Buried deep inside a report in the Washington Post today (“EPA Won’t Act on Emissions This Year”) was one of those sorts of Dickensian names familiar to fans of the Bush administration. Among the people trying to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from doing what the Supreme Court essentially mandated — ie, regulating gas emissions — was a fellow from Cheney’s office named Chase Hutto III.

Hutto is identified in the article as a Cheney energy adviser and, more to the point, a former intern at the CATO institute and a Bush campaign volunteer in the Florida recount of 2000. The GOP goon squad that descended on Florida in those days, best remembered for the “Brooks Brothers riot” in which they disrupted the Dade County recount and scared election officials away from doing their job, was filled with HItler youth types, whose principal credentials were loyalty to Bush. (Jim Wilkinson, who was instrumental in organizing the “riot” and other political pranks, went on to run press operations at CentCom before the invasion of Iraq.)

Hutto’s interest in matters related to energy come from his family; his grandfather patented at least seven piston inventions for the Ford Motor Company, and in the words of one of the participants at the meetings in which it was agreed that the EPA would take more time to study the effects of emissions (rather than actually doing anything), he has “an anti-regulatory philosophy and concern about what regulation means for the American way of life. He would talk, for example, about not wanting greenhouse gas controls to do away with the large American automobile.”

I wonder where he got that attitude.

I Googled Chase Hutto and didn’t find much: He has worked for Senator Spencer Abraham for years, starting in Abraham’s ’94 election campaign as “an opposition research consultant.” (This last gig no doubt appealed to Cheney, who has an appreciation for all practitioners of the dark art often simply called oppo.) His interests seem to be immigration and energy. And according to AP, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona in 2003. “Chase Hutto, a senior policy adviser for U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in Washington, D.C., said running with the bulls was a little scarier than working in politics. ‘Congressmen generally don’t charge, and their horns aren’t as sharp,’ he said.”

Indeed, Congress seem all but hornless these days, even as Bush’s popularity reaches record lows and Republicans look to the approaching shadow of an Obama presidency the same way the Orcs looked to the return of the wizard. The real news here, of course, is that even after the president signed an executive order directing the EPA to “take the first steps toward regulations” to reduce the nation’s gas usage by 20 percent over the next decade, he had low-level trolls working behind closed doors to thwart that directive. This troll just happened to have a funnier name than most.

If politics is theater then the general election is Broadway to the primaries off-Broadway (or off-off Broadway performance art of, say, Mike Gravel). Try-outs and previews are over, audiences have stood up and cheered, or at least not walked out, and the big money has been brought in to make sure this turkey doesn’t fold.

Comedy may be just as apt a metaphor. If the primary elections found candidates from both parties prowling the Iowa and New Hampshire equivalents of the Purple Onion (think HIllary Clinton as Phyllis Diller, Mike Huckabee as Bob Newhart, and Giuliani as Don Rickles) the general election is more like prime time and seeing how the presumptive nominees of each party handles the Family Hour is our new national pastime.

I caught another glimpse of McCain’s infamous green backdrop speech the other night — a tape that lives in infamy, since as public missteps of major candidates go it’s right up there with Nixon’s appearance in his first debate with JFK — and it occurred to me that McCain, who can actually be a funny guy, has transcended the sort of Lenny Bruce, black-humor mode of the early primary season (and 2000, when he famously referred to Arizona’s senior mecca Leisure World as “Seizure World”) and moved into an altogether more avant garde approach.

He reminded me of Andy Kaufman. If you remember Kaufman’s first historic appearance on SNL you’ll know what I mean. In the early days of that show, things really were improvised and often comics would come out and die. (The talented Franklyn Ajaye comes to mind.) Hardly anyone knew Kaufman then and when he told an elaborate joke in his Latka Gravas mode — eyes bugging, lips wet — many assumed he was really bombing, especially when he started to cry. It was only when he started to play the conga in time to his tears that we began to understand that we had entered Andy’s world.

So it was perhaps with McCain that fateful night. Yes, yes, I know there have been more shakeups inside his campaign meant to clean up his public performances, and whole articles are devoted to the man’s problems with the Tele-Prompter. But in his heart I suspect McCain may look at such outings — the frozen grin, the lame execution of such lame lines as “That’s not change we can believe in” — and smile in satisfaction. If I can’t be president, he seems to be saying, I’ll give them something to remember. Look for Elvis impersonations and lady-wrestling next.

Obama, meanwhile, has leap-frogged over the whole comedy circuit to the big stage (a very big stage in Denver). As much as Republicans scream about how smooth he is, he just gets smoother, deftly handling the net left who don’t like his centrist approach while reminding reporters new to covering him that he’s always been less reliably liberal than he is portrayed. To McCain’s Kaufman he is Johnny Carson, telling America with his very posture to stay cool. I half expect him to swing an invisible golf club in the direction of Doc and the band. And all the other comedians (ie, politicians) on the Democratic side — and even a Republican or two — are making nice. They know that you don’t cross Johnny. For the foreseeable future, it’s his show.

A story in the Times this morning reveals that the US military learned the “coercive management techniques it used on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from the Chinese. Yes, sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint and exposure were all gags used on American servicemen during the Korean War and they copied them not merely because they admired them but because they worked. By making GIs stand in extreme cold, say, for long periods of time the Chinese were able to elicit confessions from them. Problem was they confessed to things they didn’t necessarily do.

Lest you think that this fine point was hidden somewhere, the chart of fun things to do to bad people that the military used against a select number of Gitmo prisoners (before these methods were banned in 2005) came from an 1957 Air Force study entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” — false as in untrue. Bad intelligence and bad karma.

There have been many incidents of us becoming the thing we profess to hate since 9.11 but few more glaring than this. After all, our ideas of Chinese torture come mostly from movies like The Manchurian Candidate, in which a group of soldiers captured while on patrol in Korea are brainwashed to kill each other. Many a college student has been reminded of the negative effects of sleep deprivation while in the midst of finals, and has paused to wonder just what kind of people could sink so low.

Here, use my mirror.

These weren’t the only techniques the military trainers were pushing; “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings” had some great effects, including “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.” While Bush apologists will say that this was a ticking-bomb situation, and torturing these combatants saved untold American lives, that ticking sound might actually be from our own morality going down the drain. As the Times notes, “Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.”

Proving, once again, that these methods produce results, just as surely as sin begets damnation.

Can someone tell me what kind of crack the Times’s David Carr was smoking when he wrote the profile of Bonnie Fuller that appeared in this morning’s business section? I know, that’s probably a poor choice of metaphor to describe a guy who has famously written about his past addiction to cocaine and he is justly celebrated for being a better writer than most media reporters (for whatever that’s worth). “He writes like an angel!” a New York magazine writer once gushed to me, invoking Arnold Bennet’s famous description of William Faulkner. So maybe it was angel dust he was smoking.

Fuller, as media mavens know, has been the editor of Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Us Weekly and, most recently, the Star, taking the American Media publication from a tabloid to a glossy during her tenure there. In fact, you could say she is best known for giving tabloid culture a sort of glossy veneer. “Celebrity magazines, which once seemed to be multiplying weekly, are full of Ms. Fuller’s fundamental conceptual scoop,” writes Carr. “Stars, however stellar they may appear, are just like us — if you don’t count the parts about unusually beautiful and impossibly wealthy. The sight of an A-lister having a Slurpee or taking out his garbage has become a huge get in the current media ecosystem.”

The problem is that Carr writes about that trend, with which he credits Fuller, as a good thing, if not an inevitable thing in the evolution of human culture. After gushing over her Midas touch and “astonishing success” with the titles she reinvented, and inevitably dumbed down (and after passing lightly over the horrible reputation the woman has as a manager) he seeks out other cultural critics to second his opinion that a celebrity culture that has led to, among other things, the public self-immolation of Britney Spears, is a good thing. “What she has done is gotten at a kind of essential truth that is less about the specifics of the gossip,” says Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco. “This endless speculation and estimation about the lives of these people has become the stuff of culture.”

This is not just people who cover a business celebrating someone who has profited from feeding the hogs a particular brand of slop. This is media critics standing knee-deep in pig shit and pretending that it’s dulce de leche.

Fuller has just left American Media to start her own digital company, Bonnie Fuller Media, which aims to supply more slop, I mean, celebrity news, as well as fashion and romance for today’s always-on, on-demand types who live by blog, Pod-cast and RSS feed. I hope someone told her she won’t be able to review that stuff on paper.

I worked for Bonnie Fuller for one day at the Star. This is not all that note-worthy; the streets of New York are filled with literally hundreds of editors and writers who worked for Fuller for one day, or a week, or a month if they had armadillo skin. It’s not so much that she’s nasty as she is discombobulated; I was being paid my standard day-rate to do whatever and I recall one of my day’s duties was writing a quick piece about Courtney Cox’s new line of beauty products. (Hey, tell me what low thing you’ve done for money.) I had some notes from a stringer who had gone to a press conference where the former Friends star was talking about skin cream or whatever and of that a short “feature” was to be cobbled. What I remember was writing the copy in the morning, doing a bunch of other things that afternoon – and then getting galleys of the piece back from Fuller at the end of the day — “She only works on galleys,” I was told — and it was marked up like a manuscript page of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Some of her questions and comments were smart but, if answered, they would make the 300 word story 2000 words and there was no room for that on the layout, and no reason for it in the first place. And it also meant that everyone involved — not just me, but the reporter and the fact-checker and the designer and the managing editor — would stay extra hours to no avail: The “story” wasn’t going to run any longer and had to ship that night. And this was just one page of a hundred.

This is not simply a criticism of the woman’s time-management skills. (“Ms. Fuller is known for her hellacious hours, indifferent people skills and an approach to deadline matters that is more akin to ritual sacrifice than publishing protocol,” Carr allows.) It is a comment on a culture, micro and macro, that cannot tell what matters from what natters. Joyce wrote about shit, by the way — and urine and vomit and snot and jism. He was interested in all manner of human excretion and our fear of it and pushed against taboos in his writing and his life. (He liked to carry a pair of his wife’s panties around with them and give them a sniff in public — drop that fun fact at your next book club meeting!) But he knew slop from nourishment and liked to make fun of those who confused the two. When a boy farts in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man another says, “I thought I heard an angel speak.”

Give that kid a Slurpee.

Now that Obama is the presumptive nominee of our party, people on the left and the right are engaged in trying to parse his appeal, even as the candidate himself tries to broaden that appeal. Republicans seem to be flailing, as Karl Rove did when caricaturing the candidate as some kind of playboy of the western world — babe on his arm, martini in his hand — as if that were a bad thing. (Note to Rove: see the extremely popular Oceans Eleven series for further evidence that most men want to be that guy, and most women want to be with him. Then try new tack.) And some on the left seem determined to pigeon-hole him as the uber-liberal of their dreams, even as Obama is making compromises that piss them off.

But whatever your feelings or expectations about his candidacy, even if you hold out some bizarre hope that McCain can magically regain what’s left of his character as he changes his positions on the treatment of detainees, off-shore drilling and a host of other issues that he used to show un-GOP like common sense about, even if you can forgive his embrace of George Bush, even if you’re not afraid of his scary wife, you’ve got to be worried about Obama’s babe factor.

Forget about Scarlett Johansson (if you can, for just one moment); I’m talking about regular, mortal, sensible women. One I know quite well met the senator recently; it was a serious meeting with issues of import being discussed. She was impressed with how present he seemed, how attentive to her questions, even as she became aware that she was gazing at him the way Nancy Reagan used to gaze at her husband, and was smiling so much her face hurt when her audience was over.

After the meeting she sent her daughter a text message, describing the candidate in one word: McDreamy. This is the nickname the good women of Grey’s Anatomy bestowed on the doctor played by Patrick Dempsey (who played a similar kind of catch, a lawyer this time, in the Disney fairy tale send-up Enchanted). If Obama’s campaign was worried about his appeal to women after his battles with Hillary, the reaction of this rational, professional businesswoman might indicate that there is not much opposition there that greater exposure to his dreaminess can’t conquer.

She did say she thought he’d been smoking, though he wasn’t holding a martini.