Now Jonah Goldberg can actually enlist just like a lot of guys in their mid 30s to early 40s, get the basic private's pay whatever that is now, and actually experience the horror of war up close and personal. Gee...I wonder if he has some rich relative that'll pay to ensure he never gets to actually serve in case there's a draft.

Of course that would be putting Mr. Goldberg in the same room with Dick Cheney who had "other priorities" and George Bush who can send people to die in a war, but was too important to actually fight in one when he was young enough to serve. Another young, rich, white, and married Republican couldn't be that important, could he?

Maybe I'm just a frugal soul, but I do not buy A&F clothing. Not because of the controversy, or because of the politically incorrect messages on the tees for girls, which I really haven't seen(and if I had, I'd probaby think she's clearly too smart not to be joking). I think their sweaters are cool and they have some nice shirts, but I don't buy them for the same reason I don't shop Banana Republic: it costs too darn much, and in the end, they're just not my style. Does it have anything to do with the fact that I'm a black male in my 40s?

I don't know. Maybe. But it makes my head hurt too much to dig into it.

The controversy from the left and the right is rather amusing, though. Gay men wear the clothes to announce their masculinity? That's new. The religious right makes "recovering" gay men stay away from Abercrombie & Fitch because it might "tempt" them? Feminists don't like them, conservatives don't like them, people of color don't like them and everyone seems to be missing the point: they're pretty damned pricey threads in any case. So either drop the bank it's gonna cost you to buy the look or don't. Either way, we still have choices here. Let's make a damned choice and get on with real life.

I read ABB's post on Condi Rice.

Damn!

That's all I got to say.

For the rest of you, "Damn!" in this context means that ABB is absolutlely spot on. Condi Rice is no more than a suck-up to George Bush. She clearly has her own agenda, and is about as self-serving a person as any you'll run across in this administration. I never liked her, if only because of her association with Dubya. It became increasingly clear that she's as much an idiot as her boss. Just a better spoken one. She is, as ABB would no doubt agree, an Uncle Tom (or Aunt Tom in this case) in the truest sense of the word. If Bush actually cared about the opinions of black people, he might have listened a little harder to his former Secretary of State, who famously told him the truth about the disaster awaiting him in Iraq, and not this well-shoed sycophant who rushed to his defense after Kanye West said "George Bush doesn't care about black people" in the wake of Katrina.

Other than that...

ABB did sort of agree that Rice is about the ugliest woman God ever put breath in, something about holding in a "monster shit". Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks this.

And then there's the curiosity about the resemblance between her and rapper 50 cent...but don't let's go down THAT road.

Damn!

Only one question here:

Would there be so much remorse and hand-wringing about publicly shaming someone for fabricating lies out of whole cloth and then standing up to justify them if the person in the hot seat were George W. Bush?

The poster called "anon" seems to get my point: what people here and elsewhere seem to be on about is the lying. And the profiting because of lying. "Anon" is mostly correct, it's not the same thing as if the president were in the hot seat for the numerous lies he's told the public (and gotten away with so far). No one would feel sad about how Oprah, or Congress treated him. There are national consequences here. So my question is, why is it that there is such sympathy for this liar (Frey), when he is called to account? Why should he escape responsibility? I'm not going so far as to suggest what that accountability should look like, nor am I going to take up the question of whether Oprah went too far. I've only seen portions of the interview. It just seems to me that there has been entirely too much that has been foisted on us that is not true, that we've been made to believe as truth when it isn't. Maybe what James Frey writes doesn't affect our individual lives as "anon" says, but the lying touches I think a really sore nerve with people. The lying does affect us. We've had too much of it in recent years. One hundred letters and counting seems to me a sort of collective call to end it. End the lies! From Clinton who lied about Lewinsky to Bush who lied to get us into war to authors who call things "memoirs" when they are fiction. Stop the lies! We're all sick of it.

Thank you, "anon" for your feedback. You made me think much more deeply about this than I would have.