because that's how we started out.

Yep. That must mean that it's very American to talk about reinstalling slavery, not to mention genocide of indigenous populations, since those are all how we started out also.

It must be very American to talk about witch hunts too, and I don't mean the political metaphor but real witch hunts, the kind in which people were hounded, tortured, and died.

People embraced this extreme right winger because he stood up against the war and all credit to him for doing so. Kind of a rude awakening to some though to realize that "libertarian" in most cases just means so far to the extreme right that they had to invent a new name for it.

You should receive extra stars for being the first person in the history of the Blogosphere, from the left or right, to have ever used the expression "begging the question" without getting its meaning exactly backwards.

Kudos.

Kodos, even. Peace, Earthling.

Lose the Wingnut, Salon

This column might be valuable if it were actually engaging. Instead, it's just a platform for an anonymous blogger to get off a few shots at Salon's progressive readers and then disappear. No discussion, no defense, no accountability. As a regular feature, it reads as if an intern was assigned the task of gathering incendiary arguments to generate pageviews.

Pageviews! What a shocking accusation!

Of course that's all that Salon is about, always has been.

I'd like to know who these "progressive readers" are by the way, it seems to me this place is increasingly filled with Drudge fans. Would those be the "progressives" who write things like this:

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/04/20/gay_marriage/permalink/ee36acaa7010a020fc2aa01ad7f6bee4.html

So your point is that conservatives just don't want to accept gay people as they are, but there's nothing "bigoted" about that. Far from it!

Right. I mean that's not even logically coherent. You start with the part about how people are "far from" bigots and then go on to describe them as bigots.

I still think this must be a joke. You could at least have gone with the "special rights" lunacy, it may be nonsense but at least the sentences don't completely contradict each other as much. However that would take an actual sane conservative, not some far right caricature.

So Salon votes for extremists once again. The Jerry Springer Show of the Internet.

How proud you must be.

All of those idol type shows are a kind of mixture of sports and musical performance. Even the recent sensation from England, while a perfectly passable singer, gave a performance that fell right into the mold: the audience cheering uncontrolably from the first few notes, then rising to their feet at the predictable crescendo and modulation up a step into the bring 'er home section.

All of these are clues that the audience isn't looking for anything so much as a binary yes/no, a Colosseum-worthy thumbs up or down moment- I mean what in God's name can you know after three notes? Other than that oh my god, she can SING, which means, in this case "really belt one out", and once that's known, why, the whole thing is decided.

This isn't to say that the whole thing doesn't have a whole dissertation worth of cultural and even musical or at least dramatic elements going on, and the pathos of the Cinderella stories and all the rest of it. However in just the most basic sense, what's going on is at least as much sports as music. If you don't even let someone finish a phrase before starting to cheer, clearly something other than art is the point.

By the way for anyone interested these things are exactly the same in France. Well, not exactly the same but the same principle, something I learned while sitting through an entire season of the version there because the person I was seeing was an aspiring pop singer and liked them. The biggest difference is that over there the big finale includes a visit from Lionel Richie who's still a big deal there. Somehow.

Spare me the Jerry Lewis jokes please.

France lost 4 percent of its population fighting in WWI because of "appeasement"?

At least try to know the first thing that your'e talking about, especially when giving these little right wing lectures.

The characterization of France as a nation of "surrenderers" is absurd by any logic. If the US lost 16 million soldiers in a war against another country, we'd be not only bristling at anyone calling us "surrender monkeys", we'd probably be sending warplanes after them.

This devastating experience with war on the continent is one of the reasons that European countries don't march off to wars as easily as some would like, particularly George W Bush.

Their experience with the horrific dangers of letting the theocrats run things in the past is also why they aren't swamped with fervent born again religious fanatics.

The US has wonderful traits, energy, freedom, and many others. However there are one or two things that we should learn from those more experienced, rather than lecturing them and making idiotic cliche-ridden jokes on subjects we know nothing about.

The French lost 1.4 million people in combat in World War One. 300,000 more civilians died.

To put that in perspective as a percentage of their population, that would be roughly like us now losing 16 million soldiers in a war.

I wonder how we'd feel about anyone calling us a "surrender prone" nation after something like that.

Furthering those vapid right-wing cliches, even as a joke, is beneath even Salon.