by David Weigel

Stephen Colbert, as usual, was the only pundit with the balls to tell the truth. When he booked former Navy Secretary James Webb on his satirical talk show six months ago, Colbert puzzled over how an award-winning author would fare in Virginia's U.S. Senate race.

"If you win this [Democratic] primary, you go up against George Allen, right?"

"Yes," Webb said, his already-uncomfortable expression shifting from grit to grimace.

"Who I understand," continued Colbert, "and I think this is a positive, is dumb as a post."

Gallows humor: Allen was obviously going to beat Webb. He was the tall (just under six foot four), handsome (black hair dye straight from the Reagan Library) "Meet the Press" mainstay who had soaked in more than a year of hype about his chance at the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Two weeks after the 2004 election, TIME's Matthew Cooper ranked Allen as one of the party's mightiest conservative contenders. Two weeks after that, McLaughlin Group tyrant John McLaughlin called him the party's top prospect ("not number two, not number three") and grilled him on when he'd officially enter the Presidential race.

No one's asking George Allen that question right now; Colbert's "dumb as a post" assessment is the new conventional wisdom. Webb, who started out the race with less than $500,000, is tied or nearly tied with Allen in the polls. His campaign team has imposed a gag order: Allen doesn't let reporters ask him questions anymore, lest he loose another momentum-killing gaffe.

In 2008 primary states, hardcore conservative voters are looking to the Mormon guy (Mitt Romney) and the used-to-be-fat guy (Mike Huckabee) as their best hope of derailing the John McCain bandwagon. At one D.C. breakfast meeting in September, I heard conservative journalists deride Allen as "dumb" and "out of it" (dual meaning: out of the 2008 race, and out of "it").

That wasn't the first time I'd elbowed into a conversation about the senator's brainpower, or lack thereof. After 2006's Conservative Political Action Conference, it was easy to find Republicans grumbling about Allen's substance-free speech on how the philosophy of Burke and Buckley was like a football game. ("Your race, ethnicity, or religion doesn't matter. What matters is if you can punt, pass, kick, block, run or tackle!") But at the time, the sentiment stayed in the cloakroom. In public, conservatives were still promoting Allen as Ronald Reagan's heir.

All of this begs the question: If Allen's so dumb, why wasn't that conventional wisdom before this year? Why did it take "Macaca" -- a putatively once-in-a-career public meltdown -- to get the Beltway media to admit in print what they muttered in private? Namely, that this Allen guy didn't have what it took to be president?

It's simple. Allen's campaign team did a good job selling the package of "President Allen" to the D.C. media. And the media bought it.

"It almost happened by default," says Marc Ambinder, an associate editor at The Hotline. "You had a gaping hole in the race -- there was McCain and Giuliani, but there was no movement conservative candidate. Allen has the bio and the folk ways to fill that gap. And anyone who travels the country and charms journalists personally and talks about football is going to impress them."

The Hotline, for example, breathlessly reported the progress of Allen '08 until the middle of this year. When former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie took the treasurer's job at Allen's PAC, the candidate had found a man who "filled the gap" in his 2008 strategy. Over at ABC's The Note, the Allen buzz didn't even need news to feed it: the editors simply ranked Allen high on a mysteriously weighted 1-10 point scale. Rather than expose Allen's weaknesses -- which were well-known in D.C. -- they reported the hype.

"The pre-campaign worked so well because he seemed like a natural," said one conservative journalist who preferred to remain nameless. "Washington insiders who knew him from cocktail parties certainly liked him. But his performance in the Senate race, since it hasn't been so great, has people wondering how smart he is."

One of Allen's most flattering profiles came from National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, who in a November 2005 profile called Allen a "first-string presidential hopeful" whose "time is now." The candidate, Lowry found, "combines the people skills of a Bill Clinton, with the convictions of a Ronald Reagan, with the non-threatening persona of a George W. Bush circa 2000." Nothing in the piece predicted Allen's swift fall.

"I've been shocked," Lowry says today. "I thought he was a much better politician. But everything's been sort of conspiring against him. He's been off-balance so much lately it has insiders wondering, fairly or not, if his political skills are as strong as they might have thought a year ago."

Everyone in D.C. agrees that "macaca" -- Allen's crypto-racist slur of an Indian-American Webb staffer that the staffer caught on tape -- was the event that knocked Allen '08 off the rails. But why wasn't Allen reeling before? In April, Ryan Lizza of the New Republic dug up evidence of the senator's temper and his strange attachment to Confederate culture. Even if he were from Virginia, a Confederate flag fetish and noose affection would be odd, but Allen is actually from Southern California, where re-enactments of historic battles are more likely to be based on Star Trek episodes than Gettysburg. But Lizza's scoop caused ripples mainly among the harder-core poll watchers, and those who were already suspicious of Allen's prospects. However overlooked it was at the time, the piece was critical in making the macaca story stick: it provided pundits with their second paragraph.

And it gave them the opportunity to pass the buck. D.C. pundits and reporters, conservative and otherwise, chickened out on exposing Allen's weaknesses until they were flamboyantly exposed by the candidate himself. Look at the sing-song reporting on Allen before "macaca," and ask: Would reporters not named "Ryan Lizza" have seriously researched Allen's past before he actually announced his White House bid?

And what's the takeaway from Allen's fall? Maybe McCain, Giuliani, Romney, Gingrich et al can stave off serious inquiries into their qualifications and their records as long as they build up a wave of hype and stay away from amateur cameras. If they're friendly to the press corps and chat about football, buzz about their skeleton closets, tempers or I.Q. points can be kept out of the race. Just contrast the treatment of Mark Foley before and after he left Congress for rehab. In 2004 and 2006, pundits promoted him as a possible candidate for Senate. After the fall, pundits couldn't pile the dirt on him fast enough.

But all isn't lost for Allen: At the end of the day, D.C. reporters love winners. Even some Republicans think that Allen can turn the soft lighting back on his campaign if he convincingly fends off James Webb.

"Let's assume for a moment he wins this Senate race by a decent margin," says Craig Shirley, a Republican consultant who told Newsweek last year that Allen was "the real deal." "Then the story becomes 'Allen's resurrection. How did he win Virginia and how does that translate to 2008?' Everybody loves the political resurrection story. You can look back to the way Nixon lost the presidency and transformed himself from a hatchetman to a serious statesman."

Behold another quirk of D.C. punditry. Around here, "you can be more like Nixon" is a compliment.

David Weigel is an assistant editor of Reason magazine.

by Nick Gillespie

On the off chance that you want to escape, however briefly, from uncomfortable double-entendre, Three's Company-quality headlines such as "Ex-FBI director won't probe congressional page system," chew on a different sort of moral panic involving youth, uncontrolled appetites, and lots of heavy breathing.

"1 in 3 American youngsters are physically unfit," concludes a study just published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. The study subjected more than 3,000 boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 19 to a 10-minute treadmill test and found what any trip to a municipal pool could have told you: that "approximately one third of males and females...failed to meet current standards of acceptable cardiorespiratory endurance." As Reuters summarized, "fatness and sedentary lifestyles are likely culprits." In noting that about 15 percent of today's kids are obese, the American Obesity Association concurs, laying it on as thick as a Fluffernutter and Nutella sandwich: "Today's youth are considered the most inactive generation in history."

As it happens, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin Martin, believes he has unmasked the true super-villain behind all of this and it's someone even the most clever detective never would have suspected: the gluttonous cartoon canine named Scooby-Doo, hitherto best known for crime-solving, overeating, and a cross-species personal relationship of the sort that struts through the nightmares of Rick Santorum like a Gay Pride parade through the Village.

Referring to research that suggests the average child watches up to four hours of television a day and is exposed 40,000 commercials a year (many, maybe most, of them for candy, cereal, and sodas), Martin has decreed that the FCC, which has the power to regulate content on broadcast radio and TV, will now "study links between...ads, viewing habits and the rise of childhood obesity," according to the AP.

"Small children can't weed out the marketing messages from their favorite shows," contends Martin. "Especially when the marketing campaigns feature favorite TV characters like SpongeBob or Scooby-Doo." An FCC task force, made up of "FCC officials, members of the food, television, and advertising industries" and others will start up next year and eventually report to the Senate. If past is prologue, its recommendations will suggest that the FCC increase its control over what we can see on TV and include a mix of "voluntary" and mandatory guidelines for broadcasters that will be every bit as ineffective as they are heartfelt.

But before we start computing a Body Mass Grave Index, it's worth pointing out that Martin's theory has at least a couple of holes in it every bit as oversized and indigestible as the sandwiches on which Scooby and Shaggy regularly chow down.

For starters, let's remember that "small children" don't have that much walking-around money and that they have a limited say over what, how, and when they eat; just ask them (I say that as the parent of two boys, ages five and 12). Beyond that, Martin's emphasis on fat kids misses a larger, even flabbier, picture--adults have been getting fatter at an even quicker pace. Indeed, some 65 percent of adults are now considered overweight. Are adults, too, simple pawns of SpongeBob and Scooby-Doo, or their more-mature counterparts?

Or is there a simpler explanation, and one that takes into account increases in height, weight, and longevity observed not just in America but in every developed nation (and many developing ones) over the past century: Food has been getting cheaper and more plentiful at the same time that work has been getting less physically demanding. This may not lead to the prettiest outcome at the beach, but it also may not be cause for concern (especially when one considers that the health risks of being overweight are not as super-sized as commonly believed.)

Which isn't to say that many TV watchers aren't too lazy for their own damn good. Consider what FCC Chairman Martin himself said in 2005, when testifying before Congress about the horrors of "indecency" and the need for bigger fines and regulation of cable and satellite programming (currently exempt from the FCC's oversight): "You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don't want," he said."But why should you have to?"

Nick Gillespie is the editor-in-chief of Reason.

by Ana Marie Cox

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has taken on an unprecedented role this campaign season as an official RNC fundraiser. While the President, Vice-President and their wives regularly appear as headliners for political fundraising events, cabinet members have generally stayed away from such stumping -- it's too much politics, not enough policy. Snow's appearance on the trail is either a testement to desperate measures or an nod to transparency. He has been telling reporters that the speeches he gives will not be "red meat" and will simply be "trying to do a positive discussion on what the President is doing and why," which is, by the way, what the day job is. Attempting to address the conflict inherent in the dual role, today Snow told the press corps

I suppose -- yes, I'll take a vacation day. The way it is, it's all paid by the RNC. They're open press. I know that I'm doing -- I'm doing something in Wisconsin on Thursday.

The reference to the "vacation day", however, earned a small footnote in the White House's email distribution of the briefing:

Mr. Snow, like other commissioned officers in the White House, is construed to be on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and therefore is not required to track vacation or leave time. As such, the law permits him to engage in political activity (such as speaking at fundraising events) during normal working hours without the paperwork required of employees who are on a leave system.

What's best about this addendum is that it makes Snow -- and the other commissioned officers of the White House -- sound like super heroes: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! (Is it also 365 days a year?!) What's not so great about it is how it doesn't really clear up the conflict that prompted it. Of course, there's probably nothing funny going on, we trust the whole thing has been vetted by White House lawyers and everything -- then again, so was the detainee program.

Elsewhere on the web, the real Foley scandal:

I refer here, of course, to the fact that Dennis Hastert is a bumbling half-wit--something that became apparent to the world last week but had been common knowledge in Washington for almost a decade.

by Greg Beato

Having passed up a chance to enlist as a war warrior during Vietnam -- he was busy attending college in London -- Bill O'Reilly has now drafted himself to serve as America's top "culture warrior." In his new book (and doormat) of the same name, the gray, paunchy millionaire presents himself as a kind of fearless cathode Rambo, boldly storming the killing fields of "Late Night With David Letterman" to protect us all from, as he puts it in Culture Warrior, "lax school discipline," "a touchy-feely vision of our society," and Nancy Pelosi.

"What I am about to say might sound delusional," the late-blooming mercenary allows on page 150 of his book, a disclaimer that only comes 150 pages too late, though it will come as no surprise to anyone who reads the back cover first, with its cool assessment from military analyst Liz Smith: "Gen. George S. Patton, complete with ivory-handled revolvers on his hips, couldn't exude more confidence, certainty, and know-how than Bill O'Reilly."

O'Reilly, of course, is well-known for his vivid fantasy life, and to kick off "Culture Warrior," he whips up a doozy. In 2020, he suggests, the country will be ruled by a president named Gloria Hernandez. Amongst her many accomplishments? An America where no one is denied "nutritious food on the table." An America where "poor Americans are provided with new homes virtually mortgage free" and "repressive laws against gay marriage" have been abolished. An America where individuals are no longer "persecuted for pursuing happiness in his or her own way in the privacy of his or her own home."

Welcome to Bill O'Reilly's nightmare!

To assemble the army he has tasked himself with vanquishing, General O'Reilly compiles a list of issues and values he doesn't like (taxing rich people, liberating Christ -- and Santa! -- from Christmas), identifies the culprits whom he believes champion these issues and values, and, finally, imagines that they're all secretly working together to coordinate their disparate agendas. Poof!, he has an enemy to battle, the "Secular-Progressives," or in that clever way he has of coining a memorable phrase, the "S-Ps."

"The armies of secularism are rising and the public is largely unaware of what is taking place," the General writes while gently stroking the ivory-handled revolvers on his hips, no doubt. According to the intelligence his field officers have gathered, the S-Ps' various batallions include the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, and the devious Georges (Lakoff, Soros, and Clooney). Their covert agenda? Radical wealth redistribution, early indoctrination of impressionable children, and a "touchy-feely vision" of society that emphasizes "individual self-expression." In other words, they're sort of like evangelical Christians, only gayer.

Like every other demagogue working the culture wars these days, O'Reilly adopts the strategy of simultaneously minimizing and maximizing his enemy. There's so few S-Ps that they have no business even presuming to participate in the decision-making processes that govern the nation, and yet, somehow, despite their near non-existence, they're also the greatest threat to the future of America. "The FBI came in and warned me and a few other people at Fox News that al Qaeda had us on a death list," the General told Barbara Walters recently, but incredibly, he still considers George Soros "public enemy number one." Bill Moyers, meanwhile, is a "bomb-thrower."

If a mild-mannered, 72-year-old who's played second fiddle to Big Bird for most of his career is the greatest threat to America, craven appeasers might rationalize, perhaps the Culture War should be downgraded to the Culture Kerfluffle. The General, however, is having none of it. "Many of my Irish ancestors were warriors," he explains, and now that it's his turn to defend America from vicious pixies like NPR's Terry Gross, he will not abandon his post.

To bolster the martial theme of "Culture Warrior," General O'Reilly occasionally refers to Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," but given the rhetorical contortions he engages in here, it appears he's been studying yoga too. For example, when he first introduces George Soros, the billionaire activist who funds liberal groups like Moveon.org and Media Matters, O'Reilly says "most Americans know little or nothing" about him, and that he "operate[s] pretty much under the radar." Later, when he wishes to distinguish Soros' actions from those of Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire activist who funds numerous conservative groups with the word "America" in their names, he writes that Scaife "prefers to operate privately" and concludes that "there is no public bomb-thrower in the conservative donor community like George Soros."

Why the General believes it is more virtuous to operate in a shadowy, clandestine way is something only he can decipher -- the point is that in the space of a dozen pages or so, Soros has somehow morphed from little-known figure operating under the radar to public bomb-thrower. Perhaps this is what O'Reilly means when he says his coverage is "balanced," but where is the fairness?

The battlefields of "Culture Warrior" are littered with the corpses of truth and context, but unless George Soros is paying you to count the dead, there's no real reason to do so: The General has shown little interest in modifying the rules of engagement he follows. Still, there is one additional casualty worth noting; it occurs when O'Reilly declares that "the far-left Internet smear merchants have solid access to the so-called elite media, something the far-right Internet bloggers will never have." No doubt this is news to Michelle Malkin and the communist collective that runs PowerLine -- or are these folks faking the solid access to the elite media that they seem to enjoy, along with the ample coverage they've gotten as well?

Is the General deliberately trying to frag the truth when he presents such "truths," or is he just that dumb? The Acknowledgements section of "Culture Warrior" provides a clue: "Since I am incapable of negotiating a computer, my wife, Maureen, routinely stops my bad language and presses the buttons that need to be pressed."

This is a a pretty scary revelation, of course -- it means that if the General ever gets divorced, his books will be even more poorly written and even more delicately researched. Nonetheless, it does substantiate his otherwise dubious claim to an Algeresque life-path. Until now, O'Reilly's posturing as a blue-collar everyman who survived the mean cul-de-sacs of suburban Long Island and had to make do with one modest family vacation per year has always been as credible as his new para-military guise, but you have to give credit where credit is due: If you can in fact make millions a year as a newsman in 2006 and not know how to use a computer, then, yes, you are indeed, as O'Reilly claims he is, the "poster boy for upward mobility."

Greg Beato (gbeato@soundbitten.com) writes for Reason, Las Vegas Weekly, and many other publications. He wrote last for Political Bite about the RNC's America Weakly.