When I originally read the thing you posted on this, I thought it was obviously a play on words. He said he was a "commander guy" and it was funny because it was a play on words. Guy who sides with commanders, guy who commands, ha ha?

I thought it was obvious. And from the letters in that article, so did much of the Salon audience.

France also suffers from racial tensions and struggles that are far more dramatic and out-of-control than here in puritan, politically-correct America. Oh, and most French also think that Americans, regardless of whether you love or hate Bush, are the scum of the earth. That includes you, Bill.

And contrary to Bill's historically skewed perception, American concepts of humanism and individual rights may have been profoundly influenced by the French philosophes, but they were mostly inspired by English thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Much of Jefferson's writings, especially the Declaration of Independence, are more or less taken word for word from Locke. Locke's philosophy also served as the basis for Voltaire and Rousseau after him.

The founding fathers may have stood on the shoulders of French philosophes, but the French philosophes stood on the shoulders of Englishmen whose own thinking was, in turn, shaped by English Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, Dutch Calvinists, German Lutherans, and members of parliament who invoked the nonexistent "ancient constitution" in order to try to grab power from the monarchs who, at the time, far from being a tyrant, barely had enough income to sustain their own government.

It's fine if you want to cite history, but at least be a little more accurate and a little less obviously obsessed with your idealized France that does not now and did not then exist. I should think by now that a real internatiolist would have realized that stupidity is a universal human trait. I should have also thought by now that Bush's 20-30% approval rating and the radical shift in the congressional power base would have demonstrated that Americans are not as desperately naive and gullible as we have feared.

Let's not kid ourselves. The Democrats' success in 2006 is, in fact, largely thanks to one man. That man is not Rahm Emanuel, and he's not Howard Dean. That man is George W. Bush.

Lots of Democrats worked hard to get what they got, of course, but don't try to fool yourselves into believing that it was any Democratic mastermind, or collection of them, that turned the election the way it did. Bush's glittering incompetence, the total corruption of his administration, and most importantly the floundering Iraq situation won for us.

Much as I hate to get into this discussion, I feel the need to clarify slightly on the point of Mormonism. Mormons are, well, sort of Christian, in the same way that Christians are sort of Jewish. We are all, as the Muslims say, "people of the book" but to say that Mormons are strictly Christian is misleading. The Book of Mormon radically alters many of the most basic perceptions of Christ and our relation to the world and to God. So, Mormons are Christians, but we must modify the term by describing them as Mormon Christians, in the same way we describe the gnostics as gnostic Christians.

It is not a generally accepted tenet of Christianity that Christ walked in North America or that you get your own planet when you die.

As for the article itself, I am, as usual, completely unimpressed. Are you reading this, Salon editors? Give Paglia the boot. She is dragging down the standard of 'journalism' on this site.

Is the kind of parent who would immediately and seriously consider aborting a child that is going to have some kind of complications the sort of parent you'd want raising a child with major complications?

There are some parents who are fit, capable, and equipped (both financially, physically, and emotionally) to raise children with Downs syndrome. Not every parent is. Is it better to advocate that the parents who can't hack it bring a child into a world that cannot properly care for it, or to advocate that only the parents who are willing to do so actually will?

I was just noticing that Paglia's column is operating on one thing and one thing only: Her own name.

If any first-year journalism student submitted this meandering bullshit to a professor, she'd get a C for arguments with no evidence, statements unfounded on logic, and ad-hom attacks everywhere you look. If any first-year creative writing student submitted this to the professor, the professor would be amazed at the complete lack of thesis-driven arguments or anything more than opinionated observation.

Apparently, Camille Paglia gets away with this verbal diarrhea for one reason and one reason only: She is Camille Paglia. We are supposed to stand in awe of her incredible powers of opinion. If there's one thing Paglia does well, it's tell us how right she is about everything, all the time, non-stop. This woman is a giant slimy ball of ego. What little talent she has would be put to better use in some kind of community college writing class where she could maybe relearn what it means to write meaningfully.

For comparison, look at Garrison Keillor's column. Opinionated? Always. Self-fawning drivel? Never. Keillor, as a cosnummate lover of literature, knows the difference between whining to his audience and telling them a story.

He also knows how to write a thesis.

Paglia is certainly not a journalist. What little else is left for her to be on an online journalism site, she's not very good at either.