While, for instance, right-wing scribblers were succumbing to the vapors because of one over-the-top preacher's exercising of all three guarantees of the First Amendment, we were "celebrating" the fifth anniversary of an illegal, anticonstitutional, wholly unAmerican foreign war. This, however, merited no similar reactionary dread.

The disproportionality was stunningly obscene, as were its objects of timid affection. 

You want obscene? Our -- their -- president offered that yesterday in spades when he insisted once again that "removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision," without noting once again its dreadfully wrongful costs in human and fiscal treasure. 

Obscene? How about the vice president's considered response to ABC News' observation that two-thirds of his citizenry believe the war was never worth waging: "So?"

Obscene? How about about John McCain's latest Baghdad-Boblike pronouncement that we're on the jolly good "precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism." Why, to hear you folks whine, one would think this marvelous little war against an amorphous ideology and its centuries-old tactics is dragging on with no end in sight.

Obscene? Pshaw. That -- wretched unAmericanism, presidential recalcitrance, vice-presidential debauchery and would-be presidential imbecility -- is but the stuff of negligible nothings.

Hence it gets a pass from our right-wing scribblers. They have bigger and far more ominous fish to fry; namely, that one, aforementioned preacher who once exercised his First Amendment guarantees in warning that God may indeed "damn" this country if it didn't stop acting more like Beelzebub than Jesus.

With tin foil molded properly on pate, with incense burning and adorned by a Cross, two Stars of David and several cloves of garlic, I journeyed yesterday to the Dark Side, just to take a confirmational peek at what the 15th-century minds of right-wing hysteria were likely saying. And sure enough, there it was, splattered all over the screen, in all its eerie irrelevance and screaming disproportionality.

One of this preacher's parishioners, you see -- I know, this is shocking, but be of strong heart, hale friend -- had heard the preacher's message in his parish and now seeks to convert its hate into love, its disunity into fellowship, its hopelessness into potential. 

The Republic is doomed.

One of the distaff scribblers at Townhall [1], for example, wrote of the parishioner's speechifying: "Deflect, deflect, deflect.... He cannot disown Wright? Really? This rationale makes no sense to me." Thank you, dear lady, for affirming the clinically manifest.

But I quickly tired of Townhall's third-rate second-rateness so I scurried over to the more sophisticated banality of National Review -- where I found our good friend, the liberal-fascist-fighting Jonah Goldberg, sputtering in apoplectic regret [2] that "Obamaniacs think conservatives just don't get it, that we're mired in the past, that we are motivated by old passions and bigotries." Like, uh, blindingly lily-white conservatism?

And there was Byron York, who perhaps you recall has made a living out of astonishingly proving that the liberal New York Times is liberal. Byron's latest insight was this: "What was surprising, for me, was the number of Obama supporters I spoke to afterward who not only thought the speech was great but also didn't see anything particularly wrong with the 'controversial' remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright." In other words, and quite unsurprising, disproportionality met proportionality and was utterly dumbfounded.

Yet let me be not too harsh, for there are thinking conservatives out there. And perhaps the most thoughtful is Andrew Sullivan, who wrote on his own site [3]: "This searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime.... I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy ... is an historic opportunity.... I love this country. I don't remember loving it or hoping more from it than today."

So see? The conservative bug isn't lethal to the conservative mind in every way and with every conservative. And given Mr. Sullivan's brand of it, I don't remember loving it or hoping more from it than yesterday.