Dear DMBFAN34,

You Said: “We do so at the expense of our credibility and, like Richard Dawkins, we’ll look foolish in the process.”

It’s a pity that Richard Dawkins “pisses you off” because I think that he is one of the few clarion voices out there deriding this evangelical madness. Is it his comparing of a revival to the Nuremberg rally that pisses you off? If it is I don’t see why since the pathologies that underline the zeal of the participants in both events have more in common than most people want to imagine.

I’ve read ‘The Selfish Gene’, ‘The God Delusion’ and seen his documentary series ‘The Root of all Evil’ and have never seen or heard Dawkins say a “foolish thing”. I recommend you do the same instead of judging him on an eight minute YouTube clip.

Applying Debra’s amazing racial litmus test, I have come to the conclusion that despite my pasty pink complexion and decidedly WASP appearance—I’m not actually white!

White," in our political and social reality, means those descended from English, German or other genetically related Anglo Saxon or Caucasian stock. Involuntary immigrants of European descent (even those descended from voluntary great-grandparents) are just that, involuntary immigrants of European descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics (and I didn’t volunteer to be an American). At a minimum, it can't be assumed that a cab driver named Declan O’Donnaly from South Philly that has only been in the U.S for twenty years and a fifth-generation scion of the Cincinnati Smith’s have more in common than the fact that Zhang Yiping from Beijing can't tell them apart. They're both "white" as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the guy from Cincinatti, for better or worse, is politically and culturally white, as we use the term.

Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but its Debra’s argument not mine. I just switched some of the terms around to make the fallacies more glaring than they already were (if that’s possible).

Dear Salon,

I hope you take a hint and retire Debra Dickerson to the 'has been' status that Camille Paglia was relegated to after her last puerile attempt to get attention.

Dear Editor,

After the blistering flaming you received after Paglia’s last ridiculous piece of tripe soiled the site, I would have thought that you would have quietly—and with some embarrassment—retired the notion of ever printing her shrill and annoyingly repetitious rants ever again.

And yet she’s back? Are you that out of touch with your readership?

Your subscribers have roundly told you that Paglia is a dated, bloviating has been. My god, she’s still twiterpating over Sandra Bernhard, bitching and moaning about Hillary and getting adolescently giddy over the bold cleverness of the conservative talk show hosts. The only thing missing from her usual nested loop of tired obsessions was a reference to Madonna, who seemed to be upstaged this time around by Anna Nicole Smith—the epitome of manufactured, talentless nobodies (with apologies to Paris Hilton).

I almost pissed myself when she said:

“I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix.”

Does she have any idea that she just described her own writing perfectly?

Do you?

493 Letters – 90% Negative

25 Editors choice letters – 40% positive

I’m not going to cancel my premium subscription over rehiring Camille. There is still plenty of good writing on the site and ‘Tom the Dancing Bug’ alone will keep my subscription secure. But as stakeholder in Salon (albeit a very, very minor one) it would be nice to see Salon use it’s money to hire a great writer that the majority of its readership doesn’t find so trite.

There are a lot of fine writers out there. As you can clearly see from the editorials, bringing back Camille—for what I’m guessing are largely sentimental reasons— shows a lot of contempt for your supporters.

Mike said: "I wish the media would stop publishing articles as if Israel was the 51st state."

You mean it's not? With Israel getting six times the per capita federal spending than any other state you think it would be.

I think they just don't make it official because the star of David would look out of place with the other fifty.