Are you sitting down? Hard-drinking Iraq war apologist Christopher Hitchens, desperately trying to rehabilitate his credentials as a rebel, has come out with a shocking revelation about God: He doesn't exist.

Wow. Imagine the courage it must have taken Chris to take a stand shared by only about 98% of his fellow countrymen and 100% of his fellow barflies. He'll certainly be shunned in Hollywood and Manhattan for his bold, outrageous position. Original, too: who's had the courage to state that God is dead (other than every European philosopher, social critic and gasbag since the turn of the 20th Century)?

The Holy One, looking down on His creatures from the Throne of Glory, probably isn't too worried about losing the faith of Chris. He knows that everyone has to bow down to something, whether it's the Almighty, or, in Hitchens' case, a polytheism that venerates in equal portions the Royalty Check and the Double Johnny Walker.

How dare anyone hold George Tenet accountable for the Iraq debacle and the flawed intelligence manufactured to support it?  After all, he was only the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the first of many efforts by Bush Administration lackeys to rewrite the history of the decision to invade a country with no relationship to the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, Tenet portrays himself at the Captain Reynaud of the intelligence community, shocked, shocked to discover that intelligence was being manipulated to justify the neocon wet dream of singeing the beard of Saddam Hussein.

Who did produce and sign off on the fatally flawed National Intelligence Estimate used to blow the nonexistent case for war past a credulous and fearful Congress? Tenet claims, pace Hitchens' bloviations (see above), that it was an Immaculate Conception.

Tenet now offers one piece of irrefutably good advice to anyone who happens to be carrying a copy of his book when they walk past a trash can.  It's a slam dunk.

It was the biggest catastrophe in American history. A lightly regarded foe stealthily planned its attack for weeks, catching its opponent utterly by surprise. The result: suffering and damage that the nation is still recovering from. Finally, fatally misled by an ironclad sense of invincibility, the enemy overreaches, stumbles and collapses in ruin.

Of course, we're referring to Newt Gingrich four-year reign of error as Speaker of the House. Little wonder he feels competent to hire someone to write about another debacle. We hope that Newtie's fictionalized recounting of real events (the core of his political strategy) includes all the juicy details of the sneak attack, including the American commander's affair with a subordinate while bombs were bursting in air all around.

Sorry, that wasn't Pearl Harbor, that was Newt cheating on his second wife with a bimbo staffer while trying to unseat an elected President for doing pretty much the same thing. But with Newt it's frankly (his adverb of choice when he's about to uncork one of his whoppers) impossible to keep track of what's true and what, like his accusation that liberal values led a mentally ill mother to murder her children, can only be described as pulp fiction.