I HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY DILIGENT in keeping up with the news from the war in Iraq–some might say a little too diligent. I was the first one on my block to track the Command Post hour by hour, and I recall with a surge of pleasure the first time I got to a juicy story before Glenn Reynolds could link to it on Instapundit. But when I realized that it had become my chief goal in life to get Andrew Sullivan to post one of my letters on his website, I began to wonder if I had not misaligned my priorities. Clearly it was time to take a break from the passionate intensity of war reportage, the struggle to sift through the vast complexities of Operation Iraqi Freedom and bring some order from the chaos of data. In short, I needed some light entertainment. So I started reading Robert Fisk.

Fisk, for those who have not made his acquaintance, is the famously anti-American correspondent for the Independent of London. The substance of his writing is easy enough to indicate: imagine someone taking simultaneous dictation from Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf and Noam Chomsky. The tone–and tone is what makes Fisk Fisk–is perhaps a trifle more elusive of description, but viewers of “The Simpsons” will perhaps understand when I say that Fisk is the Krusty the Clown of journalism.