There was nothing 'parochial' about Keillor's review in the NYT of Bernard-Henri Lévy's lameass travel book. The article was dead on and accurate, just as Keillor practically always is. Just read the sinple listing of Lévy's ludicrous itinerary--this is devasting and howlingly funny. So congratulations are in order to Mr. Keillor and to Salon for featuring him.

Hitchen's supposed 'takedown' in Slate relied on nothing but distortion and a malicious tin ear--same as his support of George Bush & the war in Iraq, btw.

Real literacy requires the noting of accuracies vs. inaccuracies. It isn't like TV, where image and blather is everything and people with open shirts and french or british accents can pretend to be intellectuals, and people with fake Texas accents can pretend to be presidents with 'moral character.' This is really why newspapers are in trouble: the loss of a generation of readers who know how to read and see beyond surface appearances.

We don't 'do' accountability in this country any more. What we do is we drift along until something breaks and then we scramble to fix it.

My prediction: if and when the wheels finally come off in Iraq, Mr. Bush along with Mr. Cheney will be asked to resign. A military emergency will be declared, a general will be put in power, a draft will be instituted and stiff taxes will be imposed to pay for a redoubled effort in Iraq, all in an effort to save our skins in Iraq and our standing in the world.

The other possibility is that we will just drift along until the next president is forced to pull the troops out of Iraq in an embarrassing rout. That president may be more likely to face impeachment than Mr. Bush. The recrimination for a defeat in Iraq will be something awful to see, and it might come down more on liberals and Democrats than on the Republicans and the Bushies.

I just don't see any way this war can end well for us.

If the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power ends up by putting Saddam Hussein back in power?

I wouldn't bet against it.

bin Laden in that tape threatening terrorism on the states which voted for Bush.

Hasn't happened yet, unless you want to figure that Katrina was sent by Allah.

...is the guy who plays George Bush on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The Bill Clinton that people don't like is the Bill Clinton who was played by Phil Hartman and Darrell Hammond on SNL.

This has been going on for a long time, to my knowledge as far back as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The public judges the president as a person completely on the basis of his well known caricature.

>Lippmann pointed out the obvious problem with calling people morons, imbeciles, idiots or whatever else: "Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and width; it is an exceedingly complicated notion which nobody has as yet succeeded in defining."

Still true today. It is absolutely ludicrous that so many people still believe that a one day test back in grade school can tell you how smart a person is for the rest of his or her life.

We all understand that you have to practice and work hard to star in the Olympics, but we think having brains is just something you're either born with or not born with.

There is such a thing as having a folksy wisdom, a native intelligence that can shine through uncultured and clumsy words.

But this ain't it, though.

I'm wondering if Bush saw the 'West Wing' last Sunday and decided to play at being Sen. Arnold Vinick? In the show, Vinick turned his campaign around by taking questions from the press until they ran out of questions. Not a strategy I would recommend for Bush, however.

Almost every Dem online seems to be against Hillary. But she's the front runner.

In 2004, every Dem online seemed to be for Howard Dean. But Kerry won the nomination. I don't even recall anyone online who admitted to being for Kerry (pre-nomination).

Maybe the key to the Democratic nomination is to run against the 'netroots.' The netroots probably repel 10 people for every person they attract.

>I live in a a true blue state and, from all discussions on the this topic here, if Hilary were on the ballot for president on 08 both Dem's and liberal independents would simply not vote. Where is this supposed juggarnaut?

The juggernaut, if it exists, would exist among the majority of Democrats who vote but don't necessarily post here.

Salon's readers may be almost 100 percent against Hillary, but they still only represent a very small portion of the vast number of voters in this country.

We tend to forget how many people out there simply don't post here, because like opinion has a way of driving out unlike opinion, and polarized opinion tends to drive out moderate opinion. Thus we don't realize that not everyone in the world thinks like us, since we almost never hear from anyone else.

Remember that for every one person's opinion you read on the Internet, there are about 137 million other people's opinions you HAVEN'T read.

As regards Hillary, Democratic voting strength tends to lie in labor, suburban women, and minority voters. Hillary clearly has a strong appeal to those three groups--read it and weep, netroots. The netroots doesn't understand this because it tends to be more upscale and university oriented than labor, minority, and suburban.

Fact is, there's a vast difference between what Democratic 'activists' typically want and how most Democratic voters actually tend to vote. Hillary may very well be nominated even if every single Democratic 'activist' on the planet rejects her and leaves the party and joins the Greens. And she may very well win the presidency as well.

Message to activists: don't overestimate your influence or importance. Then you won't be disappointed.