Stacy Schiff on how to get a job in this Administration, and then Maureen Dowd tells us that W. apparently read two of the Flashman books. That’s not good … Let’s see about getting that job first (hint --- it helps if you’re nuts):

How to get a job in Washington, that balmy, bipartisan town: Direct an organization that opposes contraception on the grounds that it is “demeaning to women.” Compare premarital sex to heroin addiction. Advertise a link between breast cancer and abortion — a link that was refuted in 1997. Rant against sex ed. And hatch a loony theory about hormones.

You’re a shoo-in, and if your name is Eric Keroack you’re in your second month as deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Keroack, a 46-year-old Massachusetts ob-gyn, today oversees the $280 million Title X program, the only federal program “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them, with priority given to low-income persons.”

It’s not a job that plays to Dr. Keroack’s talents, which happen to be prodigious. In the PowerPoint presentation that has cemented his reputation, he makes the case that premarital sex suppresses the hormone oxytocin, thereby impairing one’s ability to forge a successful long-term relationship. If forced to mince words you might call this fanciful or speculative. Otherwise you’d call it wacko. “Really, really scary” and “utterly hilarious” were the first two reactions I heard from scientists.

Each of us owes a rather critical debt to oxytocin. It’s what moves a new mother to comfort and nurse a squalling baby rather than to toss it from the window, as common sense might dictate. It is — you knew your husband was missing something — the hormone of intimacy. (No, you can’t buy supplements across the border. And yes, OxyContin is something different. Rush Limbaugh was not working on his bonding instincts.)

Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, calls oxytocin the Glinda the Good Witch of her field. It is the drug of trust and partnership and attachment, commonly known by their street name: love. Oxytocin mellows, elates, and throws you into a mental fog. Rats prefer it to cocaine. While the rush at childbirth is particularly dramatic, the hormone swells with physical and emotional bonding of all kinds.

“Surge” has not always been a dirty word.

But no one has had as much good, clean fun with oxytocin as Dr. Keroack, for whom it is “God’s superglue.” Extrapolating in part from research with prairie voles, which are monogamous, he postulates that oxytocin cannot survive too much sex, at least with multiple partners, at least prior to marriage. By way of demonstration he proposes the duct tape test: you need only an adhesive and a hairy arm. The tape represents the brain. Press it down. Now reapply. See what happens? Less sticky, right? Concludes Keroack: “Basically, you will end up damaging your brain’s ability to use the oxytocin system as a chemical mechanism that serves to help you successfully bond in future relationships.” Don’t ask about his illustrations. They are offensive.

Keroack presents this as gospel truth, though the scientists on whose research he bases his theory balk. One called it a wild leap. “A bungee jump without a cord,” suggested another expert. Dr. Brizendine had a less kind word for it. She adds that while premarital sex cannot ruin your oxytocin response, it has been shown — in the absence of options — to ruin your life. Something tells me that Dr. Keroack is not planning a 34th anniversary bash on Monday for Roe v. Wade.

I know what you’re thinking: if Dr. Keroack can write stuff this outlandish he’s spelling his name wrong. As the other Kerouac said — arguably with a firmer grasp of neurochemistry — “I had nothing to offer anybody but my own confusion.” Dr. Keroack may want to borrow the disclaimer that prefaces Michael Crichton’s newest best-seller: “This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.” It takes an agenda rather than a medical degree to engage in this kind of science. Or an imagination.

In all fairness, Dr. Keroack has long been a little clumsy as an analogist. In a 2001 letter to the Massachusetts Legislature he explained the logic of performing sonograms on women considering abortion: “Even Midas lets you look at your old muffler before they advise you to change it.”

There are many ways to define demeaning.

Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” She is a guest columnist.

Next up we have MoDo who points out that apparently Dubyah read two of the Flashman books. This is VERY bad news.

George Bush may have lost his swagger, but Harry Flashman hasn’t.

Maybe the president presiding over a quicksand empire got a vicarious thrill out of the fictional Victorian brigadier general who roamed from Chillianwalla to Isandlwana to Abyssinia at the height of the British Empire, always making conquests in love and war despite his cowardly, caddish behavior.

In our continuing odyssey of discovery through the president’s reading list, we learned that he perused two of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, “Flashman at the Charge” and “Flash for Freedom.”

There are those who are skeptical of the president’s souped-up reading list, a result of a book-reading contest with Karl Rove.

“I don’t think he understands the world,” Jay Rockefeller, the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Times’s Mark Mazzetti. “I don’t think he’s particularly curious about the world. I don’t think he reads like he says he does. Every time he’s read something he tells you about it.”

I just wish W. had read more about the perils of empire before he naïvely dived into one. Mr. Fraser agrees that W. should have read the original “Flashman” before invading Afghanistan. It could have given him invaluable, if politically incorrect, insights that might have helped in the effort to catch Osama at Tora Bora and in the new push to stop the Taliban slouching toward Kandahar.

On a recent visit to Afghanistan, Robert Gates told nervous military commanders that he was open to sending more troops to thwart the Taliban from regrouping. Congressman John McHugh, who just returned from a trip to Afghanistan with Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh, said that everyone they talked to had warned “that when the snows melt in the mountains, it will bring a new onslaught from Al Qaeda and the Taliban ... one that directly threatens not just the Karzai presidency, but threatens Afghanistan itself, and logically, it follows, threatens our investment in blood and treasure.”

“Flashman” is based on a devastating British defeat during one of their wars in Afghanistan. After invading Kabul in 1839 and setting up an unpopular puppet shah, the British trekked through the snowy mountains to Jalalabad. Of more than 16,000 troops and camp followers, only one doctor survived; the rest were picked off in ambushes by Afghan warriors.

The lesson is that Afghanistan is a no man’s land that can’t be tamed by gringos. The British Empire, on which the sun never set, never succeeded in occupying Afghanistan even as it engaged in the Great Game with the Russians for influence there. It was terra incognita and terra fuggedaboutit.

“You could never forget that in Afghanistan you are walking a knife-edge the whole time,” Harry Flashman notes, adding that, like himself, the Afghans could be “cruel and bloodthirsty,” turning on you with no warning.

Mr. Fraser echoed those sentiments when I tracked him down at his home on the Isle of Man. “No one has ever succeeded in invading Afghanistan,” the octogenarian who fought in Burma in World War II boomed with a trace of Scottish accent.

“The Afghans are extraordinary fighters, tough and resourceful and cruel, and they know their business inside out,” he said. “On their own territory, they’re unbeatable. They love fighting and dealing with invaders. It’s almost a game to them. The country is Death Valley 10 times over. You see them on television in their robes with their weapons and that’s all. The American and British troops are loaded with rubbishy equipment.

“Eventually, I suppose, we’ll get out of Iraq and pretend it’s been a success when it’s just a mess. ... “Afghanistan is slightly different. You cannot ever win. When you consider the Russians put in more than 100,000 troops and couldn’t do it. There’s only one way to deal with the Afghans, and that’s to buy them.”

Mr. Fraser recites the end of Kipling’s “The Ballad of the King’s Mercy”:

Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told,
He has opened his mouth to the North and the South,
They have stuffed his mouthwith gold ...
and sweet his favours are ...from Balkh to Kandahar.

“It wouldn’t do Bush any harm to read Kipling,” he concluded before signing off.

I love the Flashman books, but the idea of W. reading them curls my hair with horror. He probably thinks they're histories. (And if you want to read one of the funniest things in the world read Kipling's "Stalky and Company." You'll thank me...)