AUSTIN, Texas -- The Tonya Harding/Paula Jones match on "Celebrity Boxing" ... I have no idea how to finish that sentence. OK, it's a concept. Maybe it's camp. Or haute tacky. Sure, we could shoot whoever thought of it, but don't you get the creepy feeling it says something awful about the culture? I just can't figure out what. It's a "What is the world coming to?" moment.

The New York Times critic says this "is not a postmodern joke about Warholian fame," she thinks it's a cruelty joke. I suppose people have always paid to see freak shows. But I suspect even P.T. Barnum would have been taken aback by this. Once you start thinking about it, though, it has a perverse fascination. How about "Fantasy Celebrity Boxing" with Medea versus Lizzie Borden?

There's a piquant contrast in the press coverage across the decades of Billy Graham's various private dealings with Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon's papers. I'll come shortly to the recent flap over Graham and Nixon's closet palaverings about the Jews, but first let's visit another interaction between the great evangelist and his commander in chief.

Back in April, 1989, a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote, "could overnight destroy

AUSTIN, Texas -- We're having a splendid political primary season here in Texas, featuring several loopier-than-usual players and one total gooney bird named John Worldpeace.

On the Democratic side for U.S. Senate, the two heavy-hitting, well-financed contenders are Mayor Ron Kirk of Dallas and Rep. Ken Bentsen of Houston. So, of course, a high-school civics teacher who's never been elected to anything named Victor Morales is in the lead in that race.

Meanwhile, just to further confuse everybody, another Morales, former attorney general Dan, is running for governor, which might cinch the Hispanic vote for him, except his opponent is Tony Sanchez, a rich banker from Laredo. Worldpeace (he had his name legally changed) is also in that race, and his idea of contributing to his namesake seems to be spreading as much nastiness about Sanchez as he possibly can. Voters keep getting unidentified calls that turn out to be financed by Worldpeace asking them, approximately, "Did you know that Tony Sanchez is a blue-bellied, full-blooded liar, thief and child molester who runs on all fours and has

AUSTIN, Texas -- "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today." -- Theodore Roosevelt.

It's hard to think how this could be any clearer: The headlines are "Bush Proposing Policy Changes on Toxic Sites: Taxpayers Would Bear Most Cleanup Costs." "Bush to Shift Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers."

Katherine Seelye of The New York Times reports the Superfund was founded in 1980 under the slogan, "The polluter pays." Industry was to clean up its own messes, and special corporate taxes were used to fund clean-ups at "orphan sites, where the responsible party could not be identified or could not pay. The taxes were reauthorized under President Ronald Reagan and again under Mr. Bush's father. They expired in 1995, and while President Bill Clinton sought to have them reinstated, the House of Representatives, by then under Republican control, refused."

The Office of Strategic Influence went from obscurity to infamy to oblivion during a spin cycle that lasted just seven days in late February. Coming to terms with a week of negative coverage after news broke that the Pentagon office might purposely deceive foreign media, a somber defense secretary announced: "It is being closed down." But for Donald Rumsfeld and his colleagues along the Potomac, the inky cloud of bad publicity has a big silver lining.

Orders to shut the controversial office came a day after President Bush proclaimed zero tolerance for lies from U.S. officials. "We'll tell the American people the truth," he vowed.

Would the Defense Department try to deceive journalists? The question in the air was distasteful, and the answer from Rumsfeld could only offer