F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the mark of true intelligence was the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in ones mind without going insane.

The US just spent months analyzing how insanely risky and crazy the whole derivatives market was, how the lack of any regulation of it or oversight at all led to complete financial disaster, and even Alan Greenspan said that he was "mistaken" in assuming that the banks and trading houses would simply regulate themselves out of self-interest.

The US public is now is entertaining arguments from banks and financial institutions that any regulation of practices like these is oppressive and counter-productive and after all, it's only in their own self-interest to just regulate themselves and not take undue risks.

According to Fitzgerald's aphorism, this would tend to imply that the United States is composed of people with first-rate intelligence.

On the other hand, it's instructive to remember that according to Hemmingway and others, F. Scott Fitzgerald was painfully neurotic, almost definitely bipolar, and very possibly completely insane.

"We're a right wing conservative Republican-leaning BeltWay Villager propaganda sheet with a whole raft of the most discredited and disgraced Neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan writing for us and we "balance" that with those who aren't particularly Neocons but just spectacularly right wing like Charles Krauthammer and George Will who deserves his own category for his now infamous fact-free extreme right wing columns, not to mention Fred Hiatt and Samuelson and a bunch of other conservatives, and then of course that's all entirely balanced out on the other side because we also present extreme far left radicals like, uhm, Michael Kinsley, so as usual let's give everything the most astonishingly bald-faced right wing spin we can and if anyone notices David Broder will call them "not bipartisan""

I mean, I can't say that's an exact recording of their thoughts, but it's got to be close.

So now Salon has become a place of near 100% right wing conservative readers, or at least commenters, if this thread is any measure.

The notion about deficits put forward here by Robert Reich isn't even controversial among any economists except those on the right. Paul Krugman has been saying exactly the same thing loudly and clearly in the New York Times since the crisis started last year.

I blame Camille Paglia, whose legions of Drudge and Limbaugh followers are now pretty much the majority here. At least from what I see here.

Good going, Salon. Hey, it's a readership.

I'm half kidding, of course, since Greenwald does have quite a following here too, but ay yi yi, you wouldn't know it from reading the comments here.

Salon provides you with wingnuts and reactionaries so you can practice discrediting them.

Show some appreciation - and have at them.

Yeah but it's boring. Comments sections filled with furious right wingers typing these sorts of comments can be found on any mainstream/corporate news outlet site, and anyone knows that going to some place like that to have any reasoned discussion about the opinions of someone like Robert Reich is just a waste of time. It's not "diversity" in those cases, it just devolves to angry all-caps screaming and useless ideological rants.

I mean, look at this place. What Reich is advocating isn't even a novel idea, it's the long-accepted path to get out of recession and depression, and yet from most of the letters here you'd think oh my god, what a crazy, far out ultra-leftist nut case he must be! No one has EVER suggested this sort of thing!

We came out of the Great Depression for a number of reasons, but almost no one disputes that the main, final exit was the huge deficit spending of World War II. Which amounted to the government spending massive, massive amounts which pumped itself mostly right into the economy. It also put people through college, built infrastructure, and so on. There's disagreement about how much spending is necessary, and even those on the right who argue that the spending caused the Depression, but those are truly fringe extremists, everyone else agrees that some amount of deficit spending is required at a time like this.

It's just depressing about Salon, and it makes it hard to take it very seriously. And most of the online world doesn't, as a result, from comments I see.

Including conservatives would be great. Get David Gergen to write columns, or even David Brooks or something, despite him being mostly wrong about everything at least he's not straight out of the tiny, 20% fringe group of the extreme right, which gets handed the microphone at a frequency way out of proportion to the tiny percentage it represents.

Camille Paglia and her Rush Limbaugh-praising and extreme right wing talking points-spewing nonsense, on the other hand, just draws in these readers from Drudge and Rush and God knows where who are far too extreme to even discuss things without throwing out "you liberals" like a swear word every other sentence and railing and ranting at widely-accepted economic ideas as if they're instead some sort of wild, never before uttered Satanic witchcraft.