Occasionally, the formulaic Saturday radio addresses by the President and his designated Democratic “responders,” provide telling glimpses of our current political follies.

This past weekend, the Democrats chose Washington State’s junior Senator, the embarrassingly inept Maria Cantwell, to deliver their partisan preachment.

In the course of her dreary address about energy policy, she revealed her underlying contempt for her fellow citizens. “America deserves more fuel-efficient cars,” she announced with peerless eloquence, and then added: “But the only way consumers are going to get more out of a tank of gas is if the president and his party help deliver votes in a narrowly divided Congress.”

In other words, hard-pressed Americans who note the high price of gas at the pump, can’t do anything for themselves to save money? We can’t purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles until the Republicans vote for new regulations forcing us to do so?

And auto designers and engineers and inventors can’t possibly create the “more fuel efficient cars” Senator Cantwell says we deserve, unless bureaucrats give the orders? The prospect of earning billions in profits by building such vehicles won’t be enough without a vote of Congress?

Senator Cantwell no doubt speaks for many of her fellow Democrats in her startling suggestion that the American people can’t be trusted—even on an important and very personal decision like buying a car – and instead need to count on politicians to make wise choices for them.

Many supporters of the so-called peace movement suggest that some dramatic shift in US policy might bring a quick end to the jihadist ferocity that claims innocent victims every day in some tortured Muslim corner of the globe. According to this logic, the brutality of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other fanatical groups represents a predictable response to American meddling in Islamic affairs. These terror apologists (or at least terror explainers) forcefully reject the now common conservative formulation that “they hate us not for what we do, but for who we are.”

In this context, any open minded observer ought to look at a New York Times report from the Gaza strip by Steven Erlanger and Hassan M. Fattah. With a May 30^th deadline, this story began: “It was 2 a.m. when masked gunmen raided Al Wafa Net in the Khan Yunis camp in Gaza where 17 young men were surfing the internet. The gunmen tied their hands, then forced them to stand at the stairs while they broke all the screens, and then the server and the television and photocopier…Then they burned all 36 computers.”

Considering the appalling poverty in Gaza, it might seem surprising that the young techies had 36 working computers to burn in the first place, but the attack only left the wretched Palestinians even more isolated from civilization and modernity. “In recent months,” the Times continued, “there have been similar attacks on music and video shops and pharmacies accused of selling Viagra, as well as on American and United Nations schools…. With the fragmentation of authority in Gaza, and its isolation, said a Gazan analyst, Taysir Mhaisin, ‘there is an increase of fundamentalism and the birth of groups believing in violence and practicing violence as a model created by bin Ladenism.’”

Amazingly, these grim developments all occurred after Israel ended its “occupation” of Gaza nearly two years ago, and forcibly removed the few thousand Jewish residents who had established homes in the God-forsaken territory. The Palestinians, in other words, achieved their professed political ends: winning a totally Jew-free piece of ocean-front real estate, and the ability to govern it on their own terms with no interference as long as they avoided cross border attacks on Israel. The result, of course, has been an almost ceaseless barrage of Palestinian rockets against the Jewish state, with an estimated 250 in the month of May alone.

And the result has also been the clear emergence of savage gangs who dedicate themselves to hitting their fellow Palestinians, not Jewish targets--- to destroying schools and drug stores and video shops and computers.

In other words, the deadly fanatics in Gaza (and elsewhere throughout the Islamic world) don’t just reject a given US or Israeli policy: they unequivocally reject the 21^st Century.

Yes, they hate us for who we are, not for what we do—and apparently hate with even greater intensity when they’re given what they say they want, like (the profoundly misguided) unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, this current War on Terror isn’t a “Clash of Civilizations” in Samuel Huntington’s phrase. It is, rather a “War Against Civilization” – launched and sustained by the crudest and cruelest barbarians on the planet.

Regular listeners to my radio show already know that I proudly nurture, indeed cherish, a long list of idiosyncrasies: the single most consistent element between my life today and my earlier incarnation as a 1960’s liberal involves my refusal to conform to convention. In that regard, it’s always great to see scientific confirmation that one of my personal quirks, frequently derided by friends and colleagues, has received unexpected scientific backing from authoritative research.

Since my college years, I’ve always avoided eating anything substantial before some significant intellectual challenge – like a big exam or, more recently a speech or TV appearance. Every day, I eat next to nothing before my radio show – limiting myself to a muffin or a piece of fruit or, at most, an early morning bowl of cereal before I finish with the broadcast (at 3 PM Pacific Time). It’s always seemed to me that the hunger associated with this habit gave me an “edge” that helped my performance – and now a new study from Yale Medical School supports that idea.

According to a fascinating article in the March, 2006 issue of Nature Neuroscience, the stimulation of hunger causes mice to process information more quickly and to retain it better – in general, making them smarter. According to the researchers, humans almost certainly experience the same connection between hunger and peak brain function.

Tamas Horvath, chairman of Yale’s comparative medicine program, analyzed the impact of ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach lining when the stomach is empty. In extensive tests with mice, the bio-chemically “hungry” mice- mice infused with ghrelin – performed substantially better than the well fed critters with normal levels of the hormone. Dr. Horvath explained: “When you are hungry, you need to focus your entire system on finding food in the environment.” This means, he told the New York Times Magazine, “we can use the hormonal discoveries to our cognitive advantage.”

He specifically concludes that when facing “a final exam or a half-day job interview,” it makes sense to “go in mildly hungry, not carbo-loaded for endurance.” In other words, there’s a solid basis for my instinctive desire to avoid big meals before some challenging task—for avoiding dinner until after an evening lecture, for instance, in order to make sure that I give the audience my best. Dr. Horvath also theorizes that the current, well documented “obesity epidemic” among American kids has “contributed to declining test scores and other educational woes.”

He doesn’t make the connection to misguided government “feeding programs” in schools, but I can’t skip the opportunity to slam these utterly misguided abuses of federal power. For years, bureaucrats and do-gooders have justified the daily provision of federally funded “free lunches” and “free breakfasts” for disadvantaged students based on the idea that these kids fare badly in school because they’re not eating properly. The new research, however, suggests that making sure kids face their morning or afternoon classes with full bellies may actually harm, rather than help, their academic performance.

It turns out that our bodies provide their own paraphrase of my favorite quote from Dr. Johnson. “The gallows doth wonderfully concentrate the mind,” he observed. Now, it turns out, that “Hunger doth wonderfully concentrate the mind” – and that stuffing kids full of food to confront the school day may damage them nearly as much as stuffing their heads full of nonsense in the classroom.

On occasion, rampant political correctness leads even the most respected, mainstream publications to run articles that resemble rollicking parody.

Consider, for example, the following headlines and opening paragraphs from a recent (December 7) report prominently featured on Page 3A of USA TODAY:

“LATEST SHUTTLE CREW IS ONE OF DIVERSITY-

NASA Corps still has ‘a ways to go’

The seven astronauts on space shuttle Discovery will be undistinguishable today as they wait for liftoff clad in bubble helmets and orange launch suits, but their gear will mask a milestone: For the first time, two African-Americans will rocket into space together.

They’ll be joined on their 12-day flight by a half-Indian astronaut, making this the most diverse shuttle crew in recent years. The six crewmembers on September’s flight were white.

The composition of Discovery’s crew illustrates how far NASA has come in building an astronaut corps that reflects America…. ‘We’ve made some great strides, and this mission is an example of that,’ says former astronaut Winston Scott, an African-American who is vice president of the Engineering Sciences Contract Group in Houston. ‘But clearly there is a ways to go.’”

The article (by reporter Traci Watson) also features a little graph (this is USA TODAY, after all) under the amusing heading DIVERSITY IN SPACE, comparing “Percentage of minority groups in the U.S. population and astronaut corps.” Here, we learn the alarming news that Asians comprise 4.8% of the population at large, but only 3% of the astronaut corps! Even worse, African-Americans are 12.8% of the nation, but merely 5% of the astronaut corps. Apparently, we’re meant to feel horrified and guilty over such discrepancies.

Of course, the article never explains why anyone should worry about “diversity in space.” The miniscule number of African-American geeks who closely monitor space shuttle missions (and white space shuttle fans are just about as rare) will no doubt feel proud and inspired by the presence of two – count ‘em, two! – black astronauts on the same flight, but it’s hard to understand why this represents a significant development for the nation, for the African-American community, or for NASA. Why does the darker pigmentation of three of the seven crew members (one of the four white guys is a Swedish national, by the way) deserve recognition as a national “milestone?”

Worst of all is the suggestion that this racial representation represents “an astronaut corps that reflects America.” Does the crew reflect America in terms of education level, physical fitness, scientific background, leadership ability, or raw intelligence? One would hope not--- obviously, we need astronauts who are highly un-representative in all these significant areas. Why do we permit the suggestion that race – and race alone – determines whether or not a group “reflects America.”?

The obsessive focus on skin color as a means of classifying individuals may be well-intentioned, but it’s become an illness – an impulse to reduce truly important distinctions (values, philosophy, life experience, socio-political outlook, temperament) to irrelevancy while concentrating exclusively on the abstraction of racial identity. It tells you nothing truly significant about anyone to say he’s white (Irish or Rumanian?), or black (Jamaiican, Nigerian, Aborginal Australian, or American for 300 years?), or Latino (Cuban, Mexican, Salvadoran, or Puerto Rican?) or Asian (Chinese, Indonesian, Pakistani, or Vietnamese?). These white-black-Latino-Asian characterizations, so adored by bureaucrats and race hustlers, diminish our humanity, ignoring individual differences and life histories and shrinking people to the status of color-coded jelly beans.

Want a truly diverse shuttle crew? How about insuring representative divisions among liberals and conservatives, scientists and artists, right-handers and lefties, married and single people, faithful and atheists, pessimists and optimists, overweight and anorexic? Of course, this sort of diversity sounds ridiculous, since the only thing that matters in preparing astronauts for a journey into space is competence and the ability to work together as a team. Why should we allow an emphasis on “diversity” regarding race, when we’d never allow such insistence regarding any other categories – no matter how meaningful?

When officials say the astronaut corps has “a ways to go,” they’re not talking about excellence or ambition or achievement – they’re speaking only about race. How sad! Despite all the shortcomings and stupidities in the dubious shuttle program, we’re led to believe that NASA will have achieved nirvana if only they can insure that the racial make-up of the astronaut corps reflects the percentages in the nation at large.

Our tolerance for such inanity indicates that the whole nation has “a ways to go” before we move beyond our admittedly bigoted past and make the necessary acknowledgement that skin-color should count for nothing in space – or anywhere on earth, for that matter.

As long as the charming and effervescent Kim Jong Il holds back in making use of his spiffy new nukes, we’re supposed to participate in the 2008 Olympics in beautiful downtown Beijing. Imagine, if you will, that the USA proceeded to win every single one of the significant Gold Medals – not just beating the other countries in those medal totals you see in the paper, but sweeping all the major first place victories, across the board. Wouldn’t that provide a strong basis for national pride and celebration?

Why, then, the lack of celebration – or even recognition –regarding the unprecedented US sweep of prizes that matter far more than Olympic gold?

In the sciences and economics, every one of the 2006 Nobel Prizes went to an American. In Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine, and Economic Science, the world’s most prestigious and significant awards honored six American researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts, Columbia and NASA. Each of these US geniuses received a monetary prize of more than a million dollars for breakthrough work of profound benefit to humanity.

The more politically correct Nobel Prize in Literature went to a Turkish novelist (Orhan Pamuk—there’s a household name) while the “Peace” Prize, when it’s announced in the next few days, will no doubt go to an America basher – and perhaps even to an American America basher (Noam Chomsky? Cindy Sheehan? Hugo Chavez?). The Swedish Nobel voters have made similarly stupid selections for the Peace Prize in the past, including, you will no doubt recall, the repulsive and self-righteous Jimmy Carter.

In any event, in the sciences no nation has ever before won every available medal – which should provide a powerful answer to those gloom-and-doomers who insist that the USA is falling apart, a shadow of its former greatness, corrupt and brain dead, ready for total collapse at the slightest push from (pick one) Islamo-Nazi terrorists, greedy globalist corporations, fire-breathing Christian fanatics, or the dreaded New World Order.

Actually, the United States continues to dominate the world – intellectually, economically, culturally, scientifically, militarily, politically. The scope and depth of US leadership is unprecedented in all of human history: even the ancient Roman Empire, as powerful as it was, co-existed with other mighty civilizations (China, Persia, India, Meso-America) and influenced them not at all. Today, no corner of the globe counts as so remote or isolated that it can escape the impact, for better or worse, of decisions made in Washington or trends launched in LA or New York. When my daughter began making her college plans last year, we looked at an in depth analysis of the world’s top twenty universities published in the distinguished British journal, the Economist. According to their rankings, all but three of the twenty best universities on earth—some 85% of the top schools - are located in the United States (Shayna attends the University of Washington, ranked number 17).

Of course, Americans remain morbidly if appropriately conscious of our nation’s imperfections – of the economic challenges faced by most middle class people, the tackiness of our popular culture, a suddenly rising crime rate, the stubborn continued existence of poverty in the midst of plenty, an inconclusive war in the Middle East, and so forth. But even in the heat of a fiercely contested election campaign, the startling Nobel sweep ought to remind us how fortunate we are, and how many of the best brains on the planet are either born as our neighbors, or else choose to make their lives here to give their genius free reign.

It may seem heretical to forget about Mark Foley’s disgusting e-mails for even a moment, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out that American scientists had walked off with every available Nobel Prize and, yes, it’s even better than winning Gold Medals for fencing, high hurdles or weight lifting. Time, in other words, to break out the champagne for the weekend and toast our pride in this Greatest Nation on God’s Green Earth.