You can't take the boy out of Crawford?

Bush was born in Connecticut and bought his photo-op friendly Crawford when he was well into his fifties. (And it's not a ranch. You have to actually raise livestock on your land for it to be called a ranch, not just drive around on it with your truck.)

I hope Juan Cole will continue to write for Salon, and not regard the comparative dearth of letters as lack of interest. It is my hope that the apparent lack of response is due to readers recognizing how thorny the situation is, and a reflection of people feeling that they lack sufficient background to offer useful commentary.

I'm sure there are losts of internet newsmagazines where, if this article had appeared there, would result in a lot of people writing in to complain that the prof doesn't offer a simple solution to glibly sum things up, regarding what we should do, in a hundred words or so at the end.

I don't think you understand, "duderino". In this case we have religious groups vying for power, and you emphasize the adjective, "religious" rather than the direct object, "power." Religious conflicts, eastern or western, aren't necessarily actually about religion, but who gets to rule.

Thinking this HAS to be principally about religion rather than turf is a little like believing that the neocons really care about making the middle east more democratic. If you are an ambitious fellow living in a religious society you might, like Moqtada al-Sadr, decide to go into your dad's line of work, religion, just as an ambitious East German might've chosen to join the communist party circa 1965.

this is why I subscribe to Salon, not for all that culture-vulture stuff. Thank you.

A Manjoo-less article about electronic voting issues, in Salon.com. Lordy, lordy-- this even better than all that free stuff! Thank you Brad Friedman, and thank you Salon!

Kamiya tries to cover a lot of ground, and since I am unfamiliar with Richardson's writing, it's very difficult to assess how just he is being to her. Nevertheless, what about Israel? Kamiya's article treats Israel as the elephant in the room we cannot talk about. Why?

If you ask most people in the Arab world what the main obstacle is to better relations with the US, they would, even before GWB's ascendance, have cited the US's too-cozy relationship with Israel. This was shockingly on display this summer when the US stood in the way of the international community's attempts to get a cease-fire in place before the IDF killed nearly two thousand civilians.

Pape's assessment, Kamiya's assessment nothwithstanding, is largely correct: al Qa'eda want us to stop supporting Israel, get out of Afghanistan, get out of Iraq, and stop frightening people all over the world with crazy-ass rhetoric. Should we accomodate them? I don't know, but Kamiya(and Richardson) are correct in saying we need to stop behaving as if this is an unutterable question.

A friend of mine asked me if I felt there would ever be peace in the middle east. I told him yes, when they run out of oil and the western powers stop meddling in the affairs of the region.

Consider "The DaVinci Code" and "The Corrections." Does any reader exist who thinks both are great?

I don't know the answer-- I imagine not. I also imagine you'll find lots of clever wags who'll tell you they both suck. (I have read neither.)

Surely "Mr Laser" is better off having actually written and published one novel, then all the bitter passive-aggressive types who have been meaning to write "Novel X", bitch and moan, but haven't ever done so.

Who is more pathetic- the aspiring rodeo rider who will ride the bucking bronc, someday, or the fellow who actually saddled up, even if just once, and was promptly thrown off?

to paraphrase ole what's his name--

"tis better to have saddled up and fallen flat on your ass, then to never have saddled up at all."

Allen believes that traditional American small-town life is "beautiful and blessed and besieged," and that we'd all be better off if we reconnected to it. "He thinks there's a better, more decent America out there, a country that somehow got tangled up in niggling multiculturalism, derailed by political correctness, and deformed by tax-and-spend social engineering. He dreams of a future that's a little more honest, a little freer, and a little more prosperous than the one we've actually inherited."

ok, how is that different from O'Hehir's description of

Thomas Frank's book as detailing

a class war inverted and subverted by powerful economic elites who control the Republican Party and convince the exurban lumpenproletariat to vote against its own interests?

I hear the same thing, especially since to me the concept of "tax-and-spend social engineering" is a conceit invented by the GOP, and not in fact a real phenomenon at all, especially when viewed in the light of Bill Clinton's successful management of the federal budget and the GOP's subsequent budget busting ways. Undoubtedly rural dwellers, mostly white, do feel besieged. But Mann and Frank seem to be describing the same phenomena, one sympathetically, the other less so.

Both parties are controlled by monied elites, but the republicans have been singularly successful in suggesting that this is the case with the democrats, whereas democrats are generally timorous and fearful of suggesting this about the GOP, lest they be accused of "waging class war." The democrats might be surprised at the inroads they might make if they talked about ways in which the GOP has neglected rural dwellers, rather than writing them off altogether. Reducing GOP margins in some rural counties from 70/30 to 60/40 might be all it takes to make some battle ground states blue in presidential elections.

And yes, the hunting photo-ops are ridiculous.