Much like In-N-Out Burger, our very favorite hamburger restaurant, we at Various Things & Stuff do one thing, do it well and stick to it. That thing? The tasty blog nuggets known as Quick Hits. Ready for another serving? Here we go!

• OK, we admit it: We sometimes watch Fox News Channel. We actually enjoy watching Fox, because it’s so cute when the anchors and commentators pretend to be unbiased. (”Is Bill Clinton a rat-fuck son of a bitch, or just a regular son-of-a-bitch? Our fair and balanced debate continues, after this ad for boner pills featuring Rush Limbaugh!”)

Well, the aforementioned ex-President of the United States, the Hon. William Jefferson Clinton, showed up on Fox this weekend, and did he go into a holy tear after interviewer Chris Wallace asked him why he didn’t do more to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Clinton, obviously angry after Wallace’s 22.3-minute question, told viewers that he did go after bin Laden. In fact, Clinton reminded Fox viewers (to whom this was, undoubtedly, entirely new information) the incoming Republican administration thought he was “obsessed” with bin Laden. Once the Bush people took over, Clinton’s primary anti-terror advisor, Richard Clarke, was demoted to other duties and the focus on the al-Qaida leader shifted.

Clinton candidly admitted “I failed” to get bin Laden, but added, “at least I tried.” Finally, he said, “I got closer to killing him than anybody’s gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.”

But, mixed in with his defense, Clinton took after Wallace and Fox News, too, calling the interview a “conservative hit job” and telling his interviewer he was doing “Fox’s bidding.”

We admit that the former president lost it a little, but it’s somewhat understandable, in the wake of that ABC “docudrama” (read — fictional account) called The Path to 9/11. Now that the current administration is fumbling badly (even U.S. intelligence agencies are saying America is less safe and terrorism is on the increase as a result of the Iraq war) blaming Clinton for 9/11 is in vogue.

Strip away his anger, however, and you’ll see that most everything Clinton said is absolutely true. He did have active programs aimed at bin Laden. He did resist calls to pull out of Somalia immediately after that disastrous Black Hawk Down incident. And he did launch attacks and authorize missions to capture or kill terror leaders. He may not have succeeded, but former intelligence leaders, including Clarke, said Clinton did everything he could have under the circumstances.

And that’s is a pretty fair and balanced assessment, one of the few that actually appears on Fox News Channel. Unfortunately, we think Clinton’s defensiveness will simply reinforce the view of conservative viewers that he’s only trying to burnish his legacy.

• Speaking of terrorism, the Review-Journal ran a fascinating op-ed in Sunday’s newspaper that questions some very fundamental assumptions of liberals as they approach the war on terror. Clinton had said he believes that our differences, including religion, are not as important as the common humanity we all share. But author Sam Harris (The End of Faith) says that Muslim extremists are more and more defined by their radical ideology, and commit acts of savagery in the name of jihad not because they are without economic opportunity, but because their religion is the overriding guiding force in their lives.

If that’s true, we lefties are going to have to reconsider some fundamental underpinnings of our terror policy. To start the dialogue, we recommend you read Harris’ original op-ed here on the website of the Los Angeles Times.

• We had to laugh at the latest Nevada committee name, in a season where committee names have reached absurd, even Orwellian depths. (Seriously, “Nevadans for Nevada”? That’s the height of laziness, labor people! “Nevadans for the Protection of Property Rights”? That’s like Hannibal Lecter’s “Committee for the Preservation of Human Livers [with a nice demi-glaze].”)

But the Committee to Keep Nevada Respectable?

That name belongs to the Rogich Communications-fronted group that’s opposing Question 7, the initiative that would legalize up to one ounce of marijuana for adults, with a bevy of controls and punishments for wrongdoing.

Oh, and let’s dispense with this business about the word “legalize.” Although proponents might not like it, that’s precisely what they are advocating. Marijuana is illegal now, but under this initiative, it would be legal. That’s a process we like to call “legalization.” Own it, pot people, because that’s what you’re doing.

But back to the committee. We hate to burst your bubble guys, but Nevada lost its respectability a long, long time ago. Forming a committee to keep it respectable now is like fixing the barn door after a global catastrophe has caused all humans (and horses) to flee the planet, searching for a habitable world elsewhere in our solar system. In other words, you’re all by yourselves out there.

Besides, legalizing marijuana wouldn’t make Nevada less respectable. Plenty of respectable places allow for the smoking of the kind green bud. In fact, you could make Nevada respectable by getting rid of all the casinos, free-flowing booze and strip clubs, but allowing for legal pot, which doesn’t cause even one-tenth of the problems caused by this state’s other, legal vices.

But then we’d be back to the desert we once were, wouldn’t we? Oh, well. We tried.

• What the hell is up with leaving threatening messages on somebody’s voice mail? First, state Sen. Dina Titus left a threatening message on a young staffer’s telephone, and now Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald has done it, too?

People! Voice mail, e-mail, snail mail, etc. can all be saved. It can be used as evidence. You later cannot deny that you said those things. Hello? Anybody home? It’s not OK to threaten people, but it’s especially not OK to do it in a medium that will shortly be leaked to the media! Think, people, think!

• Quotable: “The president, of course, is not stupid. Those who politically short-sell the president based on oratory skills get their butts kicked. Ask Al Gore or John Kerry.” — Sherm Frederick, in a Sunday column in the R-J. (FULL DISCLOSURE: The R-J, CityLife and this blog are owned by the Stephens Media LLC, of which Frederick is president.)

With all due respect, Corporate Overlord, do you realize that Al Gore won the 2000 election? (And that, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is to be believed, Kerry won the 2004 election?) But even if Kerry didn’t win in 2004, losing by a mere 3 million votes (out of 121.4 million votes cast) cannot, by definition, qualify as getting your “butt kicked”? We’re just saying.

Now, we don’t believe that Bush is stupid, either. But that means that everything he’s done — tax cuts, deficits, bad policy, war — has been done by design. Don’t you think that’s worse? At least, if he were stupid, he could fall back on that as an excuse….

• So state Sen. Dina Titus is behind in the race for governor, 36 percent to U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons’ 45 percent, according to an R-J poll? Could things change after the debates? We’ll see, starting tonight, as the candidates face off in Reno for a debate that will air locally at 6 p.m. on KVBC Channel 3. Check it out!

• And finally today, the Rev. Jerry Falwell apparently told a conservative audience that he hopes that U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton is the 2008 Democratic nominee for president, because she’d get more conservative Christians to turn out than if Satan were running!

First Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez compares President Bush to the devil, and now Falwell (a minister who ought to know better) compares Hillary Clinton to Satan in terms of conservative turnout potential. (And after last week’s annual CityLife media issue, we’re sure there are some folk over at the R-J who think we’re the devil, too.) What’s with these people?

Yes, Bush may have started a war for no good reason that’s killed more than 100,000 Iraqis and nearly 3,000 of our soldiers. Yes, Clinton’s health-care plan may have taken the profits out of the narco-industrial complex that is modern medicine in America.

But neither of them is the devil, that tempestuous, proud archangel who challenged God because of his love for humans and made war upon heaven in open defiance of the creator! Both Bush and Clinton, in their own way, are trying to do what’s right, while Satan, our adversary, prowls the world as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. While Bush wants to give the gift of freedom to everybody (complete with capitalist democracy!) and while Clinton wants to give the gift of health care to every American, Satan wants defiance of God and the destruction of souls.

In short, there’s a difference, people. A big one.