I find, in the blogosphere, so-called, that different blogs will get on a run, or go in the tank. Our man Easterbrook may stand as a worse case scenario for losing streaks - but almost everyone has their downs as well as ups. Sometimes, like Easterbrook, something they do realy puts them in the public eye - I've seen a couple mad flameouts that make his troubles look like nothing...

Happily, the opposite is also true - you'll find a place, now and then, that is clearly on a winning streak. Right now, the blog kicking the most ass - the absolute must read - is probably Slacktivist. I hadn't been reading this site before - I may have visited it now and then when pointed that way - but this week, the writer has taken on the, well, horrifying task, of reading and annotating the Left Behind books, by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins. These are vile end times scienfe fiction novels, I believe there are 12 of them in all....

The mind boggles. But hammering the shit out of very bad books makes for fascinating reading - and gives the opportunity to explore the seedier side of American religiosity. The reek of adolescent terror - sexual need and repression, fear of losing power, desire to exercise power, to assert oneself at the expense - through the suffering - of others. "Rayford Steele"! "Buck Williams"! (Not the basketball players, the slacktivist regretfully informs us.)... But most of all, slacktivist notes, it's about fear of death and desire to cheat death - not in the traditional christian sense (grave where is thy victory, death where is thy sting?, but in a childishly literal Jesus Will Carry Us Away Into The Clouds sense.

None of this is new, of course - eschatology has a logn history - and it is usually (maybe always) explicitly political, and here, as ever, we get villainous Europeans - though now it's the UN serving anti-christ rather than the European Union (and whatever it was called before that - cripes, I can't remember! there were 10 members, though, and that caused shivers to go up and down the spines of every fundy and evangelical youth in- what? there are 12 now? 15? etc. Opps - back to the UN.) For some reason, though, the political yearnings of the religious right - the hard RR, especially the more fantastically inclined RR - seem particularly pathetic these days. Maybe it's the kinds of things they rail against - the UN - gay marriages - feminists, affirmative action, drug abusers who don't have prominant radio talk shows...

enough! Back to the site - this daunting project is not all on the site - there is, currently, also an excellent post on George Bush's comparison between Iraq and the Philipines (the kind of comparison god lefties have been making for months, if they thought of it - and suddenly he's spinning this as something good? Oh, god, what has the Supreme Court wrought? If Gen. Boykin is right and God put Bush in the white house - how can they not fear that he is the anti-christ? he fits the bill better than 20 2nd rate European slicksters.) And a fine note on a recent Jimmy Breslin piece. All in all, one of the first sites I check these days.