It's official. Conservatives and liberals have officially traded funny bones. These days, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is cracking up audiences across the country with a mean-spirited take on Rush Limbaugh's battle with addiction to painkillers.

When "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert angled for a sign of repentance from "Dr. Dean" for making fun of the chemically dependent demagogue, the former presidential candidate stood his ground with a refreshing show of wit: "It is galling to be lectured to about moral values by folks who have their own problems."

In the pre-Jon Stewart era, such open defiance of Russert -- the Savonarola of American journalism -- would've been nigh unthinkable. But Dean not only defended his imitation of Limbaugh, he justified it by citing the political context for the joke. That's far more than what his tormentors in the mainstream media did when they replayed his infamous "rebel yell" for weeks beyond its natural expiration date.

"Rush Limbaugh has made a career of belittling other people and making jokes about President Clinton, about Mrs. Clinton and others," Dean told Russert, coming suspiciously close to speaking truth to power. The only way to short-circuit the humorless sanctimony of the Washington press corps is to refuse to be cowed by it.

During the Clinton years, conservatives justifiably busted a gut mocking liberals for their earnestness and party-line mentality. Hillary Clinton truly was a Madame Mao-like character, though hindsight vindicates the liberal conceit that her "co-presidency" was infinitely better for the country than the Stepford Wife model of somnambulant domesticity Laura Bush represented until recently.

Back in the early 1990s when the Republicans were devising increasingly clever ways to seize power from the intellectually lazy and corrupt Democrats who then controlled Congress and the White House, they understood the potential of humor as a tool of insurgency and exploited it accordingly.

Proxies like Limbaugh gleefully unleashed the dogs of laughter on the posteriors of liberals every day on talk radio. Humorist P.J. O'Rourke made conservative humor chic with hilarious best-sellers like "Republican Party Reptiles: Essays and Outrages" and "All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty."

John Stossel's "Give Me a Break" segment on "20/20" dismantled liberal shibboleths with a light touch that made even an unfunny libertarian come across like a latter day H.L. Mencken. When he wasn't exposing the alarmist mind set of government watch dog agencies, Stossel smirked through spots shredding the "myth" of Erin Brockovich and exposing the dubious morality of class action lawsuits against Big Tobacco.

Instead of conceding some things and responding with thoughtful, but humorous critiques of conservative sacred cows in return, liberals stamped their feet and muttered darkly about the need for even tighter speech codes. It was a tactical blunder from which they've only just begun to recover.

Now it's time for conservatives to squeal like stuck pigs. Judging by the way the right-wing chattering class is squawking about MoveOn.org's cheeky "Star Wars" parody that dares to suggest parallels between the film's Sith lords and the GOP, you'd think they had forgotten the first law of politics: Keep a sense of perspective.

Liberals are finally learning how to play the game. Instead of responding to the threats of Corporation for Public Broadcasting bully Kenneth Tomlinson with sweaty hand-wringing, former PBS maverick Bill Moyers emerged from semi-retirement with a hilarious televised sermon that exposed the Bush administration's partisan hypocrisy.

Though conservatives whined incessantly about the unflattering cover photo of Ann Coulter that accompanied a gushing profile in Time magazine, none of her fellow travelers seemed to have a problem with Rupert Murdoch publishing surreptitious photos of Saddam in his skivvies.

It is this inability to notice ironic symmetries that make the ruling class a sitting duck for the likes of Bill Maher, Andy Borowitz and now, Howard Dean.

Conservatives have lost the ability to laugh at themselves, which explains why they'd back a humorless automaton like John Bolton. Last week, we couldn't even bring ourselves to laugh during the filibuster debate as Sen. Rick Santorum compared the Democrats to Nazis in Paris.

Though official Washington barked like seals during the first lady's stand-up routine at the White House Correspondents' dinner, her jokes were considered risque by the faith and values crowd scandalized by the thought of a president so inept he'd "milk a male horse." Pharisees in her party roundly condemned her.

Probably the only "good" to come from the conservative retreat from humor is the cancellation of "Dennis Miller" on CNBC. Even Tom DeLay was less embarrassing.