By PAUL C. CAMPOS, Scripps Howard News Service

Exactly a decade ago Washington's social elites went into a pearl-clutching swoon over Bill Clinton lying to the nation -- and, far less forgivably, to them -- about the details of his sex life.

Every month I get a few e-mails from people who want to reveal to me the real truth about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The truth, according to my correspondents, always involves some incredibly elaborate conspiracy theory in which the U.S. government staged the attacks to justify the so-called war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

For nearly a decade now, I've been writing about controversies regarding the relationship between weight and health. In the course of studying the matter, I've concluded that much of the conventional wisdom about the subject is simply wrong.

It's been a very bad week for American journalism. The fun began when former Bush administration press spokesman Scott McClellan published a book in which he pointed out that the Iraq disaster was enabled, in part, by the failure of the media to do their job.

The Washington Post is running a week-long front-page series regarding the supposed crisis childhood "obesity" poses to the nation. It provides reporters and editors with a blueprint for how to engage in hysterical fear-mongering while committing egregious journalistic malpractice.

When Hillary Clinton claimed last week that Barack Obama was having trouble getting the votes of "hard working Americans, white Americans," much speculation ensued about whether she was intentionally exploiting classic racist beliefs about the supposed laziness of African Americans.

The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously observed that "90 percent of everything is crap." His aphorism was intended to defend science fiction from the charge that most of it is bad. Sturgeon's point -- since formalized as Sturgeon's Law -- is that such criticism is empty, since it applies with equal force to every form of writing.

Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, caused quite a stir earlier this month when she wrote about letting her nine-year-old son take a subway and bus by himself across Manhattan. The boy had been begging her to allow him to test his big city commuting skills on his own, and she finally agreed, handing him a map, a subway token, some quarters, and a $20 bill.

War is a form of mass psychosis, during which horrifying acts are transformed into heroic deeds, through the magical moral disinfectant of state sanction.A nice example of this is provided by an urban legend, which for the last couple of years has circulated on the Internet as a purportedly true story. Here's the most popular version of it:

In 2003, when he was a deputy assistant U.S. attorney general, John Yoo wrote a long legal memorandum arguing that the president has the inherent constitutional authority to torture people.