Our friends over at salon.com have a series called, Ask a Wingnut, in which a former Bush official who wishes to remain nameless (I can only assume it’s Jeff Gannon) answers questions from wacky liberals about why conservatives do and think what they do. He goes by the moniker Glenallen Walken, borrowed from the fictional character of the television show The West Wing. This is fitting since he bases many of his arguments for neocon ideology in a fictional world.

I should disclose at the outset that this is not a "How To" piece. If I knew how to find my joy, I'd surely have located it by now. But I've been thinking about happiness since Ross "What Women Want" Douthat declared why women are unhappy in his New York Times column last week.

Oh, how I love the political drama that arises with the nomination of a new Supreme Court Justice. Such classics like Robert Bork whose nomination was so disastrous that a verb was created to describe it (“borked,”follow the link if you don’t know, it ain’t good), Clarence Thomas who graced America with the only R-Rated hearing discussing squirrel genitals, and G. Harrold Carswell who just so happened to be a white supremacist (whoops) – oh the entertainment.

When I read about yesterday's Taliban attack on the provincial headquarters of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), I raised my eyebrows. Why the ISI? It's not an easy target, and in fact the attack was repelled by guards. Nor would a successful attack have been an effective way to create instability. The ISI is not filled with sympathetic targets whose deaths would arouse the nation.