An ABC News-Washington Post poll released Sunday:

Percentage of Americans who disapprove of Bush administation policy in Iraq: 51
Percentage who approve: 47
Percentage who think Bush has made the US more prosperous: less than 10
Percentage who say Bush cannot understand their problems: 58
Percentage who disapprove of Bush's handling of the economy: 53
Percentage who think the economy is more important than terrorism as an issue: 62

I think the most important statistic in this set is that 58% say Bush cannot understand their problems. All the folksy Texas malapropisms in the world have not been able to convince ordinary Americans that this prince from a Northeast finance and political dynasty is one of them. What gave it away? It wasn't the huge tax giveaways to the rich. Americans seldom mind rich people getting breaks, since they all plan on being rich themselves one day. It was that princes can get consumed by foreign wars in distant places, but ordinary Americans can seldom focus on such things longer than a year or two, more especially when their economic situation is faltering. Bush is giving away their money to foreigners, and sacrificing their boys to a foreign adventure. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction has demonstrated to people that it hadn't been necessary to the country's defense. And there is only one word in the lexicon of ordinary Americans for an expensive foreign war that didn't need to be fought, and that is boondoggle.

The idea that anything so trivial as a made-for-TV mockumentary might harm [Ronald Reagan's] reputation is ludicrous. Theodore Roosevelt suffered much worse damage, historiographically speaking, in 1931, when the biographer Henry Pringle depicted him as an overgrown bully. Pringle's book is still in print, but has not stopped T. R. from settling at No. 4 on several recent scholarly surveys of the greatest presidents. And John F. Kennedy, who has been repeatedly portrayed on television as a Mafia stooge, a serial bimbophile and the plotter of Marilyn Monroe's murder (or was that some other Kennedy?) still shines in American memory.

What Mr. Reagan did as president — the big, enduring things: restoring national pride, rebuilding the military, refiring the economy, rearming Western Europe, and above all, forcing Soviet Communism to self-destruct — cannot be argued away. Neither, it might be added, can his more serious derelictions, such as the bartering of arms for hostages, and (yes) his lack of any particular sympathy for the victims of AIDS. The writers of CBS's canceled miniseries have invented a bit of dialogue to the latter effect, but historians might more seriously ponder Mr. Reagan's actual remarks, including, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

Behind the soft exterior, I repeat, was hard metal, and not all of him was nice. But more of him was nice than is normal in men that powerful. Even in ruminations like the above, and in the very funny stories he told (many of them politically incorrect), there was never any hint of malice. Well, maybe there was, when he leveled his wit against the one thing he really did hate: totalitarianism. Aides cringed at plenary sessions with Mr. Gorbachev as Mr. Reagan chucklingly told (again and again and again) jokes that ridiculed everything the Soviet leader stood for. It was insensitive, it was moral, and it was magnificent.

What he did, he did out of conviction, not caring how his actions might be perceived, then or now. Those protesting the reported slurs and inaccuracies of CBS's canceled miniseries forget that before he was afflicted by Alzheimer's, and particularly during the early years of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was lampooned with a savagery that Bill Clinton might feel happy to have escaped.

I remember Garry Trudeau drawing a series of "Doonesbury" cartoons, with explorers scouting a sterile landscape, under the rubric, "In Search of Reagan's Brain." Paul Slansky published a devastating book, "The Clothes Have No Emperor," that consisted almost entirely of presidential quotations as goofy as any emanating from the present White House. And on the private yet world-encompassing grapevine used by heads of state to convey their true feelings about one another, Mr. Reagan was a subject of such French contempt that his national security adviser flew secretly to Paris to plead with President François Mitterrand to stop making plaisanteries about le cow-boy in the White House.

It is a matter of record that President Mitterrand came to admire Mr. Reagan, as most sophisticates did when they got past what one Brit called "the corn barrier." He was especially impressed with Mr. Reagan's notion de l'état, his dignified self-identification with all that was strong in the American state.

When I published my biography of Ronald Reagan, my confession that I found him to be, on first acquaintance, "an apparent airhead," caused screams of outrage among his acolytes. The fact that the book was narratively designed to prove the author wrong — that Mr. Reagan was, for all his emotional coolness and often dumbfounding cultural ignorance, a visionary statesman — did not soothe the incense-swingers.

Over the past two years, the Bush administration has inspired one of the more stimulating scavenger hunts in recent memory -- the search for the Ur-theorist of its bold foreign policy initiatives. With each new turn another name has emerged. "Regime change" gave us the political philosopher Leo Strauss. The "shock and awe" campaign brought forth the Cold War calculations of military strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Hints of follow-up aggression against Syria and North Korea had some consulting Trotsky's writings on "permanent revolution."

A likelier candidate might be Richard Pipes, the eminent historian of Russia who two decades ago interrupted a thriving career as a Harvard professor to help the Reagan administration articulate an assertive foreign policy that strikingly prefigured the "Bush doctrine" of today.

Drawing on themes he first explored as a scholar in the 1950s and `60s -- in particular, the brutal top-down nature of Russian power and its ultimate fragility -- Pipes wrote hardline policy memos that gave impetus to the "second Cold War" of the late 1970s and `80s in which negotiation with the USSR was replaced by political confrontation. His influence peaked in 1981-82 when, as an official at the National Security Council, he helped steer Ronald Reagan toward the belief that the Soviet regime could and must be defeated....

All this history seems to point in one direction. Does Pipes mean to say the "second Cold War" was in fact a rehearsal for the "war on terror"?

He is carefully agnostic on the matter. But the connection is hard to ignore. "If your view is that the problems the United States faces today are analogous to those of the Cold War, that you face an organized opponent with a radically different worldview," says [Russian expert Stephen] Sestanovich, "you can then see some similarities between a comprehensive strategy to get at that worldview that was developed by Pipes during the Cold War and the strategy the Bush administration has developed since 9/ 11."

It is all the more remarkable, then, that Pipes has some misgivings about the most recent application, in Iraq, of the approach he helped formulate. "I think the war was correct -- destroying this invasive evil. But beyond this I think they're too ambitious," he says.

He bluntly dismisses the promise of a democratic Iraq -- "impossible, a fantasy" -- citing obstacles similar to Russia's. "Democracy requires, among other things, individualism -- the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run."

What about the constitution soon to be written in Baghdad? Pipes laughs. "Stalin had a wonderful constitution, the most perfect constitution in the world. There's a lot of naivete in that. I should think we'd be satisfied with some kind of stability, preventing Saddam Hussein from coming back. It's fantastic that we haven't caught this man. He sits there somewhere."

It is not lost on Pipes that his criticism goes directly to the judgment of the Bush team, conservatives like himself, in some cases former colleagues, most prominently Team B's own Wolfowitz. "Paul didn't have much education in history," Pipes says. "It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist. Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures."

The administration official with whom Pipes is most in sympathy is its resident Russian expert, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. "She came to see me after I left Washington in 1983," Pipes says, though he has not heard from her since. Perhaps now that her portfolio has been expanded, the call will come.

The Zionist ideal is perhaps best captured in a slogan of Israel Zangwill, an early Zionist, who described Palestine as "a land without a people for a people without a land." The idea is that the Jews were a "people without a land" in the sense of being a minority wherever they lived, hence vulnerable to persecution. Palestine, in turn, was a "land without a people" in the sense of being a barren land without significant population, hence open to redemption by Jewish settlement and labor. Zionism, then, aimed to secure Jewish ownership of and sovereignty over Palestine, thereby saving the Jews from destruction, and facilitating their return to their ancestral homeland. The consummation of this wish was the establishment in May 1948 of the State of Israel.

The crucial claim at the center of Said's work is that for all of its redemptive power in Western eyes, Zionism was in fact a form of Orientalism-that is, an ideology of conquest and dispossession. For contrary to Zionist convictions, Palestine was not a "land without a people," but a land with one-namely the Palestinians, who outnumbered and out-owned the Zionist settlers until the very eve of Israel's creation. Given this, the project of creating a specifically Jewish state in (or throughout) Palestine was bound to lead to the dispossession or even destruction of the Palestinians, a fact that indicts Zionism of a grave injustice. On this view, the relationship between Orientalism, the Zionists and the Palestinians is analogous to that between Manifest Destiny, the American settlers, and the destruction of the Native Americans. In both cases, a messianic religious vision derived from the Old Testament justified the conquest and dispossession of an indigenous ethnic group, relegating them to the status of second-class citizens, refugees, and in the worst case, death. And in both cases, the conquerors engaged in conquest while cynically playing the role of victims: in the American case by exploiting the "Buffalo Bill" mythology; in the Zionist case by "playing the Holocaust card." The complex interaction of Zionism and Orientalism in this thesis is what I'm calling Zionist Orientalism.

The Zionist Orientalist thesis involves a complex and controversial set of claims, almost every one of which may legitimately be disputed. Precisely because it is complex, however, and difficult to dispute in a soundbite culture, defenders of Israel have often (in fact, typically) taken the path of least resistance in dealing with it, making reflexive charges of "anti-Semitism" against its proponents in lieu of dealing with their arguments. We see a succinct example of this in a recent essay by the Israeli writer Hillel Halkin:

One cannot be against Israel or Zionism, as opposed to this or that Israeli policy or Zionist position, without being anti-Semitic. Israel is the state of the Jews. Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a state. To defame Israel is to defame the Jews. To wish it never existed, or would cease to exist, is to wish to destroy the Jews.

Despite its syllogism-like appearance, Halkin's argument is little more than an exercise in obfuscation. First, Zionism is not merely "the belief that the Jews should have a state"; it is the belief that the Jews should have had a Jewish state in a place where the majority population was not Jewish-a difficulty Halkin neither addresses nor even acknowledges. Secondly, to reject Zionism is not to "defame" anyone or anything; it is to reject its principles, something that can surely come from a well-intentioned commitment to incompatible principles. (Nor in any case is "Israel" to be so blithely equated with "the Jews.") Thirdly, "to wish Israel never to have existed" is not "to wish to destroy the Jews" so long as one thinks that there were other viable options for saving them. And it's an open question whether there were. Finally, "to wish that Israel cease to exist" is ambiguous. In its non-malevolent sense, it refers not to a wish to harm Jews, but to a wish to do away with the specifically Jewish character of the Israeli legal system so as to promote a secular as opposed to sectarian conception of citizenship. In short, whatever the merits or demerits of the anti-Zionist position, no argument like Halkin's counts as a legitimate response to it. The deficiencies of the argument, however, have done nothing to weaken its currency, and one regularly finds pro-Israeli polemicists using it in brazen attempts at insult and defamation.

As with the Arab/Muslim case, the "highbrow" Zionist literature finds its debased counterpart at the middle- and low-brow levels, where we find habitual comparisons of Arabs and Muslims to predatory and scavenging animals, wild rumor and innuendo about Arab/Muslim treachery, and casual proposals made for the forcible expulsion and even extermination of the Palestinians. Here, too, the connection between "high-brow" and "low-brow" is attenuated but real, as is the need for the corresponding moral judgment.

So: On the one hand, we have the very real and menacing phenomenon of Muslim anti-Semitism, discussed principally by the Jews targeted by it, but ignored or even brusquely dismissed as a Zionist ploy by the wider Arab/Muslim community. On the other hand, we have the equally real and dehumanizing phenomenon of Orientalism, discussed principally by Arabs and Muslims, but contemptuously dismissed as a fig-leaf for anti-Semitism by pro-Israeli Jews. Each side stands indicted by the other, and each side uses its indictment-fallaciously-to discredit the claims of the other. Further, each side has a powerful investment in the evasion of facts identified by the other side. And each resists, with furious vehemence, the attempt to integrate both sets of facts into a single coherent account. Finally, each side uses supercharged moral rhetoric to discredit and disarm opponents, while seeking to coerce the assent of the as-yet uncommitted.

The key to understanding the vicious cycle at work here, I think, is to see that the mechanism behind it is each side's fear of discovering that its most cherished beliefs might be "stained in sin." What Arabs and Muslims fear is the discovery that anti-Semitism might really turn out to be an intrinsic feature of Islamic theology rather than a Christian import. What Zionists fear is the discovery that Zionism might really be an ideology of conquest and dispossession on par with Manifest Destiny-that the Palestinians are, to put it somewhat perversely, the Cherokees of Israel (perverse because the Cherokees were thought by the American settlers to be one of the lost tribes of Israel!). The fear in both cases speaks to deep questions of identity. Arabs and Muslims, even relatively secular ones, have for decades invested their moral identities in mythologies about the "glories of Islam." And Jews, even apolitical non-Israelis, have equally invested themselves in mythologies about Zionism and Israel. Each side sees the very thought of public discussion of its "sore points" as an existential threat to identity. The result is a discourse structured by evasion and fear, compensated for by blackmail and recrimination.

If I'm right about this, the key to breaking the cycle may well be to press each issue against the side that least wants to deal with it, demanding that each side cease its evasions of fundamental issues.

Though there always will be soldiers and sailors"seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's mouth," it seems that the vainglory of individual commanders has lately become less dangerous in war, as improvements in the technology of communications and surveillance have increased the ability of commanders to control subordinates. But there is a continuing danger from an institutionalized vainglory. Sometimes a branch of the military may try to maximize its opportunity for glory, turning its back on other less glamorous tasks that are really needed....

Just as the Royal Navy preferred "hunting" to convoy duty in World War I, and the Allied air forces preferred strategic bombing to ground support in World War II, and the cavalry preferred independent action to the support of infantry in the Civil War, so in recent years the United States Army has preferred to plan for fighting battles without worrying about how to govern conquered territory. The Army in World War II had an effective Division of Military Government. It was established in the Office of the Provost Marshall in July 1942, long before there were any captured Axis territories to govern. It was this division and the personnel whom it trained at the Charlottesville School of Military Government that made it possible for the United States later to govern Japan and parts of Germany and Italy in an orderly way, without encountering widespread looting, rioting, or guerrilla attacks.

In the years after the war, responsibility for military government was relocated in the Civil Affairs branch of the Army. Support for this branch was allowed to dwindle, and Civil Affairs survived several attempts to disband it as a separate unit, until in 1987 it finally found a home in the Special Operations Command. There it had to fight off attempts to divert its remaining funds and personnel slots to Special Forces. At the end of the 1980s, an Army-commissioned report, in a chapter called "Pruning Non-Essentials," asked the questions "Should 7,000 reservists continue to be trained to govern occupied nations? Is there a need for those trained in the administration of art, archives, and monuments to preserve the culture of occupied territories?"[3] Civil Affairs became known as a dead end for career officers.

There is now just one active-duty Civil Affairs unit, the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion (Airborne), headquartered at Fort Bragg; the remaining 95 percent of Civil Affairs personnel are reservists. In Afghanistan there are now only about two hundred Civil Affairs personnel, as compared with about 15,000 military government soldiers in the American Zone of Germany soon after the German surrender in World War II. A colonel (not in Civil Affairs) who is just back from Iraq tells me that there are about two thousand Civil Affairs officers there (not all in military government), leaving few anywhere else, and that although they are doing good work, there are not nearly enough of them. Unfortunately the Defense Department's priorities do not seem to have changed. Later this year it plans to close the ten-year-old Peacekeeping Institute of the Army War College

"America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people," said President Bush (news - web sites) to a joint session of the Congress of the Philippines last week. "Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule."

Unfortunately, we then killed more than 200,000 Filipinos. Almost all of the dead were civilians, killed in the two years after we liberated them from the Spanish in 1898. One of our generals there, a cranky Civil War veteran named Jacob Smith, told his men: "I wish you to kill and burn ... I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."

"How young?" asked Maj. Waller Tazewell Waller (cq) of the U.S. Marines. "Ten years and up," said Gen. Smith.

None of this was secret at the time. American soldiers -- we sent 70,000 there after the Spanish colonial authority surrendered when Commodore George Dewey's fleet sailed into Manila Harbor -- wrote of the details in letters to hometown newspapers. Here are samples quoted in a new book, "Flyboys," by James Bradley:

"We bombarded a place called Malabon, and then went in and killed every native we met, men, women and children" ... "This shooting human beings is a 'hot game' and beats rabbit hunting all to pieces" ... "Picking off niggers in the water is more fun than a turkey shoot" ... "I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger. Tell all my inquiring friends that I am doing everything I can for Old Glory and for America I love so well."

Back in Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt was calling that "the most glorious war in our nation's history." The Filipino victims he dismissed as "a syndicate of Chinese half-breeds."

George W. Bush knows all this. At Yale, he got a B in History 35, a study of that era, taught by John Morton Blum, a biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. And if he has forgotten, he could look up some of it in Bradley's book. This president's father, Lt. George H.W. Bush, U.S. Navy (news - web sites), is a hero of "Flyboys" (and of a CNN documentary with the same title), which includes a frightening section on American anti-Asian attitudes and Japanese anti-American and anti-Christian attitudes that fed slaughter, massacre and even cannibalism in World War II.

We are, more often than not, relatively decent people in war and occupation. The Spanish rulers of the 7,000 islands of the Philippines were worse than the Americans, and there was a significant anti-war movement at home between 1899 and 1902. On July Fourth of that year, Roosevelt declared victory, after 4,234 Americans were killed in guerrilla attacks during the first three years of occupation. Mark Twain proposed that the stripes of Old Glory should be black and red. Gen. Smith was court-martialed and Maj. Waller tried (and acquitted) on murder charges. During Smith's court-martial, one of his aides said, "If people know what a thieving, treacherous, worthless bunch of scoundrels these Filipinos are, they would think differently."

That quote, in Stanley Karnow's 1989 book, "In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines," illustrates one of the more important historical lessons of occupation: Not only do the occupied inevitably come to hate the occupiers, the occupiers come to hate the occupied. Last Wednesday, a New York Times story by John Tierney -- the headline began "Baffled Occupiers ..." -- quoted a GI watching over a Baghdad market as saying: "If you really want to know, I'm sick of being in a country where lying is the national pastime."

As in the United States, many of the books that have recently found their way to the top of German bestseller lists concern Sept. 11, 2001. Unlike those in the United States, many of them also argue that the Bush administration was responsible for Sept. 11. One book, by a former German government minister, argues that the planes that hit the World Trade Center may have been secretly steered from the ground. Another — translated from the French and titled "The Appalling Lie" — says that the Pentagon was never hit by a plane at all but was instead deliberately blown up with a bomb. Germany's establishment press has studiously debunked these theories, to little avail: Recently, an opinion poll showed that one in five Germans believe them.

But if German bestseller lists reveal a German reassessment of the United States, they have also in recent years revealed an even more vigorous German reassessment of Germany. Not one but two books have become popular through their descriptions of the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, which resulted in fires that caused tens of thousands of deaths. One of the authors used the word "crematoria" to describe the burning buildings, described the Allied bomber pilots as the equivalents of Nazi police units that murdered Jews and concluded by wondering whether Winston Churchill, who ordered the bombings, ought to have been condemned as a war criminal.

These books have also been effective: According to another opinion poll, more than a third of the Germans now think of themselves as "victims" of the Second World War — just like the Jews. Nor has this new interpretation of history remained limited to books. Lately momentum has gathered behind a movement to build a new museum in Berlin dedicated to Germans expelled from their homes at the end of the war — just like the Holocaust museum. It's not wrong for Germans to remember their relatives who suffered, but the tone of the campaigners is disturbing, because they seem, at times, almost to forget why the war started in the first place. Their leader, for example, is the daughter of a Wehrmacht officer, and was born in occupied Poland. Tragically, she was expelled from her childhood home when German troops were defeated — the adverb "tragically" representing a certain point of view here, not an objective observation.

That point of view, always popular on the far right of the German political spectrum, has spread rapidly leftward in recent years, attracting supporters among Social Democrats, bank presidents and others. Not everybody agrees by any means, but the subject is shockingly raw, even difficult to discuss politely. As I can attest, there are German politicians who will shout down other guests at dinner parties if their right to victimhood is questioned too harshly.

It is my guess that these things are related: It cannot be an accident that a wave of unusually virulent, even irrational anti-Americanism has peaked just as Germans have begun, for the first time since the war, to talk about their past in a new way. Germany is reassessing its place in Europe, its role in the world, its postwar subordination to the United States. Some of the recalcitrance we've seen in Germany during the past year has been genuine opposition to the war in Iraq and genuine dislike of President Bush and what he is thought to stand for. But some reflects a deeper change. Germans, or at least some of them, no longer want to apologize for the 20th century. Germans, or at least some of them, no longer want to accept the political leadership of the United States. Just look at the bestseller lists for proof.

On October 14, the Senate unanimously passed America's first serious anti-genetic discrimination bill, which now goes to the House for consideration. The measure would forbid discrimination by insurers, employers and others based on genetic background or identity, just as current protections cover workplace or financial bias because of race, religion and national origin.

All eyes are now on the House. If the bill does pass the House, it is expected to receive an enthusiastic signature from President George Bush. If anti-gene-lining legislation succeeds, it would mark the first time America has preemptively checked an entire category of discrimination before society accumulates thousands of victims. As such, we are confronting our future before a dismal new legacy is created.

In so doing, our nation must also confront the dismal legacy of American eugenics, where genetic information was twisted and distorted into an official crusade to create a white, master blond-haired and blue-eyed Nordic race. In the process, the reproductive ability of all other peoples who did not resemble this Nordic ideal would be eliminated.

It took me and some fifty researchers two years, delving through dozens of archives to retrieve some 50,000 pages of documentation to connect the dots for my book War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. The story is an ugly one.

In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics enshrined as national policy with enabling legislation in 27 states. These laws were ruled constitutional and the law of the land by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The method? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. But eugenicists also talked about public gas chambers and medicalized euthanasia. Indeed, doctor-organized euthanasia was sporadically practiced.

The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern Europeans, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island....

[W]hile the House ponders the anti-genetic discrimination bill to guard our future, America must also explore its own biological crimes. Society must ensure that the much needed, long overdue genie of human genetics will never return to the black days of eugenics--from whence it came.

The second great fiction of this story is the notion that Robert Novak is a "journalist." Nobody else published this story, because all six of the other reporters given the leak weighed the perceived motives of the leaker and the likely cost of publication to the country and to Plame and Wilson against the value of this hand-delivered scoop. The only person to take the bait was Novak--who published it in the Washington Post unedited, because its editorial page apparently sends his copy to the printer without reading it first. In publishing what one "senior administration official" describes as a leak "meant purely and simply for revenge," Novak even refused a request from the CIA not to reveal Plame's identity.

Novak may have acted unpatriotically but not inconsistently. He has never made any bones about the fact that he is an ideological warrior first and a journalist second, if at all. To offer one small but revealing example from a previous decade that appears to have new relevance today, let's go back to October 5, 1986, when Sandinista soldiers shot down a C-123K cargo plane ferrying weapons to the contras in southern Nicaragua. Of the four-man crew, the two American pilots were killed, but its cargo kicker, Eugene Hasenfus, also an American, survived and was captured. He revealed to the world that his entire effort had been controlled by the CIA and sanctioned by the US government, sending both into a massive panic.

The contras' man in the State Department, Elliott Abrams, took to the airwaves on the Evans & Novak program on CNN. Asked whether he could offer "categorical assurance" that Hasenfus was not connected with the government, Abrams smirked, "Absolutely, that would be illegal.... This was not in any sense a US government operation. None." This performance was a part of Abrams's plea-bargained conviction for withholding information from Congress by Iran/contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

I interviewed Novak not long after this for a too-kind profile I was writing and asked how he felt about being a pawn in Abrams's deception. His answer: He "admired" Abrams for lying to him on national television because the lie was told in the service of fighting Communism. "He had a tough job and there were lots of people out to get him," Novak averred, expressing zero regrets about misinforming his viewers. "Truth" did not even appear to enter into his calculations. There was his side and there were the other guys, period. That the Post and CNN willingly lend space to the man, knowing what they do, is another of the ongoing scandals involving journalistic standards and conservative ideological domination of the elite media.