Cory, I'm a fan, but your take on this reeks of the same kind of paternalism you rip the music industry over.

Customers were not "suckered" into buying anything! You write as if digital music users are children who have been terribly deceived by the industry / Apple. We are not children. We are adults who bought products and agreed to the terms of sale.

You're right, the iPod doesn't "backup" the music on your hard-drive. It doesn't let you give free copies of your music to your friends. It doesn't interop perfectly with every codec under the sun.

And you might equally validly claim that it doesn't cure cancer.

But Apple never claimed that it did any of these things!

Now Jobs says, basically, that he sees a market in non-DRM music, and he'd like to explore that, but his hands are tied. Again, which part of this is deception?

There undoubtedly is a market. Any company would want to explore any new market if the price/conditions were right. And Jobs' hands _are_ tied, if only through previously painfully hashed out consent.

I wish my coffee maker sang arias. I wish my car ran on water. I wish my iPod had 10 times more storage.

But blaming the manufacturers for these shortcomings, when I bought each of those products as an informed adult consumer, knowing exactly what the manufacturer claimed each would do, is just silly.

Gary, I was almost with you, until this:

Well, let those Fox News mouth-breathers vote Republican. We don't want them anyway.

Just because poor education has predisposed a large section of the population to mistake "saying it loud" for "telling it like it is", is no reason to make with the slurs. There's people on our side who make that mistake, too.

Include, not divide, remember? Leave the wedge politics to Rove.

The position of your average Fox viewer on "liberals" is probably something on the continuum "they just don't see how the world really works" to "how can they support a bunch of towel-heads over their own countrymen" to "over-educated preverts".

Which is to say, a combination of feelings: puzzled and perhaps, on occasion, offended. With all the work being done to whip up hatred, (Ann Coulter, etc.) there's surprisingly little.

You can say at least this for Bible-believing, Fox-watching conservatives: their default position on us sinners seems to be "Let's pray for them."

In your hypothetical speech, you've just made the liberal position on Fox viewers "we hate and despise you, you ignorant rednecks".

I'm as left as they come, and those aren't my feelings. Every Fox News viewer I know personally thinks Bush has to go, even if their reasons for wanting that are, to me at least, a little muddled.

Now, I'm no Hillary fan, but to put those words into the mouth of a possible Democrat nominee is to smear all Democrats.

To put in your terms: way to get out the mouth-breather vote! "Them liberals hate us -- Hillary Clinton said it on Salon."

And what do you have in your heart, Mr. CIA man?

Perhaps what's in your heart is what your fellow CIA employees said above that grave outside Gardez, Afghanistan, 40 miles from the Pakistani border, in 2002:

"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defence of our great nation."

Do you think that the local people have forgotten that pledge, even for a second?

Do you think it might have been possible, after you'd beaten the Taliban, to try exporting life and peace? You know, just to mix things up?

Or perhaps what's in your heart is that old CIA/NSC in-joke. You know the one:

"You can't buy an Afghan but you can rent one".

Lest you forget, your job, sir, and that of your organisation, is to make, in time, friends of our enemies, not enemies of our friends.

And you sit there telling stories about wild dogs!? To Muslims!?

What's in their hearts is pretty clear, sir. You put it there.

What's in yours?

I sat next to a former president of the World Bank years back on a flight.

We got to talking about the (at the time) recent stock market dive, caused as this one has been by rumors, and rumors of rumors.

His take? Paraphrased:

"The free market is great, but over the years I've become less convinced about the 'hooking it all up to a casino' bit."

Paglia is useful not for what she says, but what she makes you think. So you read her for the ideas she makes you have, not so much for the ideas she presents.

Example: ok, so we all know Fox News is, well, "foxed". But should Dem candidates boycott, or appear and possibly triumph in a hostile setting?

Paglia makes a good argument for the latter -- not an argument I've heard commonly made -- and makes me think that a comprehensive strategy for "dealing with Fox" is something that's very much needed by the left. That strategy should include... I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Example: ok, so we all know Coulter's naff. But seeing her through the lens the "other side" uses, does that have any value?

Paglia shows us Coulter through that lens. Is there any value in that in building a strategy to deal with those elements, like her, who believe liberal=traitor? Yes, there is but... and I'll leave the rest of that thought as an exercise for the reader.

Example: ok, so we know criticising lit crit is currently hot. Should the case be made generally (two recent Salon articles spring to mind) or specifically?

Paglia makes it personal by invoking Frankenstein and its authorship, showing (cleverly) what can happen when the general argument gets teeth. So, more of this, or more of the general, high-falutin "anti-anti-post-modernism" seen everywhere at the moment? I'll leave that answer to the reader.