With support for the war in Iraq remaining low, it is not unusual for top administration officials to encounter protests and hostile questions.

But the outbursts Rumsfeld confronted on Thursday seemed beyond the usual.

Three protesters were escorted away by security as each interrupted Rumsfeld's speech by jumping up and shouting antiwar messages. Throughout the speech, a fourth protester stood up in the middle of the room with his back to Rumsfeld in silent protest.

Rumsfeld also faced tough questions from a woman identifying herself as Patricia Robertson, who said she had lost her son in Iraq. Robertson said she is now raising her grandson and asked whether the government could provide any help.

Rumsfeld referred her to a Web site listing aid organizations.

President Bush seldom faces such challenges. Demonstrators usually are kept far from him when he delivers public remarks.

Rumsfeld has been interrupted by antiwar demonstrators in congressional hearing rooms as he has delivered testimony to lawmakers in recent months.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has had confrontations overseas. These include demonstrators who called her a murderer and war criminal in Australia in March, and throngs of antiwar protesters who dogged her every move in northern England in April.

In recent weeks, at least half a dozen retired generals have called for Rumsfeld's resignation, saying he has ignored advice offered by military officers and made strategic errors in the war, including committing too few troops.

But he has received strong backing from Bush, who has repeatedly indicated he will keep Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

When security guards tried removing McGovern, the analyst, during his persistent questions of Rumsfeld on Thursday, the defense secretary told them to let him stay. The two continued to spar.

"You're getting plenty of play," Rumsfeld told McGovern, who is an outspoken critic of the war.

Responding to another protester who also accused Rumsfeld of lying, the secretary said such accusations are "so wrong, so unfair and so destructive."

Rumsfeld focused his speech on the need for the United States to increase its emphasis on more flexible partnerships with foreign militaries and the rethinking of the role of long-established alliances such as NATO.

He called such changes "necessary adjustments, based on the new realities and the new threats that have emerged since the end of the Cold War."

Reuters photographer Lee Jae-won and about a dozen other journalists, wearing helmets and armbands identifying them as media, were also hurt after being beaten by police.

Lee suffered lacerated lips and hands.

The confrontation has been brewing for months since about 100 farmers refused to vacate the area where South Korea and the United States agreed two years ago to move the main U.S. military base now in Seoul and several others throughout the country.

The number of protesters, many of whom are anti-U.S. activists, unionists and students, swelled overnight after reports the government would send in thousands of police and military engineers to clear the 9.4-square km (3.6-square mile) area.

Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung said the project, which had been authorized by South Korea's parliament, could no longer be delayed.

"It is unacceptable that some opponents of this national project are taking advantage of local residents by turning it into a political battle," Yoon said in a statement.

PRECIOUS FARMLAND

South Korea's military would take no part in the eviction, and military engineers and ground troops deployed in the area would be kept away from protesters, he said.

About 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed in the country alongside South Korea's military to defend against possible aggression by communist North Korea.

South and North Korea remain technically at war under the inconclusive truce that ended the 1950-53 Korean war.

Seoul has said further delay in the base relocation could cause diplomatic friction with Washington.

Last-ditch talks between government and residents aimed at a compromise broke down on Monday. Local residents, mostly elderly farmers, and protesters have said no amount of compensation can justify the move.

"This is precious land that generations of farmers have made rich," said Song Hyun, 86, on the edge of rice fields before the police moved in.

"It is heartbreaking that they are trying to take such good land away from us."

Yearly, since the tragedy, Kent State students, alumni, and others have met on the anniversary of the shooting to reflect and remember. Alan Canfora, who was shot by the Guard, says, ''The students today act as the conscience of the college, and the country . . . just like the students did in 1970."

This year's memorial will come, as the last three have, in the midst of a war that has become increasingly divisive. While the memory of Kent State and other violent clashes from that time between protesters and authorities did not deter the incumbent president from leading the country into another unpopular war, it is important to honor Kent State's spirit of dissent and what it taught about the bloody consequences of intense division.

Halfway across the country, the lessons of Kent State are taught each semester in debate classes at Emerson College. J. Gregory Payne, associate professor of organizational and political communication and a Kent State historian, has been teaching students about history, advocacy, and rhetoric through the lens of Kent State for decades.

According to Payne, remembering this tragedy is important because ''Kent State is not about the past -- it's about the future."

Consider the similarities: In 1970, just as today, we had an unpopular president carrying out an unpopular war for questionable reasons.

Richard Nixon and George W. Bush embody many of the same divisive characteristics. Bush tells the world: ''You are with us or you are with the terrorists." Nixon's public statement after the shootings blamed the students: ''When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."

Again our civil liberties are being threatened. Bush has ordered the wiretapping of US citizens without a warrant and holds detainees indefinitely without trial; Nixon was spying on student activists and what he called ''domestic radicals."

But, perhaps the most telling comparison is the sharp division within the nation, both then and now. Americans are now, as we were then, split to the core on matters of war and peace, life and death, and cultural values. The President's Commission concluded it was ''the most divisive time in American history since the civil war." Bill Schroeder's parents received signed letters after the shooting saying, among other things, that their ''riot-making, communist son" deserved to die.

Today antiwar protesters are unfairly discredited by the administration as they were in 1970. When Cindy Sheehan took antiwar positions after her 24-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq, she was smeared by pundits like Bill O'Reilly, who said she was a pawn of ''far-left elements that are using her" and that Sheehan was ''dumb" enough to let them do it.

Of course, the absence of a draft now and its presence then may explain why the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War had a greater intensity then it does now. Still, as the protests in New York City last week indicate, the longer the war in Iraq drags on, the more vehement the opposition seems to get.

Musicians, once again, are singing songs of dissent. Last Friday Neil Young, who in 1970 wrote ''Ohio" in reaction to the shootings, began streaming a new antiwar album ''Living with War" for free on his website. Days later, Pearl Jam also released an album made up entirely of protest music.

My generation can't ignore the lessons of Kent State. The same mindset and failure in leadership that led National Guardsmen to fire at students of the same age and from the same Ohio hometowns is similar to what led US soldiers to torture detainees in Iraq.

Kent State should remind us of what happens when a grossly misguided war divides a country. If we can speak candidly and openly about our history and our present -- even the worst elements of it -- then we can ensure that the lives lost on May 4, 1970, were not in vain.

Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
-- Gen. Jack D. Ripper

You know, a conspiracy theory like Mexican 'Reconquista' is just too good to give up on easily, I guess -- especially when your whole enterprise is all about busily grasping at whatever straws might float your way.

So Gen. Michelle D. Ripper decides to swing away again, claiming she has proof, dammit, that "Reconquista!" is real:

On the Sean Hannity radio show Monday, I debated (or rather listened to five minutes of screeching by) a young member of the radical group MeCha. A student at the University of San Francisco, she denied that her group still subscribed to 1960s identity politics, then promptly delivered a full-throated rant about Mexico's right to reclaim American territory: "We believe that we have the right to be in this land...Aztlan is California! Aztlan is this country! This country was ours ... We didn't cross the borders. The borders crossed us ... This country is based on exploitation!"

On NPR's "All Things Considered," Gloria Ramirez Vargas, a politician in Baja, Calif., rallied her constituents with a similar cry: " Many Mexicans are nourishing the ground in the U.S. , but those lands were once ours. Those same lands, which now with intelligence, with love and with a lot of work, we are re-conquering again for our Mexico."

On leading conservative talk show station KFI in Los Angeles, hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou interviewed Tony Valdez, who also invoked "manifest destiny" as a rationale for supporting the sabotage of our immigration laws. He pontificated about 1846, recycled the "We didn't cross the borders" nonsense, inveighed against the war in Iraq, and exclaimed: "You took this country. You killed people in order to take this country for yourselves."

Valdez is a FOX News 11 reporter at KTTV in L.A.

OK, so let's review:

-- Malkin presents us with the usual parade of fringe signs from the marches, ignoring of course the prevalence of American flags and pro-American signs. None of the signs are about Mexico retaking U.S. lands -- though there are many that advocate the notion that the Southwest is part of Latinos' indigenous homeland.

-- She gives us three live examples that are supposed to represent people advocating that the Southwest be returned to Mexico. Who are they? A student. An obscure local politician. And a TV reporter.

But note that only one of them (Ramirez Vargas) seems to actually advocate that. The reporter is talking about past injustices. The MEChA member is advocating the concept of Aztlan, which essentially holds that the Southwest is part of her people's indigenous homeland. She says nothing about "Mexico's right to reclaim American territory." Malkin's putting words in her mouth.

And note: None of them -- not one -- uses the phrase "Reconquista." Nor do any of the signs she cites.

Let's revisit Malkin's original claim:

Aztlan is a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class, which asserts that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico. Advocates believe the reclamation (or reconquista) of Aztlan will occur through sheer demographic force. If the rallies across the country are any indication, reconquista is already complete.

Are any of the people Malkin cites "among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class"?

Er, no.

Can she cite any examples of those "elite" -- or hey, even some shoot-from-the-hip right-wing pundit -- advocating "Reconquista"?

Er, no.

As for MEChA, there is no instance of "Reconquista!" advocacy on its record. The phrase does not appear in either El Plan de Santa Barbara or El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, two of the 1969-era documents that get the "MEChA is racist" crowd all worked up. Nor can you find it in the more comprehensive, and current, "Philosophy of MEChA". None of them talk about returning Southwest territory to Mexico.

Indeed, as I pointed out way back when, the actual record of MEChA's activism is largely one of all-American advocacy. As one commenter I cited put it:

MeCHA has been an integral part of student life for decades; many, if not most, of my Chicano friends and acquaintances were involved with it; it was then and probably is now an advocacy organization which worked to bring Chicanos (now Latinos) into the educational institutions, to feed and clothe underprivileged children in the community, including those of the migrant farmworkers, was involved with Caesar Chavez in advocating for better working conditions for the migrant workers, and provided tutoring, mentoring, and fellowship for students, as do many other student organizations.

I don't think the Minutemen can say the same.

Perhaps more to the point, as I explored in detail then as well as more recently, where did the idea of "Reconquista!" originate?

Gen. Malkin won't tell you, Mandrake.

That's because it originated on the extremist right. It appears to have been coined, as a term applied to the current immigration wave from Mexico (the original Reconquista involved Spain's reacquisition of formerly Muslim lands), by Glenn Spencer, who runs the white-supremacist American Patrol organization. You know: the fellow who helped originate the concept of anti-Latino border patrols.

The kind of fellow who says things like:

"If the Border Patrol had done its job, using the technology that is available to us, we could stop these people," Spencer said in November, when he was a guest on the Donahue show. "This is an invasion of the United States!"

The kind of fellow who hands out videotapes of his conspiracy theory in Congress -- with a notable courier:

Spencer sent every member of Congress a copy of his videotape - "Bonds of Our Nation" - that purports to prove the Mexican government and Mexican-Americans are plotting to take over the American Southwest and create the nation of Aztlán. Hand-delivering the videos was Betina McCann, the fiancé of neo-Nazi Steven Barry.

The kind of fellow who fires shots into his neighbor's garage door:

After a neighbor reported hearing two shots fired and a weapon cocked outside her home, local officers drove out and found that bullets had been fired into the woman's garage door. Spencer, claiming that he opened fire after hearing suspicious noises outside, was arrested on three felony counts of disorderly conduct with a weapon, one felony count of endangerment and one count of misdemeanor criminal damage. A few days earlier, following a series of death threats against Spencer, his home headquarters had been burglarized, Spencer claimed.

Ah, yes ...

I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake ... but I do deny them my essence.