Mugger still churns out excellent commentary:

Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin, who didn’t graduate from Harvard, but is likely in the running for the school’s commencement speaker in May—if Gerhard Schroder or a Palestinian suicide bomber can’t make it—was magnificently incoherent last Friday. The Great Breslin, who’s made a pact with the devil, apparently gets a senior citizen pass from his editors that allows his copy to escape the delete button.

The following is a classic, worthy of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—an ancient crank still living in Camelot who’s nonetheless pressed into duty by "corporate" media like the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. (Reading Schlesinger, once a cold warrior, writing about foreign policy, you think of the Yankees dusting off Whitey Ford’s mothballs so he can pitch to Miguel Tejada.)

Breslin spouts off like a workaday drunk: "I wonder if anybody watching this Shock and Awe bombing Friday noted that Iraq didn’t have a plane. There is no joy to kill the bull unless he fights. You can’t call this a war. The television people [I’ll agree that they’ve generally been awful, especially CNN’s Aaron Brown and Fox’s Rita Cosby], and the politicians in Washington, said this was an extraordinary exhibition of bombing that never has been seen before. They used the right word, exhibition. An exhibition war, not a real war. You’ll take it right now, if it keeps these young men of ours alive. Take it and gag on it, for this is a total character collapse of a country that was supposed to be so far above this loathsome act. You become the thing you hate. And Friday, we did. We became the Germany of 1939."

And the Upper West Side’s "intelligentsia" is whining that dissent is no longer allowed in the United States

He goes on to allow Alterman to be crucified, for good reason.