(By the way: can someone tell me what a "9/11 prisoner" is?;

That would be all of us. The news media most especially. The day we all escape from the confines of "9/11, 9/11, 9/11" as the arbiter and motive for every discussion and the excuse for every trashing of the constituion imaginable will be a day of freedom indeed. If it ever arrives.

"should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party."

is that cartoonists like Tom Tomorrow have to work try to keep the satire more extreme than just good old reality. I mean, the Republicans are going to put satirists out of business if they keep this stuff up.

I can't wait for Camille Paglia to write about Barton's "brilliant rebuttal" to Gore.

The "blah blah blah Ginger" reference above was too perfect. He's like a cartoon brought to life.

"Now, hold, I say hold on there a minute Mr Gore, are you tellin me that climate change isn't like an oil change? Don't these things NEED to be changed now and then?"

Page after page filled with comments almost entirely saying things like "How dissapointing" and "An actual conservative would be great, but this extreme-right-wing nut case just spouts Rush Limbauh talking points" and "What an idiot", all of this makes you come to the conclusion that this is "popular"?

Salon sinks to the worst depths yet.

No, wait. Nothing could be at a lower depth than Camille Paglia.

Salon sinks to the same depths it's always been at.

There we go.

Feeble-minded pablum chosen for its sensational value rather than any actual value.

Hey, it's a living. FOX News hasn't cornered the market on producing vapid idiocy with no intrinsic value except to attract eyeballs. Clearly.

I would love to see a comprehensive list of all the Beltwingers who went on ad nauseum in ponderous tones about the rule of law during the Clinton scandal, and spoke of how no one is above the law, and laws matter, and laws may have been broken and must be prosecuted, when it was all about someone lying about having sex.

And now, when something serious happens, something that actually matters, listen to these people.

I don't think most of us even grasp how far reaching this already will be, how anyone dictator now use the excuse now that "the US did it" and "I'm just protecting my country, like Bush did" when they torture anyone they want to.

Even without any prosecutions this has had far reaching effect that won't even be seen right away. Our ability to lecture anyone else is now laughed off the world stage, for one thing.

Taking it seriously and showing that we understand how wrong it was by prosecuting would be at least a start.

Elephantman perfectly sums up the defense of Bush by the 28 percenters: He's from the country that you're from so you can't possibly think that he's evil. No American can be evil, it's just not allowed to be said.

Does Elephant know that polls taken worldwide have routinely shown that George Bush was seen as more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden? Those were the results. And don't make the mistake of thinking that this was because non-Americans "love terrorists" or some other mindless Hannity nonsense, they don't. Bin Laden is despised and feared throughout the world, with the exception of a small group of followers. No, it's because despite this, when people were asked to rate the most dangerous people in the world, they'd say that our President was more dangerous than even the worst, most despised terrorist in the world.

Of course, as Americans we know something that the entire rest of the world doesn't know, you imply. Only us.

What would that be exactly? Some supposed truth bred from the same nationalistic, jingoiistic blindness that kept Serbians rallying around their leader, in utter denial?

Luckily, only a small percentage of Americans have fallen into that trap. Despite how vocal they are, you are, you're really a tiny group. Thank God.

"There were very few torturers in the US"

We should be very proud.

The controversy now, in case you missed it all, is that memos have been released that show that the "few bad apples" were acting under orders from those high above them, including Rumsfeld and who knows who else.

The fact that people are now resorting to "We don't torture as much as the Spanish Inquisition or the Nazis did" as a source of patriotic pride is a sad, sick sign indeed.

"Hey, my family doesn't torture, only my government did".

Oh well, that's okay then.

This doesn't bode well for what people in the future will think of us, no, I don't think so.

Ah. No, I missed the tongue. And the cheek. I confess.

I think my satire meter went off the end of the scale and broke after reading columnists like the Wing Nut and Camille Paglia, who each at first sound like someone making fun of a blithering idiot from the farthest right but I then realized were entirely serious and not writing satire at all.

At which point I lost the ability to tell. Apparently.

Sorry about that. Carry on.