“Archduke Ferdinand found alive: World War unnecessary.” The spoof headline from the 1930s neatly sums up the attitude of the baying pack of journalistic hounds who have been on the hopeful trail of presidential wrongdoing since my last look at the media in mid-May. After a month of attending–though only with half an ear–to the incessant self-questioning of pundits and reporters about the possibilities of distributing blame for the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, I could take it no longer and left the country for a month in Central America, almost out of range of the media’s agonizing. When I came back, the media were still discussing the possibilities of distributing blame for the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, but had narrowed their focus to the possibilities of distributing blame for the specific assertion in the last State of the Union Address that British intelligence suspected Saddam Hussein of having tried to get uranium from Niger.

In Central America the possibilities of distributing blame for the missing WMD were not a big topic of conversation. There was, however, considerable interest in the question of whether or not America’s president had engineered the September 11th attacks on America for partisan advantage, so I guess you can say this for the American media to date: at least they (mostly) confine their scandal-hunt to the upper, more genteel slopes of Conspiracy Mountain. Another example of their refinement, perhaps, was the care with which these highly educated journalists pronounced Niger after the