Dope-inion page

Today, I want to bring your attention to a dire and growing problem -- a dirty secret few others have been willing to speak out about. Indeed, a viper nesting at the very heart of this nation's infotainment community.\nLast week, media attention was focused on the House Government Reform Committee's calling forth figures from Major League Baseball to testify about allegations of rampant steroid use among players. But while Congress is taking decisive, pragmatic, non-partisan action on the critical issue of drugs in sports, it has ignored a far more sinister development. \nI speak of the growing use of PEDs -- punditry enhancing drugs.\nAcross the country, from the mean streets of Cambridge, Mass., and Washington, D.C.'s Embassy Row, to the ghettos of South-Central Manhattan, kids are watching "Crossfire" and reading The New York Times Op-Ed page and dreaming about being the next Robert Novak or Paul Krugman, the next Maureen Dowd or Bill O'Reilly. Every day, they practice and struggle. Long hours are spent tightening their rhetoric, sharpening their prose, hoping for a scholarship to a university with a top-flight debating society or model U.N. club -- some place they might be spotted by recruiters from "Hannity and Colmes" or The Washington Post, given their shot at the big leagues. \nOh, how to tell these kids that all their hard work -- the fingers calloused by constant typing, the strained vocal chords might come to naught? How to tell them that they'll face competition from people who, rather than putting in the same time and effort, get their punditry from a pill or syringe?\nIt's not hard to see where the temptation to use drugs comes from. Professional punditry has become a high stakes, big-money business. The right column, the right sound-byte, can mean the difference between a multi-million dollar endorsement deal from Bic Pens or a trip back to the minors. And even when one manages to make it, there's the need to balance the fame, the fans, the life in public with the requirement to perform every single week -- daily, in some cases.\nBut the long-term consequences are devastating. One need only look at the current state of former members of East Germany's world-champion women's punditry team. From 1982 to 1988, the "Iron Columnists" took the world by storm, rolling over all competitors in their path, held up as living testaments to the superiority of socialist punditry. Today, team captain Olga Volksparteien has to live in a sound-proof environment, compelled to talk over anything she hears. First-string defensewoman Ulrike Machtwort stares endlessly at her typewriter, waiting for scandal from a government that no longer exists. Helga Wirtschaftswunder has gone from rookie sensation to permanent residence in the Thuringia Institute for the Criminally Insane after kidnapping four people, binding them to a round table and forcing them to endure 36 hours of moderated debate. And these are just the survivors.\nOther possible symptoms of PED-use include:\n• "Chihuahuaitis": the need to provide a rapid-fire counter-argument to any sudden sound.\n• "Party-line syndrome": the tendency to argue in favor of any document one is handed, regardless of political merit -- from menus to birthday cards to Democratic National Convention talking points.\n• "Alignment dysfunction": an inability to talk to others without automatically drifting toward their left or right.\n• "Tucker's disease": a preference for questionable attire such as bow- or stars-and-stripes-themed ties, flip-flops, pith helmets, kilts or monocles.\n• And shrunken testicles. Or enlarged testicles. Or testicles that swirl hypnotically, like belly-dancers.\nTogether, we have to stop this scourge. Call your senator or representative and demand they begin an investigation.\nWhat? What about me, you ask? \nI use only natural, traditional supplements. Things like caffeine, vodka and lamb's blood. \nYou know, punditry as nature intended.