Ig Publishing will be taking over the Small Press Center tonight at 7 p.m. for a beer bash—free Pabst Blue Ribbon, while supplies last!—to celebrate, among other things, the publication of The Real Republican Dictionary by Robert Lasner. The idea behind the latter book—"what the Republicans say is not what they mean, and you need a dictionary to comprehend what they mean"—is so simple that Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel is already bringing the competition: The Dictionary of Republicanisms.

As the cover at left shows, vanden Heuvel clearly has the advantage when it comes to black short dresses and leather jackets, but if she shows up at the Merc, can she knock back an entire can of PBR faster than Lasner? More importantly, how does her GOP-speak (and that of the Nation readers who supplied most of her definitions) stack up against his? You decide:

• Activist Judges
  
  • Lasner: "Judges who refuse to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments."
    
  • Vanden Heuvel: "A judge who interprets the law as it is written."
    
  
  
• Axis of Evil
  
  • Lasner: "Liberals, homosexuals, and the French."
    
  • Vanden Heuvel: "Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld."
    
  
  
• Peace
  
  • Lasner: "The short interval between wars."
    
  • Vanden Heuvel: "What war is for."
    
  
  

The grand master in such matters, perhaps, remains Ambrose Bierce, whose Devil's Dictionary described peace thus: "In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting." He was also, so the stories go, one heck of a drinker.