NEWS YOU CAN USE

More headlines from the torture front: "General Is Said To Have Urged Use of Dogs" and "Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey." It wouldn't surprise us, given those headlines, that the administration arranged to take our minds off them with today's alert: "U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Threat During Summer," but there's "Nothing Specific."

We're glad somebody noticed:

A senior diplomat from a country on the Security Council complained recently that the United States needed to provide consistent signals about Iraqi sovereignty. As an example, he said [Colin] Powell's recent statement that the United States would pull its forces out if asked after June 30 was at odds with Mr. Bush's statement that the United States would persevere and not allow itself to be driven from Iraq. "It's a complete contradiction," the diplomat said.

We're also glad somebody noticed Mr. Nice Guy's shortcomings as an author and as a columnist. Ever since reading his breakout book "Bobos in Paradise," which felt like a padded magazine article, we've had our doubts about him.

Back in October we put it gently when we said he was "still trying to find his rhythm" as a columnist. In November we described him as "increasingly irritating" but admitted he "got off a funny satire about Wal-Mart's lad-magazine ban." In December, when we were into purple prose alerts, we called him a "swiftly rising purplemeister" both for his writing style and his politics.

OK, you know we're talking about David Brooks, who claimed "Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in [the] struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror." We hoped then that when the "triumph over tyranny" did "drain the swamp of terror," it would also do a clean-up job on the purplemeister's prose.

The last time we mentioned him, in February, we were struck by his assertion that the White House nitwit is inarticulate, "like most of us." We took that as an insult, believing as we do that in the inarticulate department the nitwit is peerless.