All those sweaty fascist alpha male bodies, overlaid with the homophobic taunts of the girly boy-loving Athenians, the ultimate enemy formation of the Persian bad guy as a cross-dressing queen—sounds like this movie is made for the Jeff Gannon/Matt Sanchez end of the gay political spectrum.

I thought when Oliver Stone made JFK, he was taking dramatic license for polemic reasons when he portrayed the conspirators as a bunch of big homo fascists. Now we know he was merely striving to be accurate.

Hey Glenn,

I wanted to thank you for your other post on masculinity and the politics of the right wing, especially where you wrote:

"The underlying premise of the modern conservative movement is that the entire Democratic party consists of a bunch of fags and dykes who are both too effeminate and too masculine to properly lead the nation. Coulter says it out loud. Dowd hints at it broadly. And the entire press corps giggles and swoons at this shallow, sophomoric concept like a bunch of junior high pom pom girls.

Coulter insisted last night that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur -- that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay -- but instead only used the word as a "schoolyard taunt," to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was not to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him like they do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders."

When the Fox-Nevada fight was breaking out at Daily Kos after Edwards withdrew, there were some commenters (Fox shills, Clinton dems, DLC types, etc) who were lobbing ad hominen insults that flowed directly from the conservative meme you describe. It was great to have your excellent writing and analsis for pullquoting purposes to annihilate the dreck-pushers.

You have a knack for communicating the distilled essence of complex issues, which is helpful to those of us who are trying to pick up the point and take it elsewhere. Keep up the good work.

Actually, I thought the disgust among Democrats with Foley was about pedophilia, and his abuse of his unequal power (congressman-vs. page) to gain sexual access to teenage boys.

Tim,

Salon has completely missed reporting on the Fox-Nevada fight. A worthy topic for War Room if Joan doesn't already have someone doing a big feature on it...

I'm committed to refraining from comments about writers, but I've felt for a long time that Walter Sharpiro is a DLC fellow traveller.

And this article reads like DLC fan mail:

"they portray her reluctance to recant her Iraq vote as an act of intellectual honesty" Shapiro writes. "What she regrets is the way that Bush misused the authority given to him by Congress and grotesquely mismanaged the war."

This is exactly the position of the DLC crowd that runs the Progressive Policy Institute. Tufts University Poly Sci professor Tony Smith lays it out:

"Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.

…

Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides damning Bush's handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the invasion. It has criticized Bush's failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better."

Hillary's position to a tee—Dems can do George Bush's policies, but better. We need real change in the leadership of the US, not just another attempt at the same neoconservative thing coming from a different place on the political spectrum.

"Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda"

Oh please. Journalists once saw it as their professional duty to be skeptical of power. Skepticism has now been redefined as liberal bias, and the MSM has become lickspittle rightwing propagandists (perhaps journalistic pull-no-punches skepticism will return when a Democrat gets elected president?)

And since when do liberals have Time and Newsweek? Time did the fawning cover feature story about Ann Coulter, and Newsweek just hired uber-neocon William Kristol as a columnist.

And to think I was going to post a happy, shiny letter over in Glenn Greenwald's comments section about the importance of supporting progressive media by buying a Salon subscription, and then I fell through Walter Shapiro into this.

I'm with Bill Zimmerman and robbo, previous commenters. It's a sign that we are getting through, but Kurtz (and the editorial decision-makers who run one story off page one and bury the other inside the paper) is applying such a slanted standard of outrage that it's barely a tilt back toward the center.

The journalist's last refuge from criticism of his or her work: The editor did it.