This article and most of these letters are either or intentionally not understanding the argument. Forget the author, just look at the argument. He clearly is NOT saying the US disappears as a legal entity, just that NAFTA will evolve into an EU-like structure. This is not a fanciful idea and it is one which should be debated on its merits not on knee jerk reactions. Even the interview questions were annoyingly insistent on trying to paint Corsi as a fool by taking his language and intepreting it in the most literal language.

Someone said "Mexicans won't give up their language". Are you serious? Have the French given up theirs? Of course not.

For those who say "it will never happen" I would suggest that in 1957 when the Treaty of Rome established the EEC, almost NO Germans and Frenchmen would have thought it possible, much less probable, that 35 years later they would be sharing a currency. Why is the idea of an 'amero' so hard to believe?

If things followed the European model, I would be all for the whole concept. Think of harmonizing laws so that Mexican environmental standards were raised to our level or US laws regulating labor protection were brought up to Canadian standards? That would be a good thing.

Silenced, Anonymous, Patricia, Whatever you are calling yourself today:

You are SO MUCH FUN.

Your comment today tickled me so much that I just had to go back and google my all time favorite letter to salon.

It read:

"I Heart Patricia Schwartz! She's so totally batshit crazy, I just love her to a million pieces and I want to put her in my pocket."

Hear Hear.

Scherer's defense is more shallow than the original post. I honestly hear more convincing explanations from freshmen after they slept through an exam or my four year old after he washed out the DVD player because it was dirty.

Gender roles are incredibly important. Glenn Greenwald has done some masterful posts on this subject. He explores, analyzes, explains. Scherer's piece was half-a-step below a Beavis and Butthead skit: "heee heee. Obama's a woman". At least Mike Judge (creator of B&B) was being ironic.

Rather than calling Obama a woman, maybe we could look at what kind of man he is. In addition to doing all those standard Eisenhower-era masculine things (you know, making a fortune to support your family, getting a scholarship to Columbia, becoming incredibly success at everything he's done professionally), he also harkens back to an era when "masculine" was not automatically equated with "jock" or "anti-intellectual."

One of the thing that has characterized Generation X (of which, being born in 1961, Obama is part of the vanguard) is our ability to recast the expectations of our parents' generation, the Boomers. I know lots of 30-45 year old men who unabashedly take interest in lots of activities that seem unseemingly feminine to our fathers. It drives my father insane when his two (married, heterosexual) sons discuss gardening or decorating or cooking. The flipside of this is visible in third-wave feminists who even if they appreciate the context which made Freidan or Hilary or Jane Fonda act as they did/do, don't find resonance with their lives.

Obama could (and hopefully will) be the first Gen X president. (Stephanopoulos gave up his chance when he cashed in on TV). We hear all the time about how as a post-civil rights black man, he has a different set of racial politics than the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world. Well, he has a different set of sexual/gender politics too, which are in part generational. His comfort with his own masculinity is more than refreshing. It is vital for our country and the world. I don't think we'll survive another W. who is so obviously insecure in his masculinity that it would be pathetic if it hadn't been so damaging.

The majority of babyboomers could never countenance someone who failed the macho test: Dukakis, Paul Simon, Paul Tsongas. The right these days adore Churchill, but they wouldn't have liked him much in reality: an effete, short, soft elitist who talked with both a lisp and the most aristocratic accent possible. He was openly intellectual and took pride in his asexual nature (he claimed he didn't want to waste his 'essence'). He also had a fondess for velvet jumpsuits. Good lord, they wouldn't cotton to that at all.

Even GHW Bush -- who did lots of manly things like be a bomber pilot, played college baseball -- was derided as a whimp because he couldn't act stereotypically macho and he couldn't convince the country that his own masculinity was enought. God bless Obama's good sense to be himself. If the country needs a faux brush-cutter I'm sure Fred Thompson will step right up.

ps- even though I know it means I will never get a red star, this article is still the last straw: I am not renewing my subscription. Joan, you have finally killed, Salon. Well done.

That's it. That's the last straw. I will never pay for salon again. Karl Rove and Maureen Dowd staying up all night giggling at a sleep over wouldn't have come up with this trash.

I am a historian of gender. I spend my professional life thinking about gender. I am therefore not opposed to gender analysis. This crap though is remarkably useless. Unless your purpose is to doom Obama and try to bolster Hillary's chances.

Joan you have effectively destroyed salon. Hopefully King and Glen wll go start their own website and I'd pay double just to get them without all of this shit.

Really? Our tax dollars are beng spent flying (and presumably protectng) the AG so he can open freakng community centers? Really? I am shocked. Forget the torture, how are they not ashamed that the AG IS OPENING COMMUNITY CENTERS BECAUSE HE CAN'T BE TRUSTED TO DO ANYTHING ELSE?