If the Republicans want me to consider serious conversation they had better disassociate themselves, and fast, from any moron who is willing to call Obama (or anyone else) the antichrist. So only one in twenty of them are that nuts? If 58 million voted for McCain, that makes a minimum of 2.9 howling bigots.

I grew up in Mississippi in the 60s. I have been subjected to the lies and ignorance of these bozos all my life. All my life they have been against fair play and justice and for repression, violence, and fear. Sorry, but I aint buying. I don't have anything against rednecks--I am one myself. But nobody has to stay ignorant, and there are few sorrier examples of ignorance than people who are so ignorant they vote against their own best interests.

Sorry. I and many others have dealt with obfuscation, willful ignorance, and manipulation by fear and lies ever since the election of Nixon in 1968. NOW these turkeys want to be taken seriously? NOW they want respect?

Earn it, you whiners. If you want respect, you had better learn to treat others with respect. You don't get my respect for just having an opinion.

Grow up, and if you have to put up with the kind of marginalization you have put the rest of us through for nearly five decades, too bad. I really feel for ya.

Thanks. You said something to the effect that your parents had money, and you grew up knowing that because they did fucking up didn't mean you had fucked up forever, and it pained you to realize this was not true for most people.

As one of those most people, I can tell you how very rare it is to hear anything like that from someone who grew up with privilege. Anyone who thinks that talent, intelligent, grace, courage are recognized impartially, regardless of financial clout, is a fool. Nothing is more discouraging than knowing you have the stuff, yet being condemned to neglect and poverty.

Of course I would take money if I could get it. Makes things so much easier. I do not thinking having money is evil. It is just that so very few who have it are as sane as you are.

In the February/March issue of Scientific American Mind, there is an article on the immense difference between IQ and reasoning ability. Not surprisingly, you can have a decent IQ, but if you have not been trained to reason well, if you have no skepticism or critical intelligence, no bullshit detector as Hemingway put it, you will still do very stupid things. This explains, as the author points out, George Bush, whose IQ is apparently 120, but who has followed not only the wickedest but the most ignorant and backward possible policies.

People with critical intelligence gave up on the MSM a long time ago. Like Kamiya, I used to love starting the morning with coffee and my local paper--Little Rock's Gazette, Santa Fe's New Mexican, and the only decent paper in Arizona, Tucson's Daily Star. (I lived in Oklahoma a while but there are no decent major papers in Oklahoma.) I noticed less and less thought and evidence, more and more ads, more and more feelgood pap, and the price kept going up while the employees got laid off. In Little Rock, Gannett, that devourer and destroyer, bought the Gazette, and proceeded to gut what had been a truly excellent independent paper.

It may be that the newspapers are helpless victims of social change. Regardless, I have long since quit paying what is nearly a buck a day now for what is no longer news in any meaningful sense of the word. I feel for the reporters, but hey, I'm not paying anybody so I can read crap.

Birepublicanism, they mean.

One more thing. I paid into social security for over forty years. I am sick and tired of hearing it referred to as an "entitlement." It is MY money that the government took away from me, and they had damned well better give it all back. These bozos just THINK they took a licking in the last election. If they succeed in messing with SS, just wait and see what happens.

Thanks. I too am sick of all the stupid revisionism surrounding Reagan. You summarized very clearly, in just a few words, what was wrong with this frighteningly bad and ignorant man. Far from a hero, he is one of three villains who have done terrible damage to the country: the crook, the puppet, and the clown. And I bet almost anyone could fill in the names.

As among other things a Southern novelist O'Connor's work has always meant a lot to me. The Catholicism (which I emphatically do not share) is essentially. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," for example, The Misfit claims that he is driven to a live of murder because he wasn't there so can't know the truth of Jesus's supposed resurrection. But he shoots the grandmother in shock when she tells him she loves him. He has met the love, which in O'Connor's terms, must be Jesus, but he kills it immediately. His whole posture (and by implication that of many fashionable modern philosophers) is a lie.

Do feel she was better at the stories than the novels. Some of the stories are perfect. The novels feel forced. She's much better than Cormac McCarthy, in my opinion, and by the way, I consider To Kill a Mockingbird as at least as good a book as anything the Cormac ever wrote.

The correspondent who wrote about her humor is exactly right. She has a fierce humor that her Catholicism does not neuter.