I got as far as reading about the mainstream media's "love" of Barack Obama before I realized this was written by someone still deeply deluding himself.

So I imagined the part about non-stop "coverage" of the issue of Reverend Wright? (Including Salon, one of the worst at this particular issue back in Joan's PUMA era) Or how every crackpot theory about Bill Ayers was given 24/7 attention at times?

The part about how "the media" acted as if it were a certainty that Obama would win was also hilarious. I seem to remember months of the media blaring "Is this good news for McCain??" every time some tiny wiggle in the polls happened, to the point where they entire blogosphere made "Great news for McCain!" into a running satire of the absurdly McCain-skewed coverage. McCain's blinding love from reporters was famous before and during this election, causing much commentary if you'd been paying attention.

In this article you continue the fallacy of so many others, imagining that "minority support" is just some public relations trick you can pull off somehow, and then with the same old, racist, white, male group, take your new Lee Atwater and ride him to victory again.

It doesn't work that way. There comes a time when you have to actually think of what the voters want, not how to fool them into voting for you. The Republicans have skated by pulling PR and Hollywood-style tricks on voters for decades, in the unholy alliance with "values" voters in which you got religious fanatics to believe that you were on their side, for instance. This goes far beyond just issues of race, racial minorities were one part of the population that you bamboozled, but there were many.

The simple fact is that elected representatives are meant to represent, not to calculate how to win over voters that they don't really care about. It's not a PR puzzle, it's the actual working of the system the way it's supposed to. These racist white men held power far longer than the demographics warranted, by using PR tricks. It couldn't last however.

There's really no gaurantee that the Republican Party will be a viable party at all in the future. History shows that we've always had two parties, but it also shows that one of them wasn't always Republican. Anything can happen, and based on the "war on empathy" and open racism displayed, amazingly, by Republicans in the Sotomayor hearings, it probably will.

To the cop: When coming to someone's house on a possible burglary and what seems like the resident opens the door, saying "We got a report of a burglary... is everything okay?" is the right approach. Coming to the door and when the person answers it saying "We got a report of a burglary, please step outside" is NOT the right approach.

Next, when you ask for ID and he shows it, proving he's the resident he said he was, and then asks for your ID, the right response is not to refuse, walk away, and arrest him if he asks again. Yes, even he's angry and annoyed at that point.

To reiterate: You decided that asking for your ID was a crime, and it's not. Even if he said it loudly, or more than once.

To the Professor: All the yelling and "You don't know who you're messing with" and "your momma" made me see this very much like the author of this piece says. It sounds like you were insulted for being seen as "that other kind of black", more than anything else. Showing your ID, letting the cop leave, asking for his ID, fine, then dropping it if he refused would have been the way to go. You could call the cops and file a complaint, they were leaving you at your house, alone, unharmed, until you went out to keep yelling at them.

Score: zero-zero. Both of them blew it.

Not that this really needs explaining but the very idea that Barack Obama "lied" when he said "Now, I don't have all the facts yet.... but I think the police acted stupidly" by arresting Gates on his own front porch, is absurd to begin with. That's a judgment, not a lie or truth-telling, and if nothing else, the "I don't have all the facts" would remove any idea that he's basing his judgment on ignoring facts he knows.

He was saying "based on what I do know, this is what I think". How in the world is a "lie" involved?

Even if Williams is trying to claim not that "he lied" as much as "what he said was based on a lie" it's simply absurd, especially when Kristol gleefully runs with it to make it sound even more like "Obama lied".

By the way, whoever here was trying to claim that Bill Kristol was only "misguided" or whatever it was, Kristol continued to lie that they had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for years after it was proven wrong, and he still lies about links to Al Quaeda. Don't kid yourself, he's not just stupid, ideologically-blinded, he's utterly dishonest.