Weapons of mass distraction. (Unplugged).

Got to hurry up and finish this column--Ari Fleischer is retiring to spend more time with his new wife, who was last seen running screaming from the house. I want his job.

After weeks of breathless headlines, jut-jawed military guys poking maps and talking game plans, and Commando-in-Chief fly boy nailing his landing to give us some closure, don'tcha-know, I wondered what the first nonwar news item to merit this "coverage" would be. We all knew it would not be that messy freedom and cleanup. We've got to move on! Sing it: Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to loot!

Bill Bennett bet he knew what it would be and wanted me to place a wager, but I demurred. (Bennett's bet: Annika Sorenstam desecrating the Colonial, came in fourth.)

Before the BBC revealed that the Private Jessica Lynch tale had been wagged, before Laci Peterson's husband was charged with double murder of the born and unborn, the story that merited Faux News treatment was the now-infamous Powder Puff football game in Illinois.

The game, a twenty-year tradition of sport and underage drinking at Glenbrook North High School featuring hazing instead of cheerleading, got out of hand this year. It might have gotten out of hand other years, too, but this time an unembedded amateur videographer fed CNN some raw footage of senior girls dumping mud, garbage, and feces on junior girls. What ever happened to after-prom bowling and hurling in the limo?

The pooper scoop was picked up, of course, by Fox, which can sniff out a story. They took it and ran with it. Bill O'Really was shocked. It was awful. The grainy footage was run over and over.

Dirty girl-on-girl action, something Clarence Thomas might like in a video. Lord of the Fly Girls. They slowed it down, zoomed in on the cowering juniors in numbered jerseys looking like teenaged Prisoners of Whatever. I thought one of the hazing seniors looked like a young Ann Coulter, but I could not be sure.

Get out those lazy, crazy, hazing days of summer! The Girls' Bully Bowl was a weapon of mere distraction from the Bush Putsch to cut taxes.

In a strategy called "Flood the Zone," designed by Coach Karl Rove, eighty separate events in three weeks were designed to sling mud, dump garbage, and buckets of crap. As if he were reading to us kids again, George said we don't need itty bitty tax cuts, we need some Papa Bear-sized tax cuts.

The Powder Puff Girls story also distracted attention from the Donald, who told the Senate that he needed some itty bitty nuclear weapons to bust enemy bunkers filled with evildoers. Pentagoners call them mini-nukes and make them sound like baby carrots or tiny corns at the salad bar. At this point, the Hazer-in-Chief says he only wants to develop the nuke lites, not to use them. Like Lenny just wanting to pet the rabbits. And I mean no insult to Lenny.

When asked recently if he felt that increased security measures were a threat to civil liberties, John Ashcroft said that he thought both could co-exist. To illustrate, he warmed as best he could to a story. When he goes to his ranch in Missouri, he likes to head out to his barn and work on his hobby--no, not draping tiny blue burkas on Justice Barbies--making wire sculptures. He proudly announced that he had recently fashioned a statue of Lady Liberty entirely out of barbed wire. Color me secure. That he did it is one thing. That he told it as a heartwarming illustration of the union of security and civil rights is a chilling other.

Watch for an ice carving of Justice Blindfolded, by Antonin Scalia. W.'s head in papier-mache elephant dung bust for Mt. Rushmore, by Karl Rove. A spent uranium fuel rod miniature of the Washington Monument, by crank yanker Rumsfeld.

Talk about piling on.

Kate "Jokes for Oil" Clinton is a humorist.