That was then, and this is now. Such disrespect, such distrust! Even in the pages of what is supposed to be the greatest newspaper in the world.

One of the burdens I impose on myself in order to remain a fair-minded journalist and to be aware of what the Other Side is thinking is I force myself to read the New York Times every day. Another reason for doing this of course is that my sacrifice relieves you, my loyal readers, of having to undertake such an onerous task.

Just this morning, as wars clouds gather and our boys and girls in the field need all the support we can give them, that newspaper actually sold several FULL-PAGE ads to various groups of alleged Americans who are opposed to the war.

This, in the so-called, alleged "newspaper of record." Such disrespect, such distrust! (The most offensive of the ads showed a picture of Osama bin Laden posed like Uncle Sam in the famous recruitment poster with a stern face and his finger pointed straight out at us, saying, "I want YOU to invade Iraq!" Can you imagine such a thing being allowed into your local paper? I don’t think so.)

To such a level has the so-called alleged American intelligentsia sunk after lo these many decades of permissive non-judgmental anti-Christian secular humanism.

Now, please turn your attention to the illustration at the top of the page showing the distribution of college-educated people in the President’s home state. Note the arrow which I had our illustrator insert in this map that comes from the state data center at Texas A&M University. The arrow, beloved readers, points to my own home county and my city, Midland, in the heart of the vast but oil-rich Permian Basin region of Far West Texas.

Please notice the high level of education in my and the President’s home county.

How, you may ask, can such a remote location have such a high level of education? And how, you disrespectful secular humanists WILL ask, could such a high level of education produce a George W. Bush.

The answer is simple.

There is education and there is education. You may be SURE that more than a few of those highly educated people in Midland achieved their intellectual standing thanks to four years’ attendance at such bastions of respectful, obedient thinking as Abilene Christian University (just a few hundred miles up Interstate 20 from Midland), Baylor (Baptist) University in Waco, and of course the already-mentioned heart of Texas intellectual progress, Texas A&M University. (Some of our local children of course are also products of the University of Texas, but Austin is now in such a grip of aging hippies, filthy rich computer moguls, drunken musicians, and antique socialists who've fallen in love with Texas's beloved Hill Country that that once-fine institution is little more than a kind of large-scale Harvard West, a more-or-less London School of Marxist Economics on the Balcones Fault.)

Now. It is true that our President attended none of those schools but was in fact shipped off to the East Coast by his upwardly mobile parents. Any clear-thinking person can see from George W. Bush’s words and deeds that he by some miracle escaped unscathed from that hotbed of Heathen Free Thinkers, Lefty Economists, and Dope-smoking, Gender-bending Radical Sociologists.

It took us eight years to find out what that bunch of subversive East Coast revolutionaries could do to a perfectly nice boy from Arkansas once they got him in their mealy-mouthed grasp: They turned him into a dope-inhaling, fellatio-loving (pardon my language), hen-pecked Democrat, faster than you can say W.E.B. Dubois.

There’s no doubt that we owe George W. Bush’s narrow escape from their influence to his good Midland up-bringing and lots of hard work and long talks from his clear-headed mama, herself a product of Ashley Hall, one of the world’s finest finishing schools in Charleston, South Carolina.

Escape he did and now here we are years later with this unbespoilt, righteous man as the leader of our country, speaking God’s own Truth every day and caring not a whit what those ad-buying upstarts with all those degrees after their names think, not to mention their foreign card-carrying counterparts in so-called alleged "countries" such as France, India, and China.

What a lonely, difficult vigil that brave Midland boy keeps now, as he, alone and isolated from the rest of the so-called alleged "civilized" world, steers the United States further on down the lonely road of Liberty and Justice and the Pursuit of Happiness for all the oppressed peoples of the world!

How bad are things? How lonely and difficult is his vigil?

I have saved the worst for last.

The ads I mentioned above that come from all sorts of scurrilous do-good organizations are bad enough.

Now, I give you Camille Paglia. If you are not familiar with Miss Paglia’s work, I need only say that she is 1) an academic who 2) made her infamous name 3) in the field of so-called alleged "gender studies" (that being the area of so-called alleged academic thought that tries to convince the Boy Scouts of America that they should allow homosexuals into their patriotic ranks). Do I need to also go into the significance of the fact that Miss Paglia’s own significant other is a person who in fact shares her gender? I don’t think so.

Here comes the capper, dear readers, showing the kind of American intelligentsia that the President has to fight every day, every minute.

Recently, Miss Paglia in a publicly published interview, capped off her incisive analysis of what I know she thinks of as the Big American Mess with the following unashamedly superstitious, paganistic remarks. I give her the last word in this column, because what could I say, what need I say, after this? Miss Paglia:

"As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas -- the president's home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was "weeks, not months" away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas… Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you're doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he'd call it off."