“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”

“Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies.”

-----Thomas Jefferson (Third President of the United States)

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated.

-----Ulysses S. Grant (Eighteenth President of the united States)

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”

“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.”

-----Ben Franklin (Founding Father and Patriot)

“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”

“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it”

-----John Adams (Second President of the United States)

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."

-----Abraham Lincoln (Sixteenth President of the United States)

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

“In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”

-----James Madison (Fourth President of the United States)

“To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life.”

“I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be nonsectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools.”

-----Theodore Roosevelt (Twenty Sixth President of the United States)

“All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.”

-----Thomas Paine (Founding Father and Patriot)

Do your homework! Bacevich is a conservative, a graduate of West Point (he has also taught there), a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army, a Vietnam Vet and he has had the great misfortune of losing a son in Iraq.

You've obviously been dipping into the patriotic kool-aid a bit much. Nevertheless, just try and put your ignorance and indoctrination on hold for long enough to consider that maybe—just maybe—when people don't buy into your puerile mythologies, it doesn't necessarily make them commie liberals. In fact, they may just have something that you don't have; like experience, a mind that can reason and an education.

You said: "The Atomic bomb. Yes we used it twice and killed over 180,000 but the alternative was a bloody invasion with expected casualties in the MILLIONS."

I dissagree, I believe the "casualties in the MILLIONS" is a myth and it has been pretty soundly discreditied by many military historians. Japan was on its knees and it's generals had already make overtures for surrender through third partys when we dropped the bomb.

It's going to sound cynical (but sadly true) that the decision to drop the bomb was made the day we decided to appropriate the funds to make it. You just don't engage in the largest engineering progect in the history of the world and then not test your fancy new toy.

By the way, it was a very tough decision for Truman and I have hated to have been in his shoes. Nevertheless, it should be noted that most of the top brass were against dropping it.

I think it’s very possible that Camille Paglia is insane. For the past few years she’s been twiterpating over how visceral and insightful right wing talk radio is only to do an about face in this week’s column to say that:

“Talk radio has been seething with such intensity since Barack Obama's first week in office that I am finding it very hard to listen to it.”

Then she continues with this gem of abject stupidity:

“As a longtime fan of talk radio...I want stimulation and expansion of my thinking -- not shrill, numbing hectoring and partisan undermining of the authority and dignity of the presidency. Rabidly Bush-bashing Democrats shouldn't have done it to the last president either, but that's no excuse for conservatives, who claim to revere our institutions, to play schoolyard tit for tat.”

Wait, let me see if I understand you correctly, you just noticed that right wing radio “seethes with intensity” and it took the “hectoring” of a sitting president that the right wing hates with a passion for you to see what talk radio has always been about?

Seriously Salon, listen to your subscribers and give this harridan the boot. Her monthly bloviations are becoming more and more disjointed and the magazine embarrasses itself by keeping her on.