This is a very mild preview of things to come if/when a Democrat (especially if it's a Clinton) takes the White House. The same obsequious yes-people in our so-called Legislative branch that bend over backwards to do what Dear Leader says will close ranks and fight like warrior-poets against anything the Democratic President does. Every mis-step on his/her part will be a horrible transgression against law and human decency that these virtuous citizens absolutely MUST stand against. Because, of course, it is the Will of the American People (tm).

I'm with the other commenters on this thread who wish that these Republicans go all the way with their walkout and never come back. We really don't want them and their ilk in Congress, anyway. (Yeah, watch me talk about what we, the people, want.)

You know the funny part about walkouts? They're predicated on the assumption that the person that walks out is actually WANTED in the room, and them walking out is an undesirable event. I wonder how many Democrats in Congress found themselves thinking "Awesome! Get out of here, you fools. Now we can get some work done." Yeah... probably not enough of them.

I remember an incident in my Latin class when the professor was discussing grammar. She brought up the outrage of various grammarians at the Oscar Meyer Wiener commercial tagline: "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner". The correct grammar, of course, would be "I wish I were". Egad! Language, my professor said, changes, and that which was wrong before becomes right when enough people use it. When I related this incident to a friend who studied linguistics, he exploded. Grammar, he said, is a set of preposterous (and arbitrary) rules the elites come up with to separate themselves from the "vulgar" masses.

The line between "smart" and "dumb" is fuzzy and contorted. My advisor in graduate school always listened to jazz and classical music, while these days, I can walk in on my current supervisor and find him blasting trance. Both are tenured professors, smart and educated, experts in their field. Go figure.

There was a time when Shakespeare's plays (and theatre in general) was considered to be a vulgar type of entertainment for the masses. Ballet was a form of strip-tease. Actors were considered the worst sort of scoundrels and the knight poems of, say, Chretien de Troyes were trash reading for the lazy and bored. Don Quixote went bonkers and began attacking windmills as a result of, Cervantes tells us, reading too many medieval romances... texts that today are rigorously studied by academics and revered as treasured classics. But I'm preaching to the choir, ain't I?

Lamenting the loss of intellectualism in these scary modern days is a dead end. We cannot go back to how the world was, we have to go forward. Whenever someone writes a lament like that, they've probably reached the stage of their career when they're ossified in their perceptions, unable to absorb the new and therefore must sit on their porch lamenting about the bygone "good old days". Of course, I haven't read the book. But you know... I don't really want to. I'd much rather read something stimulating than a treatise by some disenchanted intellectual about how I'm too plugged in to my computer.

Sure, the Berkeley City Council shouldn't have been so harsh, especially since it's not the recruiters' fault that our government prefers to start unnecessary wars and shield the children of the powerful from fighting in them. However, free speech is free speech: the government has no right to restrict the free expression of ideas by anyone, anyone at all. So, if the Berkeley City Council is encroaching upon the Marines' right of free speech by barring them from the city... what do you call it when a bunch of conservative senators threaten to withhold millions of dollars from the city for expressing its opposition to war?

By the way, the Berkeley City Council retracted their letter very quickly. Are the Senators going to retract their threats, or are they going to punish Berkeley for being feisty?

These guys are about to enter their golden age and they don't even know it. Think about this: what's easier, to doggedly support idiotic policies of a neocon President that fail miserably (and obviously) and look like a moron, or wildly criticize anything a Democratic President does and look like a Thoughtful, Serious Analyst? Any time President Clinton or President Obama as much as blinks wrong, these guys can have a field day with no accountability. They can make millions just blathering about it on TV. It's a goldmine.

So many of them are setting up the themes for this future bonanza. The war, people! We're at war! We need a great Leader as a Commander in Chief, Lord of the Bunker, Master of the Undisclosed Location! We are rubber, Democrats are glue! (Have I mentioned we're at war?) Thus, any diplomatic solution, any withdrawal, anything at ALL that could even remotely be spun as a defeat, will be spun so, and since this will be done by a President, it can be billed as "speaking truth to power", too. Instead of obsequious sycophants, these guys will be courageous critics. Much nicer. Very American. Freedom of Press, y'all.

And I suppose when the conservatives get over their guilt about Bush and learn to hate Obama (or continue to hate Clinton), the blowhards will get a reinvigorated audience, too. Watch for a rebound of Fox news in the next twelve months. The fun never ends.