And yes, keep pointing out what scum Republicans are. They're not just dishonest, not just incompetent; they're scum. To be a Republican these days is to be evil. That a leading member of "God's Own Party" should turn out to be a child molester shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but it's also a point we need to keep on making.

There's much older evidence than Thatcher than female leaders can be just as aggressive as male ones. Steve Kelner brings up Victorian England -- well, the Victorian age is, after all, named for Victoria, who was, last I checked, a woman. She was also the last British monarch to have any significant say in how the country was run, and her reputation was not exactly warm and cuddly. "Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor ..."

Going back a few more centuries, we have Elizabeth I. Please, someone try to argue that she brought a civilizing effect to the throne. Good luck with that one.

Now, it could be argued that women in traditionally male positions of power feel the need to act more aggressive in order to prove themselves to skeptical men; that may be so, but it's also irrelevant. Whatever the reason, women who either rise to power or are born to it have proven themselves every bit as capable of ruthelessness as men are. Here in the US, we may not have any queens or female presidents to point at, but female corporate executives are certainly just as ready to axe thousands of loyal employees (while giving themselves fat bonuses) as are male ones.

What we need are not necessarily more "woman leaders," but simply more thoughtful, rational, humane people, of either sex, who recognize that even the greatest empire can (and, inevitably, will) overreach itself, and that there are better ways to deal with the world than "the sword an' the flame." I still have some hope that we can find such people -- yes, even among politicians! -- but I really don't give a damn about their plumbing.

There seems to be a revulsion against the idea of trying to understand actions that we find abhorrent; this is only one example. Here's another: "Who cares why terrorists fly planes into buildings? Let's just go bomb the hell out of somebody!"

"Breast ironing" is a grotesque practice, and should not be condoned under any circumstances. So is terrorism. So, for that matter, is rape. So are many of the other things that people do for specific cultural reasons, and while we should never be afraid to speak out against evil acts regardless of the motive, we should also recognize that understanding the source of the evil gives us our best shot at preventing it.

"And yeah, we could all speculate about why Limbaugh might arm himself with a bottle of Viagra for a two-day trip to the Dominican Republic."

Yes, we could indeed: almost certainly, it was to make it possible for him to get his limp, flabby dick up enough to stick it in a prostitute.* When a tough-guy champion of traditional morality does something like this, it is both our right and obligation to, at the very least, point and laugh. Limbaugh may be less important than he used to be, but he is still a major voice of both the armchair hawks and the God Squad. Here we have an incident that goes to the heart of both his machismo and his moralizing. As with almost all modern American right-wingers, his is weakness that desperately masquerades as strength; we should take every opportunity to point out that the emperor has (ahem) no clothes.

*Quite possibly, an underage prostitute, in which case it isn't funny at all.

Anyone who chooses which college to attend based on sports should, frankly, probably not be in college at all. Male or female, black or white, large school or small, football or basketball or any other sport -- it doesn't matter. If your primary purpose for being in college is anything other than studying, do yourself and the other students a favor and stay away, because you're not ready.

For macho young men in particular, there's another highly structured environment in which they can work out their excess testosterone, and I hear they're pretty eager to take on new people right now. But perhaps that's just too scary? Whatever, tough guys.

Given Allen's still-sterling poll numbers, Virginia seems to be full of zealots who cling to their failed ideology even as their world is falling apart around them. Yep, sounds pretty Red to me. Da, tovarisch!

I don't have anything like Webb's combat record (my war, Daddy Bush's war, was mercifully brief) but I'm proud of my Cold War service in Europe -- we held the line against what was, even or perhaps especially in its dying days, a terribly dangerous enemy driven by a commitment to an ideology that denied all reality, and many of whose adherents would have preferred to go down fighting rather than accept that the world had turned its back on their beliefs. Naively, perhaps, I thought that after the Wall came down, after the Velvet Revolution, after the USSR barely managed to avoid chaos and coup ... after all that, that we were safe, in a way we hadn't been for half a century.

Now America is in the grip of people just as blind as those old apparatchiks. No doubt these are the same ones who were shouting "better dead than Red" once upon a time. How quickly we forget. Evil can hide just as well behind the Cross and the Stars and Stripes -- or the Stars and Bars! -- as the Hammer and Sickle.