Give Peggy Noonan credit: She's not going to let a mere heat-based hallucination deter her columnizing. Indeed, in today's Wall Street Journal, she draws back the curtain on the workings of her own, uhm, gelatinous muse to demonstrate a causal relationship:

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the humidity [is] just high enough that you feel like you're walking through pleasantly warm gelatin as you walk along the streets. A good time for a general political overview, I say.

Hear, hear! A good time, too, to administer transitions as though you're in the lightning-round of Password:

. . . half the country would be relieved to have a lazy president as he'd do less and make us less nervous.

And there is Iraq.

So there is! But what of. . .the bookends of terror? Let Peggy, uhm, explain:

It started with terror and has ended with no-terror-since.

That's a big reason [Bush's] base is still with him, and that's why a lot of Americans, when you come right down to it, are with him.

Those are the bookends. And the great question of course is: Will the second bookend hold? Every fact of our domestic political future rests on the answer to that.

And with that settled, we're off, of course, to the next obvious transition:

A word on Mrs. Bush. Everyone knows she is popular and admired . . .

Indeed. By plasticene people with looking-glass eyes. --HOLLY MARTINS

Bookends [WSJ}