Victoria L wrote:

I also notice how easy it so for some ‘liberal’ men to talk of appeasing Iran. Their brutal gender apartheid would scarce affect you were you living there....etc., etc., etc....permits girls to be married at the age of nine and other atrocities which any true liberal and humanitarian find execrable.

And those women and girls would be so much better served to be liberated at the barrel of a gun, like the thousands of dead women and girls we've already "set free" in Iraq? The Iraq war has largely eliminated the secular middle class (those most likely to join the modern world and make peace with Israel), and sent its refugee citizens seeking shelter among the proponents of the most backward forms of Islam. Burning the Islamic village in order to save it hasn't been working out too well for anybody, has it? The cognitive dissonance is all yours, Victoria...

The problem isn't Islam so much as it is warmongering that stamps out the flame of Islamic moderation and reform that exists in Iran, Lebannon and elsewhere, thereby driving the population into the arms of extremists.

And yes, if American foreign policy continues as it has been, when it leaves, Israel will be left surrounded by a festering mess of failed states boiling over with malice and hatred. I gather that the response of Israelis would be "same as it ever was"--except that now the arabs and persians will have even less to lose and will be that much more destabilized and dangerous. Please join me in criticizing current American foreign policy to prevent that from happening.

Casual observer wrote:

I hope that bloggers will understand and accept the importance of their work, and I hope they will also appreciate the need for permanent preservation of their site records. By this, I don't mean that blog archives should remain accessable through the life of a given blog. That is not an historical archive. What I am referring to is a functional archive that will safely preserve blog records for posterity-- permanently. I hope that bloggers of all stripes will give this issue some thought, and will take steps to permanently preserve these unique records of public discourse for future generations.

Bloggers have begun to supplant mainstream journalisms in America. Because of this, bloggers have become key participants in the creation of the public record, ie, the body of information and ideas from which we all draw when we make decisions about the future of the country. But who is documenting and preserving that record?

When I was in journalism school in the 1990s, the end-all be-all database of record was Lexis-Nexis. If you wanted to do an exhaustive background check of everything that had ever been written, said or otherwise published about a public figure, Lexis-Nexis was THE primary source.

But Lexis-Nexis's orientation to MSM coverage is near total. So when David Sirota interviews Barack Obama or Jonathan Singer over at MYDD interviews all the Democratic primary candidates, it's not there. Sure you can do a Google search, but that's like looking for a needle in a haystack. And if bloggers are not maintaining a permanent record of what they have reported, then we lose part of the history that informs what we are all about now, and we lose the ability to sit down together and review the same information and make common decisions.

Given Glenn's recent reporting (yes, reporting) about the NYT's Michael Gordon, the NYT's and WaPo's flagrant disregard for their own standards regarding anonymous sources, and now on the good job that the crew did over at Firedoglake--Whatever they are paying Howard Kurtz to be the "media writer" over at WaPo, Glenn is worth double. Too bad the market doesn't work to reward people with their real value in rightwing America.

Before Edwards hired you, I had never heard of you. In the blogosphere, I avoid blogrolls and I'm pretty loyally provincial about the few corners I choose to hang out in, so you were a stranger.

But my reactions to your story from the time you came under fire have been completely emotional and personal. When you first were attacked, I was so pissed. I got up a head of anger about what the smear machine was trying to do to you. I joined my voice to those of others who swore I'd disown Edwards if he fired you. And then he didn't fire you, and at that point I felt so much hope and pride that finally there was an unapologetically progressive political force in this country that I support and participate in (netroots grassroots), and that was powerful enough to push back against the smear merchants and keep you in your place in the Edwards campaign.

At that point you became a symbol, representing something real and important and valuable and needed. Your fate (if you will) didn't just belong to you anymore. Alot of people shared in it.

And then you quit, and by doing so gave away your power (and ours) to the rightwing nutters who had attacked you. And I feel so angry and frustrated toward you now.

And you did it because you said you just had to come out and defend yourself. All the threats and sex-violence invective were just so much turgid purple impotence, and you chose engaging with that over real power. All that pure mysogyny was like magnetic north to you—it validates your worldview and was just too tempting for a feminist activist not to wallow in. And it all leaves me feeling depressed, angry and has rekindled my resentment of feminism as a movement that's easily distracted by it's need to seek conflict, controversy and validation over real power and real resolution.