Salon has asked for further comment and clarification from Jindal's office; if and when we hear anything, we'll update this post.

Don't hold your breath. The purpose of telling this story was not to relay a truth; it was to put a story out there--a la Reagan's infamous "welfare queen" stories--that would take on a life of its own, regardless of the facts.

The Right in this country has created its own shadow reality that bears only a passing resemblance to the place where the rest of us live. It's very much akin to the "Protocol of the Elders of Zion" kinds of believers you'll still find in unenlightened parts of the world--the notion that facts as most people understand the meaning of that word don't really matter, that there's a hidden history of the world that is more True than truth itself.

Don't call Rush an "entertainer" or as he like to call himself, a "comedian" (shades of Watchmen!). Call him "the intellectual soul and emotional heart of the GOP." Which is what he is. And which shows just how empty that soul and bankrupt that heart are.

A thrice-divorced, drug-abusing, Parkinson's-mocking, cigar-sucking egomaniac, a poster boy for meanness, overindulgence and excess?

Joan, this is wrong, just so wrong. I'm disappointed in you.

You forgot impotent.

"$1 billion wasted on a magnetic-levitation train from L.A. to Sin City"

See, for those of us not in SoCal, this would just mean that the train wouldn't be going anywhere at all.

Congress has already provided oversight and, for that reason, a commission would be “an indictment of congressional oversight responsibilities.”

Yep. So? If Congress has acted in a way that contravenes the Constitution, why should they be held harmless? If Congress has been guilty of stripping rights from American citizens, why should they avoid responsibility now? If Congress failed utterly to exercise the oversight and the checks and balances that our structure of government not only allows of them but requires of them, why should they escape whipping?

What, then, are Republican senators afraid of? What truths do they want to bury? What blood stains their hands? Because that is the only conclusion we can come to: that the US Government, under the Bush Administration, with sins of commission or omission having been committed by Congress, committed crimes and has blood on its hands.

Would not a truth commission reveal otherwise? So--what are they afraid of?

We know what they're afraid of--and they're right to be afraid.

this isn't the way real people talk.

Sigh.

Neither is this:

Oh, that this too too solid flesh

Would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew....

Or:

Sleep that knits up the ravel'd sleave of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast-

Of course, this is Shakespeare, and what you quote is not Shakespeare, it's just stylized writing.

There's a time when you want people to speak like real life. Rarely. Very rarely. The closer you get to "real life" the more boring, on the whole, you get. Unless you're a genius, like Harold Pinter. ("Did you like your corn flakes?" "They're nice.")

But the notion that you should criticize a work for not having people speak like "real people" talk?

I believe the "real people" term for that is bullshit.

I am at the top of the mountain of what I do.

It's true, it is. He's the fattest, most impotent, stupidest drug addict on the planet.

See! Rush is always right!

I think we can all agree that we can respect the Right's position on stem cells when they all get behind the end of capital punishment. Oh, and war--especially the "pre-emptive kind".

Until then, respect the Right? Not so much.

Fat, for Limbaugh, is a choice. He had his fat vacuumed out at one point, and he's gotten it all back, and more. Thus it becomes a symbol of his excess and his lack of discipline--two things he mocks in others.

There's a discussion to be held about fat. It's like religion, or alcoholism (or Rush's drug addiction): it's a choice. For some people, thin is an easy choice. For others, fat is a very hard choice not to make. But I would argue that it's fundamentally different from being a woman or being black: except in very very infrequent and extreme cases, these simply aren't choices.

Sexual Personae--the first half of the book, at any rate--is pretty darn good. After that, repetitive and self-referential, like most academic crap.

A few of the essays in Vamps and Tramps hit the spot. Most of them, however, looked a lot like the tenure fodder that mediocre assistant professors turn out--just iconoclastic of the then-current academic idols.

Since then? A lot of status anxiety. A feeling that "I coulda been a contender." It's not like she's was hired by some big Ivy League school, after all. (I mean, the University of the Arts? C'mon!)

So here we have a minor scholar, with a minor reputation, turning out work that just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. I mean, Camille reads....people who can really write and create?

She's dead wrong about Rush, dead wrong about the reputation of Obama, dead wrong about just about everything in this essay. And you get the sense, after a while, that she's wrong just to be wrong--that old contrarian streak that she mistakes for courage and insight.

Really. Her expiration date has come and gone. The moment you boot her, she'll be writing for NewsMax--and good riddance.