Breslin's maligning of Republicans may be somewhat geographically bigoted, given that there are some pretty glazed-eyed Republicans in states like New York and Massachusetts, too, but his point is nonetheless on target.

These people, and the vaster populace that continues to hail Dubya as a great leader, are really either willfully stupid, or genuinely ignorant.

The difference between them and the people in the street last Sunday, and in New York in general, is nothing short of striking.

Consider that New York City is the ground zero of this Age of Terror--the place that took the big hit on 9/11. And yet New Yorkers have the sense to know that it was ridiculous for Bush to send the U.S. military into Iraq. They have the intelligence to know that slashing taxes on the rich and corporations and running up a trillion-dollar deficit is madness. And they are savvy enough to recognize that producing the Republican National Convention show in Manhattan is nothing but a sleazy, ghoulish effort by Bush and the Republicans to ride to victory in 2004 on the blood and suffering of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks, and their families.

I say this because polls say 80 percent or more of New Yorkers support the demonstrations against the RNC, and their right to demonstrate and have the support of the city, with a permit for a rally in Central Park.

I say it because my own random survey of marchers last weekend suggested that as many as 50-percent of the half-million people marching up Seventh Avenue, across 34th Street and down to Union Square were from the City, which if true would mean about one in 15 able-bodied New York adults was out there protesting Bush and his gang.

Inside the Garden, and across the red swath of states so gracefully libeled by Breslin, are people so devoid of logic and rational thought that they actually believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were behind the 9/11 attacks. Many of them, for that matter, believe that the world began a few thousand years ago and that women were made from Adam’s rib.

We're talking serious know-nothingism here, folks.

Not that all Republicans are stupid. Some, I'm sure, are simply good selfish folk who figure that they've got theirs, and they want to keep it, and the rest of the country and the world be damned.

For the rest of this column, please go (at no charge) to This Can't Be Happening! .