the insularity and the arrogance of those views.’"

What do you think about Al Franken, Camille? “‘Good lord! I want to fall asleep. Narcolepsy.’"

And the radio station that carries his swill? “‘It's even slower than NPR. Like a record being played at the wrong speed.’"

As for the perky "Today"...errr "CBS Evening News" host, Paglia isn't impressed: