"My opposition," Boyd explains, "is to a poisonous strain of feminism, a concoction of regressive policies only masquerading as belonging to a vanguard of progressive thought or action. The people behind these policies oppose free expression and due process and favour solving complex problems through an inflexible imposition of punishment by the state."

They are, he writes elsewhere, "a cadre of radical extremists who are spouting bogus science and silencing their critics with a combination of illogical mantras and vicious tirades." Even worse, in their prudery and intolerance, they have made common cause with "the evangelicals who want paintings and sculptures of naked women or men removed from the workplace and from all forms of advertising."

Boyd gives four examples where radical feminists have gone too far: They are intolerant of all pornography; they have defined sexual harassment in ways that are too vague and that ultimately infantilize women; they are apt to define any male sexual advance as rape; and they exaggerate the extent to which women are the victims of domestic violence.

This doesn't look good for Whoopi. It would certainly seem that the hardline feminist prudery would not sanction Whoopi's anatomical references. Nor, if they disapproved her speech, would they be likely to defend it. None of us is supposed to notice or mention the fact that women's bodies differ from men's in any way, and in the new etiquette, we are being urged to conduct all our social interactions as if there were no such thing as physical bodies, attractive or otherwise, or clothing, attractive or otherwise.

But does anyone seriously expect that the feminists won't leap to Whoopi's defense? Of course they will. Because the feminist mentality is capable of maintaining exactly opposite convictions without recognizing any contradiction. Thus, we have feminists who simultaneously espouse the absurd sexual harrassment standards Boyd cites while cheering the quasi-pornographic career of Madonna and the jailbait tartiness that has made Britney Spears a superstar. Her particular brand of sex-based success is called 'girlpower.' The bottom line is that women are permitted to flaunt themselves as nakedly (pun intended) as they will, whereas men are not supposed to read their behavior or dress as an invitation to initiate sexual contact.

This is a ridiculous double standard which can be summed up by a conversation I reported elsewhere. A female acquaintance of mine -- an academic feminist -- was inveighing against pornography, but in passing she allowed that erotica was okay. I asked her to define the difference between the two. She hemmed and hawed for a while and finally conceded that erotica is what women find exciting and pornography is what men find exciting. Even when she realized the import of her definition, she had no problem with it and argued for its validity.

Whatever women decide is decent to do or say about sexual matters, even sexual anatomy, in public is acceptable. The best proof of this is the self-celebrating theatrical phenomenon-cum-holiday entitled The Vagina Monologues. If you haven't heard of it, here is a brief description:

The structure of the piece is pretty simple: [Playwright] Ensler describes the project, which was to interview a large and diverse sample of women about their vaginas—how they feel about them, what they call them, etc.—and present a selection of the results as a series of monologues, sort of on the model of Anna Deavere Smith’s recreated interviews in Fires in the Mirror and other pieces, linked by material about how each interview was collected. Ensler doesn’t adhere rigidly to that structure, but that’s the basic device. There are no props or sets, though there’s a nice lighting design that helps dramatize the material.

Does it get explicit? Yes.

...The next two bits—after a Hallmark Card moment quoting a wise-child six-year-old, which actually evoked an “Awww” from behind me—are definitely open to criticism. The first is the “cunt” riff. Much of this is a kind of rhapsody on the word itself, taking it one phoneme at a time and lingering ecstatically over each as the full word is built up. Then comes a comic turn on the reactions women can still get by saying “cunt” in public. Then comes a recommendation to “reclaim” it, not only as a synonym for “vagina,” but as a metonym for “woman”....

For those who haven't been following this kind of theater, do not delude yourselves that this is an off-off-Broadway experiiment. It has become an institution. Every year since 1998, there has been an event called V-Day:

The Vagina Monologues initiated V-Day, a global annual event that raises funds and promotes awareness to stop violence against women. The first V-Day was held on Valentine's Day 1998 in New York, featuring a gala performance of The Vagina Monologues with celebrated artists including Winona Ryder, Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Lily Tomlin, Calista Flockhart, Rosie Perez and Marisa Tomei. The second V-Day was held in London in 1999, and featured Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Melanie Griffith and Gillian Anderson. V-Day 2000 was celebrated in Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Aspen, and on over 150 college campuses throughout the country. V-Day 2001 was celebrated on over 300 college campuses and at Madison Square Garden.

In The Vagina Monologues, Ensler gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, brave, highly original and thoroughly human stories. Based on interviews with a diverse group of women, the play brazenly explores the humor, power, pain, wisdom, outrage, mystery, and excitement hidden in vaginas. Having seen The Vagina Monologues, no one - woman or man - will ever look at the world the same way again.

Is anyone starting to see a new problem here, a new contradiction for the feminists to blink away? To understand it, we'll have to look a little deeper into the career of Whoopi Goldberg. Her bio is mostly missing from movie websites, but imdb.com tells us the following about her background:

Whoopi Goldberg was born in New York City in 1955, as Caryn Elaine Johnson. She was born in Chelsea, in New York City. She worked in a funeral parlor, and as a bricklayer, while taking small parts on Broadway. She moved to California and worked with improv groups, including Spontaneous Combustion, and developed her skills as a stand up comedienne

When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.

Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing?

Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer.

It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage).

I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News.

So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.

But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.

So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?

In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror."

Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right?

Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point.

The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it.

This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically.

Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs."

Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media.

The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt.

Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why?

First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids.

Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness.

In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it.

Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America.

That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on?

This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us.

In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him.

After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"?

Mr. Tillard is first quoted as saying that "Cosby 'could absolutely have' gone even further," and though slavery and Jim Crow had hurt African-Americans, "at the end of the day, we have got to turn the tide." But then Mr. Tillard is quoted as explaining that the real danger of Mr. Cosby's remarks is that white people (i.e., racists) will "seize upon that and try to castigate the African-American community. The conservatives and liberals are far too quick to seize upon a statement and say to the rest of us, 'See, see, it's not us, it's you.' What they have not wanted to acknowledge is that there are still legacies of slavery."

How is this biased? In this editorial-masquerading-as-news, Ms. Hajela is providing us with a "clincher" that tells us what we are supposed to learn from all this: that it would be a bad thing for Americans to let the racists off the hook by telling blacks that they are causing some of their own problems.

Harmless? Sure. In fact, I agree with Ms. Hajela's editorial. But it was in the news pages, and it was not news, and it was not impartial. It was shaped and designed solely to cause readers to reach a certain opinion.

Nobody was quoted as saying, "Cosby was absolutely right, it's ridiculous to keep complaining about things that are completely under our own control. We can teach our children to learn standard English and get a good education. We can teach our children not to become criminals, and can hold them responsible for their actions when they do commit crimes, instead of blaming racism."

Ultimately, both the "pro" and "con" quotes said the same thing: Mr. Cosby had a point, but he shouldn't say it openly because it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Very PC. Don't we all feel better now?

This is as vague a way of saying "What this movie actually shows is scientific nonsense" as you could possibly imagine.

The bulk of the article--especially the crucial first paragraphs and the large-type inset, which are all that most people ever read--say quite a different thing. In answer to the question "could the climate really go bonkers, just like that?" the answer in the article was "Maybe. That was the consensus among researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a leading center for climate studies."

The next paragraph includes a quote from the observatory's director, G. Michael Purdy: "This is not fantasy. It's happened before. It's well documented."

Which quote will leave the clearest impression in the readers' minds? The fact is, what Mr. Purdy was saying was "not fantasy" and has "happened before" is Manhattan being covered in ice. That was during the Ice Age. It didn't happen in one big storm. And it wasn't caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions.

Furthermore, any institution calling itself an "earth observatory" has a built-in bias. They want to wrap themselves in the much more fact-based science of astronomy, but this isn't an observatory as most of us understand it, it's a group of scientists who have gathered together specifically because they already are true believers in a certain set of viewpoints about the human impact on the environment.

And the large-type inset absolutely treats global warming as a fact (it is still only a suspicion, by rational standards) and ends with this statement, attributed to no one: "Scientists believe this is probably due to man-made 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere." Which scientists? Are there scientists who disagree? These matters are not even addressed.

The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda.

Keep in mind that there is no way of knowing whether human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing or preventing disaster, mostly because we don't yet understand the causes of the natural cycles that lead to ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. So at this point, there is zero scientific basis for action. There is only the quasireligious premise that any human change to nature is dangerous and bad. Therefore, if human activities produce gases that might cause a disaster, then we can't afford to wait until the connection is actually proven. We must stop emitting those gases right now.

What they don't tell you is that the only way they are proposing to stop emitting those gases is to have such a drastic change in the activities of Western civilization that it might well lead to devastating impoverishment, and probably to famine and a catastrophic drop in the human population.

But the reporters covering science in America today are so wretchedly miseducated that they don't even know what questions to ask when interviewing biased sources. And they are perfectly willing to make ridiculous statements--which would include any sentence beginning with "scientists believe."

This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.)

The fact is that Mr. Broecker is an important scientist, and his model of the "conveyor belt" of warm water in the Atlantic provides a plausible explanation for how ice-age climate changes might happen and why they seem to be restricted to the northern hemisphere, at least in the most recent ice-age events.

But the article in the paper was not science or even respectable science reporting. It was designed as propaganda to convince readers that smart people all agree that global warming can cause an ice age like the one depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow," unless we make the radical changes required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to levels that true believers claim (but cannot prove) would prevent this disaster.

If the evidence of global warming were a report of burglars operating in your neighborhood, there's enough of it to cause you to check that your doors and windows are locked--but the true believers want you to respond by boarding up your house and moving to another state.

The left-wing news media live in a tiny village of people who all think (or pretend to think) exactly alike. Therefore, to them any reporter or media outlet that rejects their premises must be insane or dishonest, and instead of seeking to refute them with actual evidence, they merely call them names and accuse them of venal motives.

The fact remains that on Fox News, and only on Fox News, we get television reportage that gives us at least two sides of every important issue. On all the other TV news outlets--and "mainstream" newspapers--we mostly get coverage that is hopelessly biased. The madmen have taken over the asylum and now, dressed in white lab coats, they pronounce the rest of the world insane.

Keep in mind that I found these egregious examples of bias in a single issue of a single newspaper, randomly chosen. I could do the same thing with any national news broadcast or with any paper in America except the occasional paper that still has a toehold on reality.

Fox News Channel, on the other hand, claims to have only one bias--it is definitely pro-American--and it presents all the facts and every viewpoint and leaves the decision up to the viewer. Imagine if these news stories had been written from that perspective. They would be barely recognizable--and some of them would not have been written at all.

What makes the liberal bias in the mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect. In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.

Nothing to add. The sure sign of a punk piece. Note the insouciant confidence of Mr. Card in this excerpt: "I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately." He is bold, fearless, and provocative. He leaves nothing in his wake but a levelled landscape in which liberal blindness, pretension, arrogance, and assumption poke no higher than the shoots of clover that grow in every razed North American battlefield. So much for our rationale. What of the reward? It may seem a paltry thing. There will be no plaques, no ceremonies, no luncheons, no lucrative book contracts, no lissome literateurs eager to fraternize with greatness. There is only the punk promise: if ever Mr. Card is in trouble, trouble unto death that is, he can smile death in the face and wait serenely for his inevitable rescue by the Shuteye Train. Is that reward enough? Shammadamma.