with many interesting reactions. Some things to note:

The left did it too. From car bombs and street trashings for 'peace' in the 60s to the accusations of child molesting based on 'recovered memories' in the 80s and 90s, the left has a lot to answer for in terms of setting the current tone of stridency in this country. Nobody found it fun to be called racist, sexist, or a warmonger back when it was young and brash liberals who were doing it.

It was the left which first asserted that 'the personal is the political,' a malignant notion which is behind the current smearings of decent politicians like Kerry, Gore, and McCain, as well as the exaltation of moronic politicians like Bush just because "you can have a beer with him." In many ways, today's right is a copycat reflection of the worst sins of yesterday's left.

The basic problem is that it's too easy to live in your own private cocoon in America. You don't have to live with your parents and they don't have to live with you. You don't have to listen to the people they listen to and they don't have to listen to the people you listen to. At the few get togethers, people don't think they have to get along and so they don't. Both sides yell at each other like farm yahoos at city slickers.

The media on all sides exacerbate the problem because all of them pander to their various constituencies. There is no longer an objective media in this country in the sense of putting out the facts as they are and letting the chips fall where they may. There is only a media that fears to offend its patrons and thus many people have grown intolerent of hearing any differences whatsoever. Blogs don't help this at all; to the contrary, blogs appear to be only increasing the tendency of many Americans to want to live and think entirely inside their own idiot mafias.

In a lot of ways, retouching is really about removing sexiness, not adding it.

You can sort of see why: how can it be a women's magazine if boys keep wanting to steal it? Thus the models in fashion magazines are made cold and remote looking.

In Playboy, if the models weren't retouched, the magazine would come off as pervy.

Retouching is really about adding a glaze of corporate propriety so as to make sex available for public consumption.

"Anyone who understands physics knows it's that first little push over the top that matters the most on a slippery slope."

But physics ain't politics.

"But now he reacts to any criticism of Bush as if it's a personal attack on him. What is going on??"

We're now almost at the end of the third year of a feelgood war in which the feelgoodness doesn't seem to be any closer to showing up. That's what's going on.

Prepare for another round of insanity as the war drags on for another year and the election drives Republicans crazy.

Bush has painted his presidency into a corner.

He can't leave Iraq and he can't win in Iraq.

He can't raise taxes or cut spending.

He can't change himself or get rid of Rove or Cheney.

The rest of his presidency will just be a series of frantic rattlings in his self-made cage.

This isn't to say he won't be dangerous. In fact he may become more dangerous.

And from now on, all liars are George Bush. It's not so incidental that George Bush tells a very similar story of his own life, only without using the phrase 'fucking pigs.' But he manages to evoke the same sort of bad boy charm.

But after Bush, making shit up is no longer funny or cute.

Bush would also claim that the 'emotional truth' of the war in Iraq is more important than the reality; he likes to claim that we Americans are a 'good people' who took out a 'bad man' so that we can lead the Iraqis on to democracy and freedom. The fact that the war is a disaster which can come to no good end seems to hardly matter. What seems to matter is how Americans 'feel' about it.

I'm sorry, but 'emotional truth' is just another name for 'feelgood twaddle.' Pleae read the Smoking Gun story and contrast the reality of the good and sensible cops in Ohio with the foul smears and lies of the author. What 'emotional truth' is there in calling those cops 'fucking pigs?'

There's nothing smug, snarky, or insensitive about Garrison Keillor. He can, however, be provocative, and he can bite, and some people just don't like that.

Some men are fat. I am one, though lately I've been trying hard to be more like Bush and run it off. Why is it now against the law to mention fat men? Or lean men, for that matter?

"...yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look..." And then there's that jolly Falstaff. Is Shakespeare now to be regarded as smug and snarky?

Does the television replace the sex or is the lack of sex replaced by a television?

he's a dipshit religious nut who shouldn't be giving out the time of day. He should be sitting in prison like any other loser with homocidical tastes.

But by treating him and his terrorist followers as a quasi-nation, as 'combatants' instead of as plain criminals, Bush has elevated bin Laden to a respectable world force, a potential leader of nations. That's why 9/11 happened; to provoke the US into the kind of overreaction that would make Al Qaeda important. And Bush obliged.

Bin Laden knows which side his bread is buttered on and that's why he hits every bullet point the RNC could desire him to hit. This missive is designed to keep Bush in power, exactly like the tape that obligingly popped up during the campaign.