What will Uncle Sam do with all that lipstick?

The one decent thing about being cut off from the Internet for a week is that you really gain some perspective on the degree to which commentary–particularly that parroted and spun by the major players following actual events–distorts the news.

For instance, until today I had no idea that the print chatter seemed to concede that Sen. Joseph Lieberman's primary defeat and the foiled British airline plot aggregated into positive PR for the Republicans on Iraq and put a fresh coat on their "tough on terror" facade.

Silly, isolated me–here I thought bringing up those issues might reflect badly on the party responsible for handling them both. Good thing Dick Cheney and his band of merry rogues have been making the media rounds to set news consumers straight. Because quite plainly, this business with religious kooks trying to blow up airliners with sports drinks and disposable cameras was really just an elaborate endorsement of more intrusive domestic eavesdropping.

But left only with the sinkhole that is network news, all I got was that Americans are finally being asked to offer up a tangible sacrifice to fight the war on terrorism–by relinquishing their toiletries to our fine transportation security professionals before going airborne. (Though I did manage to total my car the day before I was due to drive out here–rest in peace, dear, sweet Silver Bullet–at least I didn't end up flying; for if some ham-handed screener had tried to confiscate my SPF 45 or my three-quarters-full bottle of my signature Dior perfume, I just may have snapped.)

Of course, I also gleaned that Dubya made some cringe-worthy generalization on fighting "Islamic fascism" and, like, OMG, one of the would-be terrorists was a WOMAN!

To top it off, we've now got Katie Couric claiming the people have spoken, and they want the network evening news to be twice as long as its current half hour. (Strike another one against this still rather beguiling notion of mandatory voting.)

If that weren't indication enough we're in for a journalistic jewel when Katie takes the CBS helm in a few weeks, she's also alluding to including an adaptation of that dreaded scourge of local newspaper opinion pages, "a regular segment for people to give their opinions." Seriously, if I want to hear what some random jackass has to say about the events of the day, I'll ask one of the many I see on the street–is it really so much to ask that people given interview time on national news broadcasts actually have some tangible, verifiable reason we should treat their opinions as informed or particularly noteworthy? Ordinary people have the entire Internet.

But in one bright spot on the current-event horizon, your friend and mine, Tucker Carlson, is finally going to rock that bow tie like it's meant to be rocked–by serving a stint as a prancing douchebag on "Dancing With the Stars." Perhaps there's hope for the future of political punditry after all.