Coming back to Las Vegas after several days in San Diego isn’t easy. There are no beautiful sunsets over stunning Pacific vistas. There are no delicious seafood meals to be eaten at restaurants that jut out over water. There aren’t (yet, anyway) beautiful, high-rise buildings casting their nighttime reflections on the still waters of the bay. And there sure as hell aren’t magnificent fighting ships of the Pacific fleet at anchor in the harbor, like the U.S.S. Nimitz or the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan.

But return we did, and carry on we must. So sit back and enjoy today’s blogapalooza, baby! (There’s plenty of cool stuff, so read all the way to the bottom.)

• From the Two Can Play That Game Dept.: President George W. Bush is delighted these days to read the pre-war quotes of some latter-day critics of Iraq, including our very own Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who once said “Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think that the president’s approaching this in the right fashion.”

Now, of course, Reid is critical of Bush and the president’s handling of the intelligence that led to war, as are other Democrats, who denounced Saddam Hussein as a big old prick before the war who was sitting on more weapons of mass destruction than Wile E. Coyote.

Inconsistent? Not really: At the time, everybody believed Bush’s oft-repeated assertions on Iraq. Our own U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley voted for the war, too, after Pentagon briefers showed her maps of the exact locations of supposed weapons of mass destruction. Even we at Various Things & Stuff expected our soldiers to find plenty of WMD.

What happened? It turned out to be bullshit. And now, Democrats want to know if Bush knew it was bullshit at the time, or was under the same delusion as everybody else. Fair question in our book.

But as long as we’re trotting out old quotes, let’s take a look at a couple of our own Republicans, and see how they felt about Saddam Hussein, Iraq and war back in the days when President Bill Clinton was in office.

When Clinton was tussling with Iraq over weapons inspections, some thought war was imminent. And that, according to U.S. Sen. John Ensign was a bad idea.

“It’s not like Pearl Harbor has been bombed and we have to respond now,” Ensign said in Feburary 1998, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “President Clinton has some time to lay this out to us and get Congress’ support, and he hasn’t done that.”

Don’t say “Sept. 11,” either: Despite the outright lies of the administration, repeated investigations have found that Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.

And then there’s U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, a veteran of the initial Gulf War. Gibbons told The Associated Press back in 1998 that it would be foolish to bomb Iraq without international support.

“I’m concerned about our foreign policy. This on-again, off-again hesitancy [toward Hussein] on our part is diminishing world and global support.”

In the Review-Journal, Gibbons was even harsher on any potential war plans: Clinton “has to take the time to secure the consent of Congress and the consent of the world before we go after Saddam Hussein in his own backyard.” Does that mean we have to get France’s support, too, congressman?

Ensign told the R-J in the same February 1998 story that Clinton “has not made the case to Congress to get our support and we are not in a crisis situation.” It seems to us, senator, that we weren’t in a crisis situation before Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq, either.

(By the way, former U.S. Sen. Dick Bryan was very pro-war, with quotes you could put into the mouth of the Ensign of today, like this: “To do nothing sends a message that’s devastating to international relations. … So I favor a military strike, that has to be massive.”)

The point? Members of Congress tend to vacillate depending on who’s president. That makes them political hacks. But President Bush — along with some of his key underlings — has been totally consistent on Iraq from the very beginning of his presidency, even before Sept. 11: Pro-invasion, anti-Saddam. And that made putting the military at his disposal a dangerous thing.

Proof? We bet Clinton could travel the world today without creating the protests that follow Bush wherever he goes. Who’s done more to diminish world and global support for the United States? And, in the words of the Gibbons (the Gibbons of 1998, not the Gibbons of today) what’s our exit strategy?

• Speaking of Ensign, two things. First, we wish him a speedy recovery from the sprained ankle he suffered while playing basketball last week. Sometimes, being a senator can be dangerous business, and Ensign in his career has risked many a sprain, strain and even torn ligaments doing his duty in softball games, basketball games and marathons. Oh, he’s also risked paper cuts in the odd appearance on the Senate floor, too.

Second, it was probably the pain meds that made him issue the Nov. 9 news release on the need to cut down on smoking — in the movies. (At least we hope that’s the reason.) Ensign said a study published in the journal Pediatrics found that youths with the highest exposure to smoking in movies were 2.6 times more likely to start smoking then youths who never saw smoking films, and 38 percent of young smokers started because they saw it in movies.

Damn! All we have to do is get those kids to go see the movies where good prevails over evil, where bad acts have bad consequences and where the heroes rise above their personal flaws to do the right thing — which is to say, pretty much all of them — and we’ll have an epidemic of good citizenship! Won’t we?

“There is a very serious health issue in America that has been largely overlooked, and I hope this study draws attention to the link between smoking in the movies and smoking among children,” Ensign said in a statement. “The film industry should pay careful attention to how its product is affecting the lives of America’s children.”

Ensign wants a voluntary reduction in the among of smoking in movies, and he’s even proposed a rating system that would alert parents to the fact that characters in films smoke.

Yes, we’ll never forget the time we went down to Brazil, wearing our leather jacket and fedora, to fetch a gold idol from a lost temple, all because we saw it in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Why, we almost didn’t make it back to the seaplane because we were being chased by spear-tossing natives! And when we did, Jacque’s pet snake Reggie was slithering around in the cockpit! Oh, that Jacque and his crazy pets.

Reality check, folks: Kids won’t do something just because they see it in a movie, and if they do, they reap the consequences just like everybody else. Parents, if they really want to make a difference, should be involved enough in their kids’ lives to teach them the difference between movies — where the hero hardly ever gets cancer and dies from smoking — and reality.

As for Ensign, we’ve got to believe he’s working hard to capture the title of Master of Frivolity in the upper house. With bills banning interstate transportation of roosters for the purposes of cockfighting and a smoking rating system for movies, he’s not exactly what we’d consider a heavy lifter. Outside the House gym, of course!

• And finally today, Time magazine has named Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn as one of the nation’s top five chief executives. (No, really.) It praised him for the $833 million tax increase of 2003 that Guinn desperately doesn’t want to be his legacy, saying he helped Nevada weather a fiscal storm.

Of course, the mean old Review-Journal immediately replied by saying that Time only praised Guinn for raising taxes, a liberal pursuit. The implication: If he’d had principles and been a real Republican, the national newsweekly probably wouldn’t have looked twice. (After all, where was union-fighting, budget-cutting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on that list? Nowhere, baby.)

Then again, what Time didn’t mention is that we lefties were amazed at Guinn’s fecklessness when it came to the tax increase. (It was originally much larger, and imposed a gross receipts tax on the tax-dodging big businesses in Nevada.) But Guinn did absolutely nothing to support his own plan, even when he saw the Legislature concocting a dismal alternative. He’ll get no plaudits in The Nation or Mother Jones, we can tell you that.

So Guinn returns to building his legacy, with Time’s praise on his resume, but people on both the left and the right wondering if he might truly be remembered as The Governor Who Never Showed Up.