This is the wrong fight, at the wrong time. I think just about anybody who wants to see these cartoons has seen them, and they don't matter. It is not a significant First Amendment case. If I was running a paper in the West, in America particularly, I would not be under serious threat, but I still don't see any useful function of these cartoons except to inflame, to give the jihadists an excuse to drive a wedge between the west and the majority of good people of the Muslim faith.

Is it a "free speech" cause to draw a portrait of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban? What have I said with that? Muslims are evil and violent, because their prophet was? That's not true, and it's just insulting. I was raised a Catholic, and I know Catholics who would be mortified by a cartoon of, say, a naked Jesus sodomizing a young boy. Would it be a first amendment right to publish such a cartoon? Yes, but... why? The point it would make, if any, would be to say that pederasts exist in the Church because Jesus was one. Untrue and insulting to boot.

I don't believe for a minute that the cartoons themselves have been responsible for these riots. I guess cartoonists would love to think their drawings have that power. They have been organized by those who would like the rioting to continue, and provoked by Danish right-wingers who wanted to start a rumble.

I suppose it is my constitutional right to curse and swear at a baptism, but I'd be a nasty piece of business to do so. Please, before I volunteer to die for your right to say something, don't make what you say idiotic.

God bless you, Freddie deBoer. I'd call it the "too hip to care, or even to be a part of society at all." Or, "Liberal, shmiberal, why does a high-minded person like myself have to lower myself to think of politics?"

If Mr. O'Hehir wanted to critique all these films, fine. I'm sure they're not among the top ten films ever made. But no! He has to use it as a critique of "liberal messages."

Would he rather we start making great, epic testaments to the great Nuremberg rallies we're seeing more and more of?

There are almost three years left of this. The question is not, can we outlast the man, it is, will he outlast the Republic? I've just watched the Katrina tapes of the closed-circuit conference before the storm. Again and again, the same pattern: we couldn't have known, but they did know. This failure of a man has depended on flattery his entire life.

"Note how it is always the liberals who are in favor of some people dying for the "public good.""

With a name like "Tatyana Petrova," you might be forgiven for believing that. However, it's still bullcrap. You mean, a, it's the Stalinists who want people to die for the public good. And the neocons, in the present moment, who believe that the lives of 100,000 or so Iraqis is a small price to pay for... what? Also, I seem to remember a man named Hitler who was responsible for a lot of killing, too. His concept of "good" was a little strange. But I've had it with the new conservative bull that it was egalitarianism that was responsible for Stalin, and that all liberalism is totalitarianism. You need liberalism, Tatyana. It's why the Soviet Union fell -- and why we never unleashed thermonuclear war against them. You have obviously been fed a line to think that. Read opposing historians.

And then, you say that abortion is murder. That's theology, my dear. By keeping abortion as an option, liberals are allowing women to decide. If their religious principles dictate that they not have an abortion, no state is forcing them to have one.

The most unlovely thing about present-day conservatives is their railing against the people who fought our way through the Second World War and the Cold War, while fighting to keep our society free, ending segregation and discrimination against women and gays. We're not totalitarians, my dear. You are.

And that's without getting to Mr. Manjoo. He may have missed the action, but this is very old news. The last of those laws weren't ended until the '70s, and the facts began pouring out -- due to the actions of liberals, and progressives.

And lastly, though I think most importantly, some Progressives were implicated, yes. What seemed to be necessary to make you a supporter was a faulty idea of biology -- about all that was available at the time -- and racism, which was endemic to our society, and infected every category of thought, including progressivism. But blaming progressives for it is really, I think, a case of selective history.