New York Times columnist John Tierney (center-right, pro-Establishment) is usually somewhere between pointless and wrong, but he had a very nice uptick recently. Excerts from two recent columns:

"We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront," Bush said last week, "and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you've doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can't completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

Take it from bin Laden, who bragged in 2004 that it was "easy to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do," he said, "is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." And then Al Qaeda, no matter what losses it has suffered, will come off once again looking like the strong horse.

(12 Sep 2006)

and

Compared with past threats -- like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals -- Al Qaeda's terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don't justify the hyperbolic warnings that America's ''existence'' or ''way of life'' is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive.

There undoubtedly will be more terrorist attacks, either from Al Qaeda or others, just as there were before 2001. Terrorists might strike Monday. There will always be homicidal zealots like Mohamed Atta or Timothy McVeigh, and some of them will succeed, terribly. But this is not a new era. The terrorist threat is still small. It's the terrorism industry that got big.

(9 Sep 2006)

Unfortunately he seemed to run out of ideas after that burst, and so followed up with "ripped-from-the-headlines" (or, more likely, "based-on-a-press-release") columns about for-profit philanthropy and a mathematical equation to predict how long celebrity couples will stay married. Here's my advice: just keep writing more columns spelling out, in your somber but serviceable prose, with a bit of detail and a few quotes per column, that the emperor has no clothes. You won't run out of material for years.