Rummy Inc.
In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saluted Congress for its passage of the 2004 Defense Authorization Act:

"While news from Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror dominate the headlines, here at home progress is being made on another important front: the critical work of military transformation. Today, President Bush will sign into law landmark legislation that will help bring the Defense Department out of the industrial age, and into the information age."

In the spirit of the Bush administration's self-professed corporate style of governing, Rumsfeld explained the benefits of the Department of Defense overhaul like a true CEO. There will be streamlined labor negotiations:

"The bill ... authorizes national-level bargaining authority, so the DoD can negotiate with unions at the national level, instead of renegotiating the same issue with 1,300 different union locals."

And some sort of environmental benefit:

"The legislation will also clarify key portions of two environmental laws. Our military must protect the nation while preserving our environmental heritage. These reforms will allow us to train our forces, while maintaining the department's high standard of environmental stewardship."

And downsizing:

"This legislation is an important step forward on the road to transforming the department. Already, we have reduced management and headquarters staffs by 11 percent and streamlined the budget and acquisition processes by eliminating hundreds of pages of unnecessary rules and self-imposed red tape."

All of which Rumsfeld capped off with some of his special clarifying syntax (normally reserved for press conferences):

"But this [legislation] is only a step. Transforming is not an event. There is no moment at which the DoD moves from being untransformed to being 'transformed.'"

Hey, baby, want to go back to my pad, drink some wine and commit spiritual suicide?
In last Saturday's New York Times, columnist David Brooks argued that conservatives should embrace gay marriage because encouraging marriage, whether for gays or straights, will help stop society's decline into immoral, egotistical "contingency." This is familiar conservative high-moral-sermon territory, but more than a few readers may have choked on their coffee when they read Brooks' weird lead:

"Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations."

Brooks did not say whether those who have had several sexual partners in a year and a half are also committing spiritual suicide.

Spank me, please (or at least buy my doll)
Like an impetuous child in an elevator, right-of-Attila shock shrew Ann Coulter delights in wildly pressing all the hot little buttons just to see what will happen. This habit got her exiled from the "respectable" right: the über-conservative National Review Online dropped her weekly column from its site in late 2001 and after she wrote (and they published) a notorious column in which she called for the U.S. to "invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

But even if she's regarded by mainstream conservatives as a self-promoting freak, Coulter continues to be a major player on the far right. Her "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right" was a runaway No. 1 bestseller, with more than 400,000 copies in print.

In her latest column for right-wing clearinghouse Townhall.com, Coulter is in classic form, flailing at the Democratic presidential candidates for shamelessly exploiting personal tragedy and suddenly discovering their Jewishness.

"The Democrats have discovered a surprise campaign issue: It turns out that several of them have had a death in the family. Not only that, but many Democrats have cracker-barrel humble origins stories and a Jew or lesbian in the family. Dick Gephardt's campaign platform is that his father was a milkman, his son almost died and his daughter is a lesbian. Vote for me!...

"Howard Dean talks about his brother Charlie's murder at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. Bizarrely, after working on the failed George McGovern campaign, Charlie Dean went to Indochina in 1974 to witness the ravages of the war he had opposed. Not long after he arrived, the apparently ungrateful communists captured and killed him. 'Hey fellas! I'm on your s-- CLUNK!'...

"In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats' other big idea -- too nuanced for a bumper sticker -- is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There's Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew -- along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering ..."

This last line is not the obvious anti-Semitic slur it initially appears to be, but a less obvious one. It's Coulter's ironic put-down of Democrats, whose pandering she contrasts with the true suffering of Jews. In Coulter's mind, it seems, you can't be a "real" Jew and a Democrat -- a weird, convoluted position that creates a whole new category of partisan anti-Semitism. But lest someone accuse Coulter of this, she immediately stakes out her pro-Jewish bona fides by making the absurd claim that the evil Democrats -- who until the current Bush administration were always more pro-Israel than Republicans, and continue to be staunchly pro-Sharon -- are planning to sell out Israel to the terrorists:

"The Democrats' urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children. Their humble-origins claptrap is designed to disguise the fact that liberals think ordinary people are racist scum. Their perverse desire to discuss the deaths and near-deaths of their children is designed to disguise the fact that they support the killing of more than a million unborn children every year. (Oh, by the way, what did their milkman and mill worker fathers think about abortion?)"

Having gotten that borderline-psychotic screed off her chest, Coulter turns to flogging her newly expanded line of personal merchandise. Just in time for the holiday season, it's the Ann Coulter "talking action figure," whose advertisement gets the final word on the page:

"Amuse your conservative friends and annoy your liberal neighbors with the brand new Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure. This incredibly lifelike action figure looks just like the beautiful Ann Coulter, and best of all... it sounds like Ann, too! This highly collectible doll comes in a display box with information highlighting Ann's unique contributions to America's political discourse. If you can't get enough Ann Coulter, you'll want to order the Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure today!"

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Read more of "Right Hook," Salon's weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.

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