Inevitably more stunts like this will occur in the future, and there's really no point in getting bent out of shape about it, nor should we hush it up and refuse to talk about it to ostensibly protect the civility of society.

(It's somewhat ironic that this should come out roughly simultaneously with the criminal charges being brought against the lady implicated in the MySpace suicide, as they're both examples of the culture and the law catching up with the net and human behavior.)

Anyway, groups like MoveOn should learn from this experience and not try to impose a ridiculous rule about not posting rejected ads elsewhere. (I wonder if the MoveOn people see their hypocrisy, as a group that supposedly promotes a wide-open participatory political culture nevertheless trying to prevent people from showcasing their contributions as they see fit.)

If, for example, they didn't have their silly rule and they had rejected this entry, as well as a few others(just for being hackneyed or otherwise stupid), and all the rejected entrants ran on websites hither and yon, then this one would probably have ended up as just another item in the background noise of the internet.

If you believe that the web is a democratic medium and political activity on the web should be truly decentralized and democratic, you're just going to have to make allowances for the dreck.

Now gimme a star or I'll post this comment on my blog and make fun of Salon.

apart from the more obvious reasons-- the media is a creature of the big corporations, who tend to favor right wing politicians, and therefore prefer that they be less rigorously scrutinized, etc.

there at least two other reasons--

(1)the capitulation of the mainstream left,

for example, in not defending Jeremiah Wright, who is hardly crazy and has made many sanguine observations about the nature of American imperialism, but also-- and this is a particularly ironic example-- when Obama sucked up to the ghost of Reagan...

and when Bill Clinton argued in 2007 that under some circumstances he thought maybe torture was acceptable...

EVERY F**KING TIME mainstream figures on the ostensible left speak favorably regarding the myths and the pathologies of the right in order to "triangulate"(or just suck up), they help make the current ideological disconnect seem normal.

and, (2)

I suspect simple fear plays a part. Remember when liberal shock jock Alan Berg was gunned down? What about when Dan Rather was assaulted?

I am by no means advocating a quid pro quo, but I would argue that because nothing comparable has happened to a major or minor blowhard pundit on the right, the media has learned a lesson about avoiding offending the crazies out there in the hinterlands.

This Almond feller is an irrepressibly amusing writer, even if it is at his own expense. My best wishes for a happy and presumably less interesting future to you and the missus.

While we're on the subject of the US talking to various parties we've demonized, it seems to me that we've reached a point where one of the necessary items in creating a viable peace in Iraq will be for the US to deal with Moqtada al Sadr. Maybe they could have afforded to "take him out" in 2003, but he's simply too powerful to ignore now.

At this point, if the US or the putative Iraqi army does decide to kill him instead of negotiating with him, I suspect it will further destabilize Iraq, and possibly the region. And BushCo, the compliant congress, and the compliant press have made it virtually impossible for any post-Bush president to de-escalate and talk to him.

When you say, "Americans are stupid" perhaps a little context would help, as in relative measures of how well the Brits know how British government works, how well the Dutch understand Dutch government, and so forth. I'll admit I don't expect our citizens to fare well in such comparisons, but I don't think we should take these things as axioms and just run with them.

Americans are conditioned, by the government and the (admittedly) horribly bad mass media, to believe all they have to know about government is who to vote for, and the details will be taken care of by our betters. And let's face it, to some extent that is what the framers wanted, insofar as they regarded the masses as poltroons who wouldn't understand the finer points of governance anyway.

This is the message that the media and "our betters" saturate us with, and for the relatively low numbers who bother to vote, apparently they buy it. (Salon is part of the problem too, you know. Look at all the interminable articles you ran about the Hillary-Obama horserace, compared to the articles you ran about the policy proposals of Biden and Dodd and Kucinich when they were still running, or that detailed look at the healthcare proposals of Obama and HRC...

(the sound of the wind. A tumbleweed floats by...)

Some of the people who don't pay attention and don't vote are less intelligent than average, but I seriously doubt the group is less intelligent overall.

Many have undoubtedly concluded that getting educated about being an American is a sucker's game, since it only pays off if you have money and can really influence things and the whole thing is a con, and if you're poor and educated all you'll have for your trouble will be a more articulate sense of how you're screwed. I'd like for people who see things that way to be wrong, but that view doesn't strike me as irrational.

Churchill said that democratic government is the worst form, except for all the others. With that maxim in mind I tend to think that overhauling our system to make it less democratic can only make it worse, the law of unintended consequences being one unforgiving bitch. We should prefer to be conservative in the classical sense of the word and avoid opening up Pandora's box of supposedly enlightened ideals.