Conservatives like to say that the left has its priorities treasonously skewed -- that we hate George W. Bush (or, say, John Ashcroft) more than we hate terrorists.

Well, Eason Jordan has quit his job at CNN, and after observing the near-monomania of the conservative commentariat on the subject of this man -- day after day after day after day -- I think it's clearer than ever that the people at whom such a charge should be leveled are on the right.

Right-wingers simply hate liberals, and people they believe are liberals (the entire mainstream media, for example), more than they hate bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarqawi. We are the real enemy.

Conservatives don't care that the masterminds of 9/11 are still at large, as is the anthrax killer -- they've begun taking down the real menaces to society, John Kerry and Tom Daschle and Dan Rather and Eason Jordan. They're working on Ward Churchill.

Oh, sure, conservatives cheered when Saddam was found in that spider hole, but that wasn't about Saddam -- that was about Bush. The point of the Iraq war was to give one of their own a big flag for America to rally around, as a means of vanquishing the Democratic Party in 2004. (Just debating the authorization of the war had done the trick in '02.) Why do you think conservatives didn't care that the pursuit of bin Laden was all but abandoned in favor of war against Saddam? Because the real result they wanted wasn't justice for the victims of the Towers, but exaltation for the guy who stood on their mass grave with a bullhorn on 9/14. And if the leaders of al-Qaeda are captured now, for conservatives the point will be that it happened on a right-winger's watch.

Back in 1999, the New York Post asked readers to choose the most evil person of the millennium. Bill Clinton came in second, ahead of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Josef Megele; Hillary Clinton came in sixth.

That wasn't done as a joke. There may have been some glee among the Free Republic members who stuffed the ballot box, but the opinions expressed were sincere. (One Freeper wrote: "There is space at the bottom for 3 write-ins. Bill & Hillary each got a vote...the 3rd was Charles Schumer. Although, I should have put Senator Boxer or Feinstein.")

This is the Right's real war. If that poll were being conducted today, I wonder where Eason Jordan and Dan Rather would rank.

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(Note: Yes, we on the left had some fun for a couple of days with the pseudonymous superpatriotic rent boy Jeff Gannon. But one or two lefty blogs went all Gannon, all the time. The rest of us cheered, but quickly moved on.)

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(Oh, and what's the Latin sentence at the top of the page of Hugh Hewitt's blog? It's "Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!" -- "The power of Democrats must be destroyed." I rest my case.)