Yankeetorial: Where is he?

Fugitive Chuck Knoblauch continues to haunt the first-base box seats of our nightmares.

For the fourth day, the U.S. government is scouring the landscape, seeking the hair-jelled zephyr once known as "Knobby," (pictured right) in hopes of forcing him to testify against his friends in the nation's campaign against top-secret muscle-building potions.

He has vanished like the bases he once stole.

Somewhere out there, Knobby is watching us, toying with us, laughing at us -- as the most advanced domestic surveillance force in world history plods helplessly along on his carefully covered trail.

Where are the cool wiretaps we were promised? Where are the sky satellites? Why wasn't someone reading his emails, and following two cars behind his every trip to the corner store for cigarettes? Did we not have fresh DNA? Did we not have an infiltrator within his midst?

What happened to Homeland Security?

Each day, Knobby grows stronger, more confident, more strident... more dangerous.

And our national sense of pride grows weaker, as recent stock market fluctuations have revealed.

Chuck Knoblauch has become to the Bush administration what Britney Spears long ago became to fishnet stockings: A stomach-turning embarrassment, revealing that a once proud network of core support has withered into a torn, fibrous illusion, designed only to conceal images we prefer not to see.

He is out there. He's plotting. He's sneering. And make no mistake: The war on performance enhancing drugs will not be won until Knobby is in custody and telling the world what we want to hear: The terrified yelps of another ex-jock invoking the Fifth Amemdment.