As someone who grew up in the bosom of the Religious Right and went through a thorough apostasy in young adulthood, I can attest that the reason these people insist on describing sex as sick and degrading is to make it more fun. Besides the inherent fun of undressing someone not your spouse, you get more of a charge if you're guilty, if you're trespassing and getting away with something you're not supposed to. For this perverted mentality, to take sex as a natural, healthy part of human life destroys some of the eroticism. Drive through the midwest: at every highway exit you'll find a convenience store selling religious tchotchkes on one side of the highway, and an adult book and video store with no windows on the other. They go together.

Krugman made an interesting point on his blog about why conservatives don't see these people as hypocrites the way liberals do:

From their point of view the cause, the need to police what people do in bed, is, by definition, right, because it’s literally God-given. So the fact that some of those trying to police what other people do in bed are themselves doing nasty things does not reflect on the cause itself — on the contrary, it shows just how necessary more bed-snooping is.

It’s also notable that conservatives are, in practice, more forgiving of their politicians’ sins than liberals. John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer ended their political careers; Ensign and Vitter are still in the Senate, and Newt Gingrich is out there on the Sunday shows, speaking for the GOP. Why? Because where liberals see gross hypocrisy, conservatives see men doing the Lord’s work — which partially excuses their own failings. Liberals think that a man who has an affair is worse if he preaches moral values; conservatives think he’s better. You might say that as they see it, if he interferes with what enough other people do in bed, it doesn’t matter what he does himself.

During the press conference she certainly didn't look to me like someone so bursting with confidence and ambition that she was ready to make a bold move toward being elected president. She looked and sounded like a scared little girl who'd been told to get out of Dodge by somebody with big guns, and was packing up her toys in frantic haste.

I see your point - there were a few days when Palin was first announced as running for veep that I just found her kind of amusing, the latest example of Republican cluelessness. But then her popularity soared, briefly, and at the same time it turned out that she was one of those Christian fundie types who think it's their duty to hasten Armageddon, and for a few weeks in October I was scared shitless. I grew up in the Christian Right, and I do not want those people with their hands anywhere near a nuclear button. So for me, the anti-Palin overkill had nothing to do with misogyny, nothing to do with class issues, but a genuine fear that the country might fall into the hands of a member of a very dangerous cult. To me the overkill seemed justified to keep the levers of power out of that woman's hands (and the hands of any of those fundie fanatic bastards) by any means necessary.

"I know there are plenty of moments of brilliance hiding in the chaff but God Damn It, I am a reader, not a placer miner."

I like the line. It could apply to many successes d'estime among modern novels that I started and found a chore. In this case perhaps my mistake was getting Infinite Jest for the Kindle. I love my Kindle, and have already read several books on it, but there's something extraordinarily intimidating in starting a book that you've heard is over a thousand pages, and that darts from character to character with little sense of trajectory, and you get no clue from the object in your hand where you are in it - like you've decided to visit Brisbane by swimming the Pacific. I left off after probably 75 pages myself - but who would know how many it was in paper terms? I love long novels and have a long attention span, but just because of that, the sudden switches from character to unrelated character kept knocking me out of the narrative. Since classic, public domain novels are so cheap, I keep all of Dickens, the Brontes, Twain, Shakespeare, and Trollope on my Kindle (cost about $9 for the whole lot), and I switched to rereading A Tale of Two Cities. I have to admit I was impressed yet again with the skill with which Dickens kept me reluctant to quit reading, and wondering during hiatuses what was going to happen (I hadn't read it in 30 years) - a quality that, for all Foster's virtuosity, perhaps even precisely because of that virtuosity, I was not finding in him. As a musician, I know that virtuosity is easier to achieve than depth of feeling, and that people are ultimately more touched by the latter.

Glenn Greenwald is my Walter Cronkite.

"You're asking us to decide that the government is to be trusted," Gingrich... told ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday.

Jesus, here I thought it was the Cheney administration that was asking us to decide that the government can be trusted: to read our e-mails, monitor our phone calls, determine without evidence who has weapons of mass destruction, lock up the people who don't deserve habeas corpus, implement electronic voting machines that invariably give the right total, etc., etc.

I know better than to read Paglia, but the comments she gets are the best entertainment in Salon. I needed a long laughing session.