This country is at war, and I'm not talking about the war on terrorism, or, as President Bush used to call it, the War on Tara. (Poor Tara!) The war I'm talking about is a very different war. I'm talking about Civil War II, the battle between the left and the right that's brewing around the 2004 elections. At this point in history, the United States is almost evenly divided between liberals and conservatives. Moderates seem to have completely vanished from the landscape. In terms of sheer numbers, there still seems to be more people who are attracted to liberal ideas, but until recently conservatives fought harder and smarter. That may be changing. Joe Conason's new book, Big Lies, has been getting a lot of press lately. For many liberals, myself included, the lies and distortions of the right seem all too obvious. Advance readers, though, have said that the virtue of Conason's new tome is that it concentrates details about the biggest lies into a single well-researched reference. All the standard right-wing bullshit about how the media is controlled by liberals, how Clinton was soft on al Qaeda, how liberals are elitists and how conservatives fight for the little guy are dissected in painful detail. This should be an effective salvo in the continuing battle for the soul of America.