...was the enshrining of Larry Flynt, of all people, as a political philosopher. Even in the sex-obsessed early Seventies, when I was young, Flynt was widely known as a no-account schlockmeister dealing in outhouse humor. Nobody, left or otherwise, took him seriously.

Suddenly, sometime during the Ninetiies, we saw Larry Flynt thrust forward as the liberals' Edmund Burke. However did he acquire such intellectual status with you folk?

"Isn't there any place with a more temperate climate we can move to? Brrr."

Why not Cuba or Venezuela? In these places, it's as though Berkeley occupied an entire country.

Because Americans have ancestry that encompasses the whole world, most of us would like to travel as much as those worldly Europeans we are constantly being pestered to look up to. Our problem is that the message we keep getting from our airlines is that they hate to fly, and it shows.

Stores and restaurants love their customers, and keep competing to get more of them. Why do airlines hire consultants tasked to find ways of keeping us nailed to the ground? Furthermore, airlines delight in making life difficult for exactly the type of travel-for-travel's sake free spirit who writes this column. What hoi polloi envy about Pat Smith is not that he gets those half-mythical pilot's freebies, but that his status seems to give him the ability to bat about in Africa on a whim, immune to the penalties the rest of us would be walloped with if we made any travel arrangements less than a year ahead of time and without towering walls of insurance to protect us from the mistakes everyone in the travel business is allowed to make with total legal impunity.

It's no wonder that Americans regard travel as though it were root canal work, to be endured every third Thanksgiving to placate the in-laws. I wish that Obama, as part of his first hundred days, would be able to chuck out the cabotage regulations that prevent Singapore and Emirates from competing in our domestic market. Fat chance, of course. He's probably going to be more protectionist than Buchanan.

"Would a McCain win spell a complete sell off of the markets?"

The market doesn't hate Obama himself, but it fears what would happen if his followers were to sweep into Congress, the Senate and state offices with supermajorities. The next few years would see us trying out every moonbat scheme that has been festering in these peoples' brains since 1968. Dow 6000 says this isn't going to be pretty.

"Oh, you mean moonbat schemes like investing in infrastructure..."

Can you imagine today's Democrats doing the equivalent of electrifying the Tennessee Valley? The party's old hippie professariat will make sure that no actual usable major items of infrastructure actually gets built. What we'll actually get will be...moonbat schemes.

"And any "reasonably pleasant person with a trace of humility and good cheer" will end up just as dead in a Bombay alley as an American trooper. The thugees don't check credentials or perform personality inventories before shivving the rich, privileged, foul Americans."

I've done a great deal of travel to foreign countries, and have lived in several of them. Never have I encountered any generic hatred of Americans. People the world over have their own local political concerns. Travel into the New Zealand bush, and you'll find that the one aspect of America they resent is...farm subsidies! We tariff out foreign farm products and subsidize our farmers, while New Zealand farmers are totally unsubsidized and unprotected. They sell their lamb to the Arabs because, despite high demand from American consumers, Congress won't let it in.

Salonista travelers who perceive anti-American sentiment overseas are just seeking out their own kind in other countries. To return to the New Zealand example, of course the little caucus of protesters who spend their days in the plaza outside Te Papa are going to be anti-American. They hate their own country too.

If you're concerned about crime, stay away from South Africa and Brazil, whatever your nationality. There are quite a few other places where it's safe and Americans are specifically admired, such as Japan.

Does this newfound respect for research mean that you're no longer going to rip up our GMO test plots and burn our labs? Can we expect actual consistency emerging on the left?

"If We'd Forgiven The Terrorist Nutjobs

Maybe we wouldn't have pissed away a couple of trillion dollars fucking around in Iraq. I don't know if forgiveness is good for your soul, but it certainly would have been better for our pocketbooks."

So next time there's a terrorist attack, our response will just be to kill huge numbers of Muslims with standoff bombardment, suitably impressing them with our ability to retaliate. This would be have been far cheaper than our years-long adventure in sending ground troops, and politically popular in the wake of a terrorist attack.

We have chosen to fight the hard way because even a low probability of creating another Japan makes even a couple of trillion a worthwhile expenditure. And the world cannot blame us for not having tried.