That's the breakdown. Whatever their motives, Time sold the D.C. sniper hunt as news. Newsweek sold it as entertainment.

It's as if the hack mentality decides there's not enough to the story without a little "help," something sexy, something edgy, something Zodiac, something Summer of Sam — a little story meeting like the studio suits in Altman's "The Player," riffing up a sexy "Stand and Deliver."

And so what the carrion press rushes to market is a nakedly anti-humanistic effort to franchise the newest national disaster as vulgar, straight-to-video B-movie trash.

Of course the Tarot card turns out to be about the least vital angle on this whole horror show. But the question remains: what kind of a news organization puffs up a coward killer's half-baked homicidal fantasies?

"Hey, wouldn't it be 'edgy' if we took the killer's side? I mean, fuck the good guys, the killer's the one they want to know about, right? He's the guy, right? So what do we know? He shoots people from a distance and he leaves a Tarot card with some mental case type slogans — My God, that's it! That's the angle! He's not just the Beltway Sniper. He's The Tarot Card Killer! Huh? Do I got it or do I got it? I should be this guy's agent! How the hell do I do it? Sweet mother of market share, let's get paid!"

W.'s MAGIC BULLET THEORY

Then, sadly, there's the White House. That's where George W. Bush flack Ari Fleischer recently uncorked some rhetoric so corrosively radical you wonder whether you're hearing U.S. foreign policy or some kind of badly translated tirade from a drunken North Korean general.

"The price of a bullet costs less for the Iraqi people than war." That's according to Fleischer, ever a friend to Baghdad's man on the street. Hey Ari, do you realize several hundred Chicago businessmen got sent up the river on racketeering charges for saying less about their enemies on wiretap than you just did in front of a hundred microphones? Either way it's a little insulting to hear solicitations for political assassinations coming from the office where Lincoln and JFK made American history with their command of the English language.

Still, let's give credit for staying consistent on one thing. For the truly cynical everything comes down a price, and a bullet is admired as is the ultimate problem-solving device of all time. At this point it's barely a stretch to say the Republicans resemble the mutants "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" worshiping the Doomsday Bomb. Can't you just see Cheney peeling off that rubber mask? Even more grim was the spectacle of the ailing Charlton Heston clutching a musket and aping the mantra "From my cold dead hands" for the hooting head-cases of the NRA. Meanwhile funerals and the manhunt for a sniper.

The rifle? The Bushmaster. The perpetrators? Very likely include a homeless former military man, not so different from the small army of not-so-heroic nutcases the US plans to release back into civilian life after we've used up their limited sanity securing "regime change" in Iraq. A dozen more McVeighs, a few hundred new wife-killings and a quarter million new case of Gulf War disease, coming right up. I guess that's the cost of warring for peace.

Now the red phones are ringing. The master class are demanding a retraction. There's no the connection between George W. Bush's imperial gangster rhetoric and Newsweek's beloved "Tarot Card Killer."

Maybe so, but it was Fate who drew the connection. Fleischer made his notorious "price of a bullet" declaration on October 2nd. That was the day the DC sniper, a bullet hole where his soul should be, began living out a military fantasy of his own.

That's right, we said it. After all, since sex addict Bill Clinton eradicated the menace of "Heroin Chic," things have been too quiet. We cannot wait idly by while the current administration turns a blind eye to the gathering storm of "Pedophile Chic."

At left: What's not to love? Cinema sweetheart Kirsten Dunst presented for the super-appealing, sexually attractive young woman she is.

Not to single out Rolling Stone. They're just the worst offender. Britney in a "fuck me" pose clutching a purple Teletubby anyone?