When you write:

"Modern standards of establishment journalism have eroded so severely that they actually now think that admitting their sloth and lack of any basis for what they "report" is some sort of grounds for praise."

For some reason I always think of John King's response in this column as the gold standard of this sort of thing, when his mail to you began:

"I don't read biased uninformed drivel so I'm a little late to the game."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/01/16/king/

It was a perfect example of actually being proud of his utter unfamiliarity with someone's work as he confidently and conclusively dismisses it as "drivel".

I think Glenn's next book should include King in the blurbs:

Bill Moyers: "Brilliant"

John Dean: "One of the most important political critics around"

John King: "Biased uninformed drivel"

"Missing persons alert: Slutty women have disappeared, last seen circa the "Sex and the City" era. The suspected loose lady-napper: Feminism."

So the "Sex and the City era" was pre-feminism?

Huh?

So right there that would pretty much preclude taking the Esquire article seriously.

I mean whether the characters of Sex in the City acted at all according to ones idea of feminism or not is a whole dissertation-worthy debate, but the implication above would seem to be that the whole feminist movement came only after that TV show, which is way-back-machine logic at its finest.

Sidestepping that maelstrom for a moment, if you really want to have every idea you've ever had of male-female relations scrambled in ways that you could never have predicted, move to France for a while.

Not Germany, which is more or less like us, not the UK, which is more like us than we are (I know what I mean by that but can't explain it in brief), and not Italy, where it's so unlike us as to be impossible to experience really, at least without going completely insane. No, France. Just the right distance in the funhouse mirror as to end up completely scrambling your ideas and making you wonder where they ever came from to begin with. And then re-learning where they did. Come from. Now there's a wayback machine, alive and thriving. And its opposite. In some ways.

Funny, I heard Karl Rove "debate" David Plouffe at the Panetta Institute on the radio yesterday and he sounded exactly like this, full of laughably disingenuous arguments that were easily disproved, and combative and argumentative when this was demonstrated.

He was asked about the "Obama is the most polarizing President in years" motif he's been pushing for example, which is utterly at odds with the facts, since just about 70% of the country approves of the job that Barack Obama is doing.

"Polarized", this country is not.

Rove it turns out is basing this claim on polls showing that Republicans disapprove of Obama at such high percentages, forgetting to mention that Republicans also now represent only 21% or 20% of the voters, according to two recent polls (Rove also denied this, in the debate).

This is, at best, redefining the world "polarized", since it usually means "distributed clumped up against two poles". It's at worst, lying. If 70% of the country is grouped together in approval and 21% in disapproval, this is not any "polarized" that I know.

Rove of course is really saying "Republicans and Democrats are more at odds than before" which is absolutely true, but since Republicans have shrunk to one fifth of the voting population, spinning this into the "polarized" lie is what's so typically and distastefully dishonest.

There's a larger question here though. Why does Salon love these sort of nutty extremists so much?

There's anti-science on the Left, too...

While I think the Republicans dismissal of science is irresponsible, they could not have been able to do so without the B.S. post-modernist views of "socially constructed realities" so readily embraced on the Left, such as regarding gender as a "social construct" and that scientific findings that are politically undesirable represent just another "privileged" view of the world.

Can you back this claim up in any way? That Republicans "could not have been able to" dismiss science without whatever postmodernism had to say about it?

There are some very silly excesses by postmondern academics and their followers at times, but how the Republicans and the religious right needed this in order to carry out the born-again evangelical Pat Robertson brand of assaults on reason and the Enlightenment tradition is a bit puzzling.

"Science is only embraced by Liberals when it matches their politics. Lets discuss Dr James Watson.

Black People are Less Intelligent, Says Dr. James Watson, Nobel Prize Winner and DNA Pioneer."

So you're saying that all Republicans think that black people are stupid. Only "liberals" won't admit this obvious fact.

This "black people are inherently stupid" view then would presumably be held by all non-liberals, like Karl Rove, er,, Salon's "Wingnut" representative, since it's his column you're addressing.

I'm certain that Republicans love having you represent their views. How happy they all must be about that.

Stapling teabags to your forehead is fun I know, but the brain damage may not be worth it. Just a thought.

In their quest to broaden readership in terms of political leanings, Salon has clearly decided that just lukewarm conservatives of the non-nutcase reasonable type are not worth the effort and has gone directly for the Morton Downey Junior/Jerry Springer audience. AKA Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh followers. Both Rush and Matt link to this site now when Paglia or Wingnut post, which then brings in the high level of discourse often starting with "You LIBS are all a buncha Dumb-bama-bots...." and so on.

How proud Salon must be.