Mr Greenwald's latest gem further confirms for me something I've recognized for years, that in the US MSM the left-right spectrum is unbalanced. CNN's late and unlamented Crossfire (which I watched until the producers got the brilliant ideas of having more than one topic and a live audience) should have started with the announcer saying "On the very centrist left...and on the reactionary right...". That would have summed up what the US MSM will permit and in fact encourages, but I had no idea that the very centrist left devote so much energy to attacking members of the more progressive, more principled left like Greenwald. Perhaps this explains why an NYT editorial this past Saturday referred to socialism's "evil history". As Greenwald and many others in Salon have showed, the NYT is all too typical of what passes for liberalism in the US media. Things up here in Canuckistan are a little better, but I emphasize, only a little.

Thinking of Americans in much of the US who perceive and acknowledge what happened, Tom Tomorrow's metaphor brings to my mind that great Twilight Zone episode where beautiful/handsome people are considered ugly in a world where hideousness is the norm, except in this case it's NOT relative.

Re. Update II: Considering the decades that he has spent going after powerful lawbreakers, could Mike Wallace be at least a little secretly ashamed of his son's conduct as a journalist?

Now the US Right is using the intellectual arch-enemy of their hero Edmund Burke to score, sorry, attempt to score political points? As Mr Greenwald's column shows re Paine, this is like using Mary Wollstonecraft to attack equal pay legislation. Can Karl Marx be far off? Oh wait, I forgot, as Thomas Frank showed in One Market Under God (341-58), some defenders of globalized, laissez-faire capitalism were using Marxian arguments about historical inevitability, without admitting they were, back in the nineties.

Despite all the hoopla comparing Barack Obama to John Kennedy the current president in his policy stances is looking more and more like that Democrat who was president the last time his party had a majority in both houses of Congress. No wonder there are so many Clinton retreads.

Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Present, speaking about the children that cling to him: "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both; but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom for men, unless the writing be erased." Or at least doom for an equitable healthcare system, along with an equitable society, in the US.

Most of what I have read and seen about the South recalls to my mind that line of Gene Hackman's in Mississippi Burning when he talks about how his racist father was being killed by his own ignorance. And as other posters here have pointed out, the wealthy with their pretence of civic equality (the kind which Thomas Frank among others has so well described) have been happily complicit in it.

Ms Walsh's comments are insightful but she neglects to take into account another country that like the US is ethnically pluralistic and yet does have universal health care, namely my own country Canada. Interestingly, until the 1960s Canada was actually behind the US in social welfare programs at least at the national level and yet somehow we then pulled ahead, though sad to say in the last twenty years or so we are moving toward American standards in everything except health care. Also, a number of West European countries aren't exactly models of ethnic harmony (Belgium comes readily to mind) and yet they succeeded in establishing the welfare states Ms Walsh understandably admires. So there are reasons other than a "fractious and well-manipulated heterogeneity...the bounty of the eternal frontier and American exceptionalism" she has not cited, and I believe they lie in the US political system itself, particularly regarding parties and elections.

Ms Lopez is yet another example of the sad fact that some of the most dangerous misogynists are women. As for that other sad fact of teenagers blaming Rihanna, isn't that really an example of how many young people as well as people in general still do not understand much less hold the principle of equality between men and women?

I have no doubt Pres. Obama is not a socialist, but I find it a little depressing that he won't even admit to being, as shown in the NYT interview Walsh refers to, a liberal or progressive, albeit a cautious one. Even that arch-pragmatist Hillary Clinton said she was the latter. Obama claims to be following the examples of Lincoln and FDR but in this regard and I suspect others he's following the example of Gov. Michael Dukakis. Just because he avoided the governor's fate in allowing his opponent to define him (let's face it, Obama was rather luckier in having the opponent and the US economic circumstances he did than Dukakis was) doesn't mean he should continue the same practice.

Hear, hear, HEAR! Another excellent column by Mr Greenwald, this one should be emailed to every Obamaphile and Obamaniac (start with Obama Girl). I had my full of the stand he rightly denounces from reading the Huffington Post, and I'm even seeing it up here in Canuckistan. As the saying goes, there is nothing so uncommon as common sense and Glenn Greenwald is an exemplar of it.