Newsweek magazine has a special place in my mind, because it played an important role in my intellectual development from age 15 to 17.9 (when I went to college and had to pay for subscriptions myself).

Now, slightly older, I condescendingly consider it very main stream and middle brow. My idea of a Newsweek journalist is a very smart and well informed person who wonders how nearly he or she dare write the article that he or she would write for the New York Review of Books or the Economist. That is, when Newsweek gets into the game it means that people who know a lot more then I do about such matters feel they can speak frankly with middle America.

Thus I am struck by the non news reported (well asserted in Newsweek) in the cover story on Chalabi

"the neocons in the Bush cabinet, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, were ready to march on Baghdad before the World Trade Center stopped smoldering. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld were all itching to show off American strength. The rest of the government and the American people needed some persuading."

Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball feel free to glibly suggest that Bush invaded Iraq to scratch an itch, that is to show he was macho not in a blog but in Newsweek.

I feel like I just received a formal engraved invitation to a feeding frenzy.

My