Brooks ("Multiple Reality Syndrome") says the Bush administration is starting to address the complex realities of Iraq.

Kristof ("For Environmental Balance, Pick Up a Rifle") says we need hunters to control the wildlife population.

Rich ("All the President's Flacks") rips Bob Woodward for his lack of interest -- and honesty -- about the Plame case.

Brooks: "Most serious people who spend time in Iraq report that reality there is contradictory and kaleidoscopic...It's been interesting to watch the Bush administration grapple with these ambiguities, contradictions and dissonances...Sometimes I'd come away from off-the-record conversations and background briefings feeling my intelligence had been insulted, because even in private, officials would ignore realities that were on newspaper front pages."

"Then, gradually, an internal glasnost evolved...There was a vast gap between the eighth-grade level of some public statements and the graduate-school level of private White House conversations."

"The president's Annapolis speech last week marks the start of the third phase of the Bush administration's efforts to function amid the fog of the Iraq war...for once the Iraq Bush described matched the Iraq his generals confront every day. I'd add that the speech was a watershed because more than ever before, the views the president expressed in public resembled the views he holds in private."

Kicker: "I still wouldn't say deliberation is this administration's strong suit...But just as our troops and the Iraqis have learned to fight better, the White House has learned to think and communicate better. These days one at least has the sense we are putting our best team on the field - whether it is too late is another proposition lost in the shadowlands."

Kristof: Too many deer, and a growing population of big predators, too. "We have an environmental imbalance caused in part by the decline of hunting. Humans first wiped out certain predators - like wolves and cougars - but then expanded their own role as predators to sustain a rough ecological balance. These days, though, hunters are on the decline."

Rich: "When 'all of the facts come out in this case,' Bob Woodward told Terry Gross on NPR in July, 'it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great.'

"Who's laughing now?

"Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom."

More: "Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events."

"Thanks in large part to the case Mr. Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis."