Until just recently, the expectations have indeed been low for Huckabee. He is more famous for losing more than 100 pounds than for any towering political accomplishment. But he is an ordained Baptist minister, and Romney is a Mormon -- a member of a church that some conservative Christians consider heretical. Huckabee has presented himself as the un-Mormon.

Pardon me for saying so, but that is the chief difference between the two. On about all the social issues you can name -- abortion, stem cells, gun control -- Huckabee and Romney are in sync. So their religious differences are not about morality. They are about belief -- religious belief, precisely the issue that is not supposed to matter in this country. Huckabee, though, clearly thinks it ought to.

I would have some sympathy for Hillary, but she did this to herself. The heat she's taking all goes back to her Iraq war vote -- a callous, opportunistic, immensely cynical vote that has rightly returned to haunt her. There's simply no way she can run from it, and early on she exacerbated the matter by refusing to even acknowledge or denounce her own stupendous wrongheadedness. Which was another strategic misstep -- running a general election campaign before the primaries; dancing with the Right when it was the Left that had brung her -- and her "inept response" to the blowback is to rip into a thoughtful opponent's integrity -- for advertised "fun."

Through their ethics scandals, Republicans in Washington long ago began making the word conservative synonymous with the term corrupt. Surprisingly, though, it is a group of Democrats that is cementing this definitional conversion for good.

A report prepared for the Democratic majority on the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate warns that without a significant change of course in Iraq, the long-term cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could head into the vicinity of $3.5 trillion. The vast majority of those expenses would be for Iraq.

Priorities don’t get much more twisted. A country that can’t find the money to provide health coverage for its children, or to rebuild the city of New Orleans, or to create a first-class public school system, is flushing whole generations worth of cash into the bottomless pit of a failed and endless war.

It is not surprising that the NIE’s authors make a point of saying up front (in bold type) “This NIE does not (italics in original) assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.”

This, of course, pulls out the rug from under Cheney’s claim of a “fairly robust new nuclear program” in Iran, and President Bush’s inaccurate assertion that Iranian leaders have even admitted they are developing nuclear weapons.