I don't pretend to know who actually won the Iranian presidential elections. However, I know that outside the large cities, small town and rural Iranians are very religious, religion, particularly in its fundamental form is extremely important to them, they value more than anything piety, tradition and lack of corruption, three things Ahmadinejad is synonymous with. There is an almost total disconnect between "Red" Iran and the urbanites of Teheran who overwhelmingly support Mousavi. If you lived in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Boston in 2000 and 2004, you couldn't even fathom that Bush would get any votes, yet roughly half of the electorate voted for him.

This is 2000 all over again, with right-wingers suddenly concerned about election fraud. We'll never know if Ahmadinejad actually received more votes than Mousavi, since the hard-liners were determined not to take a chance and declared him winner by ridiculous margins that were certainly fraudulent and unrelated to the actual vote tally. However, the US right-wing has absolutely no right to utter a word about election fraud. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's also hilarious to hear the right-wingers complain about theocratic rule in Iran, when the GOP core is just as theocratic and would love nothing more than to establish a theocratic "Christian Republic" in the US that strives for Rupture and forces its craziness on the rest of us. The mullahs and their boy Ahmadinejad are the Iranian mirror reflection of the kind of government the Limaughs, Becks, Hannity and Cantors would like to have in the USA.

The O'Reilly Factor is the kind of show Joeseph Geobbels would have if there had been TV in Germany in his day. Every guest who isn't of O'Reiily's persuation is actually a set-up designed to increase viewership and revenues while giving legitimacy to a show that's right-wing propaganda at its shrillest. That guest is always going to be shouted own, intimidated and his/her views skewed and drowned in an avalanche of idiotic demagoguery and infantile sound-bytes. The O'reilly audience is spectacularly dumb, racist, xenophobic and ignorant. The chances of any intelligent, coherent, rational person of getting through to them is nil. When a guest like Ms. Walsh is tricked into appearing on his show, she helps him win a game which had been rigged for him to win and her to lose. Why would anyone fall for this scam is beyond me.

Palin is so grotesquely stupid, ignorant, pathetic, medieval and mean, it's a disgrace she is even allowed in public. Whatever Letterman is saying about her is too kind.

GWBush was so reviled because he was a criminal, a serial liar and unprecedentedly incompetent while serving as President. The right-wing hate speech against Obama began a long time before he even entered the White House. There's a world of difference between anti-right rhetoric from the left and right-wing hate speech. The right-wing not only threatens violence, it acts violently, be it the assassinations of civil right activists in the 196s, Oklahoma City, family clinic bombings, murders of abortion doctors, right-wing militia activities around the country or explicit calls from crazy media right-wingers like Glen Beck for a violent uprising with Limbaugh, Savage and Hannity only marginally less explicit. On the other hand, there were never any threats of violence against Bush, Cheney or their minions, none have been even indicted and no right-winger has been assassinated, despite the fact that everything the right-wing is saying is disengaged from reality, fact-free, loony and astonishingly stupid.

by giving Camille Paglia a column from which to express her ridiculous narcissism, infantile contrarianism and allows her to act as an extreme right-wing hate talk apologist. In every single column she keeps harping on the "Obama is hiding something about his birth", "he may very well be a Socialist", "the liberal media is condescending to Limbaugh's audience", "the liberalsare persecuting Sarah Palin", "the liberal media is trying to silence conservatives", ad nauseam. Paglia is not as bad as Limbaugh and J. Gordon Liddy only in the sense that unlike them she has a small audience, but in any other way she's a right-wing apologist and provocateur and is actually gets paid by money provided by Salon's members, which is really grotesque.

The right-wing rhetoric in the US these days is chillingly reminiscent of the early Nazi rhetoric of 1920s Germany. Moreover, the characters in both cases are also chillingly similar:racists, bigots, sexually frustrated and confused, obsessed with racial superiority, warmongering, xenophobia and imperial craving. Since I believe that the gap between the early Nazis and the current US right-wing is rapidly shrinking to the point they'll be largely indistinguishable, we only have to remember history when we wonder if hate talk can lead to murder. Hate talk has already lead to murder in the US-the Oklahoma City bombers were incited by Rush Limbaugh and J. Gordon Liddy and several abortion doctors murders and clinic bombing were egged on by right-wing hate talk. We must wonder now about much larger scale consequences such as presidential assassinations and coup attempt by violent and paranoid right-wingmilitias, and I for one wouldn't consider them implausible.

Of course, everything she says about politics and economics is absurdly infantile, contradictory and ludicrous, but even when she mentions Daniela Mercury, she makes a fool of herself. It would be almost impossible to find a Brazilian pop performer whose shows are more overproduced than Daniela Mercury. Even Ivete sangalo, who sells out the Maracana stadium (200,000 capacity) is less overproduced and more spontaneous. Has that woman ever been right about ANYTHING?

And does anybody really believe that Paglia actually voted for Obama?