"Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment."

Although Kamiya doesn't actually come out and directly say it, his argument suggests that Coulter and Limbaugh, et al, don't in fact believe their own heated rhetoric, and recognize they're selling snake-oil so the masses will continue to support laissez faire corporatist policies that are against their own class interests. I've often wondered about this, and have come to question whether it's entirely satisfactory as an explanation.

I remember, for example, when Ahmedinejad hosted the anti-holocaust conference in Tehran recently. The first thing I thought of was Coulter, and her "revisionist" take on Joe McCarthy. They're both college-educated, and (you'd think) both Ahmedinejad and Coulter have enough sense to know the propositions they're selling are false. But if you stew in your own juices long enough, screeching at people long enough about how they should distrust empiricism and rational thought, etc., doesn't a point come at which you come to believe your own crazy-ass rhetoric?

or, as Kamiya says in the next sentence,

"Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them."

1.I think somebody already commented about this: something about the show, something a little hard to define-- whether it's the dialogue, or the acting, or the pacing-- tells me the people doing it are constantly preoccupied with the supposed darkness and significance of the whole endeavor, like it's Alain Resnais in space or something. If anything, their hi-falutin' portentousness actually makes me miss Lorne Greene.

2. That guy with the British accent, lovesick over the tall outer-space chick only he can see. The actor may well a likeable person, and capable of real acting, and range and all that, but I only know him on this show, and here all he ever does is mope about with that look of perpetual consternation. It's really tiresome.

On the other hand, if they had an episode in which he was accidentally sucked out an airlock or something and we saw him drift out into space and explode, maybe I'd start watching. And they could even bring him back as his (non-moping) Evil Twin, so that the actor could keep up his condo payments. That would be ok with me too.

why don't they just impeach Gonzalez? Last week Katie Couric said "only the president can remove the attorney general." I don't doubt she really beleves that, but it's just wrong. Appointed officials DON'T just serve "at the pleasure of the president"-- that's just a lame-brained modern notion, borne of spin-- they serve at the pleasure of the US Congress, insofar as they may also be impeached.

Grant's secretary of War was impeached, but sensibly resigned before he was convicted, taking the political steam out of the urgency to take the second step. The Congress can impeach the head of the EPA, or the FBI, the Small Business Administration... or the attorney general.

I don't know. Long term? Time and again I look at relatively pivotal events and wonder if they had gone the other way-- would Reaganism have ever caught on if that CIA helicopter hadn't been downed by the Iranians in 1980?

What about the 2004 election? The democrats had the opportunity to offer not one, but two candidates with clean hands, untainted by the support of the Iraq war:

1.a populist firebrand(Howard Dean).

or

2.a bona fide general who could run intellectual circles around Bush(Wesley Clark).

Instead, they chose the phlegmatic, hemming and hawing John Kerry.

And what if Kerry won? Given his cautiousness(a trait he shares with Hillary), one imagines HE would have been blamed for the debacle of the war, and the shameless by now ex-president George Bush,jnr would have gladly misrepresented 2003 and 2004 on the lecture circuit as the days when the war was still going well, "before the democrats made it into a quagmire." And I imagine that Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd, et al, would have just as gladly accepted Junior's assessment, parroting it uncritically to anyone who'll listen.

Meanwhile, Hillary has already said that she's having second thoughts about getting all the troops out of Iraq, and demonstrated that she learned NOTHING from her 2002 pro-war vote with her brainless tough talk regarding a potential war with Iran.

Moreover,the democrats look like they're again going to be stupid enough to anoint the worst possible candidate who will gladly accept the keys to the war as our worthless little toad of a president shuffles off to "write" his memoirs. Quagmires are inheritable, and trends that seem inevitable can quickly change.