I am not in favor of censoring the New Yorker. I was utterly disgusted by the mealy-mouthed responses of progressives (and others) bending over backwards to defend Islamic extremism and censorship during the Danish cartoons brouhaha, and generally think there's way too much concern about people being offended by cartoons. However, I can certainly criticize the New Yorker for encouraging ludicrous rumors (which, yes, are fed by racism) that already have an incredible amount of currency, particularly on talk radio and Fox news (which of course makes Rush Limbaugh's commentary incredibly ironic), to the point that significant portions of the population believe that Barack Obama's a muslim, his wife hates "whitey" and neither of them like America very much.

So, what if the New Yorker did an equivalent cover on McCain? How could they do that? There simply isn't a liberal ugly rumor machine like the one on the right to provide necessary material. If there were, rumors would be flying through the radio and cable TV waves that McCain is a kind of Manchurian candidate, brainwashed by the Viet Cong and programmed to grab power so he could destroy the United States, and that, because of all the time he's spent in the rural southwest, he's part of a white supremacist militia, and so on. But, instead, the only major lies propogated about McCain have been that he's a "straight talker" and a "maverick."

Around the nation, one presumes, numbed heads were nodding in approval. Whatever it takes to get those bastards.

Gotta admit, one of those numbed heads was mine. The central problem (okay, one of the central problems) with the administration's response has been in acting as if there is a finite number of "those bastards," who, apparently, were simply born evil. Knock all of them off, and you're done. Thus, the administration, in attempting to eliminate that finite number, and torturing anyone who they even suspect might be one of them, has simply created more and more bastards who would feel perfectly justified in crashing highjacked airplanes into American skyscrapers, or worse. And, the thing is, the leaders of Al Queda aren't idiots, nor are they oblivious to American politics. Can there be any doubt that they knew exactly how Bush, Cheney, and co. would react, and the extent to which in would bring new footsoldiers to their cause?

As long as a significant portion of my fellow citizens are stupid/racist enough to believe the ridiculous rumors satirized on the New Yorker cover, I will continue to assume that they can't handle the same complex images I can handle. Is that really unreasonable?

Clearly, the only way to be forgiven by the religious right for the "agents of tolerance" remark is for the straight talking maverick to be one himself, and he's doing a heck of a job.

Any idiot knows that access to birth control means fewer unplanned pregnancies that will end in abortion (whether or not abortion is legal). Anybody who sincerely believes what "pro-lifers" all claim to believe, that fetuses are full human beings, should be pro-birth control. Those who aren't need to simply admit that they couldn't care less about fetuses and just want to keep women in their place.

"Ask yourself what you can do for her."

Are you serious Cary? What she can do for her friend is obvious: she should tell her that her fiance and best friend are both lying scumbags and that she should keep as far away from both of them as possible. And why should she break up the relationship with this guy? Sounds to me like they're made for each other.

That headline "you don't feel like it, but you do it for him" really needs to go, unless you're actually going to make the argument that having sex when you don't feel like it is the same as being raped (which would probably make most sex that happens in relationships rape, with a lot of men as well as women as victims). Otherwise, you're simply adding to the confusion over this issue and (as you can see from some other posters here) the anti-feminist backlash.

True, this is ludicrous but...

let us not forget that these are the people who convinced the white working class that an Andover graduate son of a president who used family connections to get out of going to Vietnam and has done everything he can to benefit other wealthy people at the expense of everybody else was a man of the people, all because his opponent liked wind surfing and didn't seem sincere when he talked about his love for Nascar.

For that matter, these are the people who, for the past thirty years, have quite succesfully placed a cloak of "moral values" around an agenda based on bigotry, lust for power, and unbelievable greed.

After all that, convincing the American people that Obama's opposition to the war is more like Bush's support for it than McCain's support for it should be a breeze....

What Obama really needs to do is make the point that the Bush/McCain approach is not only ineffective but countproductive: creating more terrorists and more sympathy for terrorists (as well as putting more oil money in terrorist sympathizers' hands) and, thereby, ultimately making us less safe since 9/11 than we'd be if we'd done nothing at all. We need a policies that get us away from the ridiculous idea that there are a finite number of terrorists who hate America simply because they were born evil, and instead work on reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil (and oil in general) and being less, rather than more, aggressive in our relations with these countries.