Not surprisingly, Barack Obama's "Hey, We've Got a Problem With Race in This Country" speech didn't do much to rip the Rev. Jeremiah Wright from the heavily heaving headlines, especially on cable news, where the panting ascended to greater and greater heights. Over at the notoriously conservative Fox News, the Obama-bashing on the network's morning show, Fox and Friends, got so out of hand Fox reporter Chris Wallace actually called out the morning-show's hosts. One of them, Brian Kilmeade, left the set in the face of the other two's idiocy — or maybe he fled the room because of the bedb ug infestation. More on that in a moment.

The Wright fiasco raises more than one don't-go-there topic — religion, for one. It seems discordant for religious nutters on the left to make so many heads explode after several decades of foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay, anti-Semitic, misogynist rhetoric from the religious right has caused nothing more than a very heavy sigh from the body politic. Pat Robertson, who famously conc urred with fellow lunatic Jerry Falwell when the man blamed gays and feminists for 9 /11, was a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, and is still trotted out to get the conservative viewpoint on many cable news shows, where he's often countered by some center-left Democratic Party hack. I await the day when the news shows bring on Noam Chomsky to get the liberal viewpoint, since that would at least be more equivalent to Robertson than the B ob Shrums and Paul Begalas who usually serve the purpose.

Hell, maybe these millennial preachers are right. Maybe we are in the End Times. Last week's headlines certainly read that way. In India, millions may face famine as a plague of rats devoured the rice crop. Locally, we saw yet another fatal attack in the ongoing war that sting rays have declared against humanity, which they opened Pearl Harbor-like by sneak-attacking the Crocodile Hunter. And as mentioned previously, in the Fox News newsroom, a horde of bedbugs fed on the blood of Rupert Murdoch's minions, with a trail of parasites leading to the residence of one Fox News employee and what an exterminator called the worst infestation of the insect he had seen in his 25-year career.

The signs are everywhere, to those attuned enough to see them. But maybe they don't bespeak the rapture. Last week, after all, was also the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, the Big Dumb. (The week also saw the milestone of 4,000 American soldiers dead, but hey, who's counting?) The benchmark was celebrated with a typically bizarre, Opposite Day speech by our president, in which the war was a stunning success. Also, the week was characterized by the sort of Monday morning quarterbacking from the punditry that often leaves me reaching for a Kleenex to clean the blood shooting from my eyes. My favorite was MSNBC's Tucker Carlson's claim that before the war, he couldn't find three people out of 300 million who said we wouldn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But Carlson is right, in a way, if only in revealing that the press didn't look too hard. Five years later, the press' hard-on for war in the lead-up to the invasion still leaves me a bit nauseous. Hell, last Friday, the day after Carlson's ridiculous statement on Morning Joe, the same show had on The Washington Post's allegedly liberal columnist Richard Cohen, who wrote about Colin Powell's United Nations speech a month before the invasion. "This is where Colin Powell brought us all yesterday," Cohen argued. "The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise."

Well, I'm pretty smart, and I don't speak French. Why did Cohen and his ilk take the Bush administration at its word despite the group's proven untrustworthiness? I recall seeing Powell's speech. I saw the cartoon drawings of "mobile weapons labs." I saw the satellite pictures of buildings that Powell claimed were weapons factories. I saw the vial of American-made anthrax Powell held up as an example of what Hussein had. I recall thinking what a vacuous charade the whole thing had been, and then nearly falling out of my chair as CNN cut back to Wolf Blitzer, who breathlessly reported on the powerful case for war that had just been made.

How the hell are people like Cohen and Blitzer so wrong, so often and still gainfully employed as anchors and opinion columnists? Perhaps the Washington press is, like Washington politicians, easily corruptible after too much time in D.C. Maybe that's Cohen's problem — too much time inside the Beltway has caused his brain to rot. In any case, we ought to start keeping better track of how credulous these jokers are in their reporting and how correct they are in their predictions. Those who prove too gullible or wrong should be subject to serious punishment — public castration, maybe. That way, the only people left in political journalism would be the ones with balls.

Send rumors of war to Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com.