Barone is a whore and a moron. Much like the rest of the right-wing punditry, which has painted itself into a troglodytic corner by consistently appealing to the worst and most base natures in their audience. We should not be surprised that this kind of shameless cuntmouthery (riffing off Deadwood a little here, bear with me) is all that's left of them. Especially while all the dumb little waterheads like Barone, who couldn't hold a day job outside of the self-reinforcing, reality-denying right wing jihad wing, sign on to defend Palin for the next four years. They have to sink this low to defend Palin because there is literally nothing substantial to defend her with.

In a just world Palin would still be the mayor of her horrible little East Bumblefuck stripmall of a town and people like Barone would be mucking out sewers or perhaps well compensated catamites for the Senator Larry Craigs of the world. Alas, our world is an imperfect one.

Yes, we must understand what forces were responsible for the Palin Incident so that we can safeguard against repeat occurences. However, we must also try and figure out why the suffering fuck Salon continues to pay Camille Paglia to stroke herself in public over Sarah Palin.

It's not all about the letter counts, is it?

My initial impulse was to be offended and annoyed by the article. I knew it would set off a firestorm of letters not seen outside of Camille Paglia's desperate struggles for relevance or the days when Joan Walsh was in the middle of the Hillary-Obama squabble.

Some of the defenses of the piece, most particularly from black women, caused me to reconsider my initial offense. Further elaborations of the writer's career and her butt-based oeuvre made me reconsider further.

But in the end, it's a flawed piece. While I don't think it's incredibly out of line to use Michelle Obama's behind as an example to underscore a broader, more thoughtful article about race and gender and body parts, I don't think this piece was good enough, thoughtful enough, broad-ranging enough to overcome the initial barrier of its attention-getting premise. It took extra biographical detail, cited by responses to the original article, to bring me around to a vaguely neutral stance. That is a flaw. The article must stand on its own, without supplemental background material, to be successful.

Nice try, but not good enough. I will, however, decline to threaten to cancel my subscription.

Wanky pseudo-intellectual sophistry by a clueless hack with a book to sell. Assumes too much about current actors while putting together sloppy, sophomoric analogies based on the shallowest analysis, conveniently ignoring how long it actually took for FDR to Save America With His Cast of Unsurpassed All-Stars, or, you know, the massive mobilization of World War 2 that sealed the deal.

Perhaps Steve Fraser should get together with Camille Paglia so they can touch their pointy heads together and bask in their recollections of a glorious past.

It's the least surprising thing in the world that women's hackles instinctively rise when Giada de Laurentiis appears on-screen, but I've tried a few of her recipes (admittedly, from "Everyday Italian" and not from "Giada at Home") and found them all practical, do-able, and tasty. Plus, as someone else pointed out: Cordon Blue graduate. She's got the chops. Why hate her because she's beautiful, if a little creepy? The reflexive slagging of Giada says more about the reviewer than it says about her.

The fact that someone is trying to make a lawsuit out of this is the news, Tracy, because "Anonymous douchebag posts awful things about someone on the Internet" is a story as old as the Internet. The phenomenon is well explained by the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory elucidated by those keen students of human nature at Penny Arcade.

Ralph Wiley died, Paul Zimmermann had a stroke, Jason Whitlock seems to be getting marginalized... All my favorite sports writers are going away. Well, at least Rick Reilly's still churning out predictable heartwarming tripe, so maybe if I whack myself in the temple with a ball peen hammer a few times I can once again be happy with the current field of sports journalism.

Good luck with Salon's collective course-plotting for the tough times ahead, though.

Andrew, all your base are belong to us. (That's old enough now to be retro in web culture)

A grown-ass (allegedly, anyway) man calls another man "faggot" in a nightclub and gets popped in the mouth. This is nowhere comparable to domestic violence or gay people getting beaten. It's not even a fucking hate crime. It's a trash-talking self-aggrandizing asshole asking for trouble and getting his wish -- camera time.

I "crusaded against poststructuralism" in the 1990s too. When I was being force-fed it in college. Not when I was a desperate flash-in-the-pan wannabe public intellectual struggling vainly for relevance. Can I have a monthly column with a pompous pseudo-intellectual's version of Penthouse Letters making up 33% of my output as well? I promise I can generate as much offensively braindead intelligence-insulting hogwash as Paglia. I just won't dress it up in my own insecurities as thoroughly as she does.

Seriously. Paglia is less than useless. Is it all just about page hits, or do you actually care what content appears under your logo?