Interesting article when Strausbaugh is talking about how politics panders to fears. Unfortunately, he then ruins the impression by treating legitimate concern about global warming as a fundamentalist religion.

Oh well. I guess he's just a sissy in that sense. Incapable of examining the issue directly himself, Strausbaugh has adopted one of the common memes about global warming and now claims it as his own opinion.

We love articles like this because they are raw meat for vegans. You want tough? We will slaughter a million just to have enough dead carapaces to walk over.

We've become, I think, a herd of Holsteins.

That's so obviously untrue one is amazed that he's risking his credibility on it.

Sheeple: "Baa-aa!"

What complete and utter nonsense. Schwarzenegger is not a sissy because he... believes in stuff? Was that it? Al Gore is a sissy because he, what, doesn't? Or believes in the wrong stuff? Believes in stuff that this guy thinks are fairy tales?

Right. That's coherent. This person sounds like a sensationalist attention-grabbing posturer, by his own admission.

I was about to say it's beneath Salon but then I remember who else they still publish. Actually they'll probably give this guy a column.

The concept of America as a nation of wimps merits exploration, but Strasbaugh blows the interview by getting too taken with his own outrageousness. Kind of abandons a neat premise in favor of currying cheap, Coulter-like gasps from the audience. The intellectual consistency just ain't there.

But we are a nation of snivelling twerps and knee-jerk cowards. I guess that was George W Bush's most spot-on assessment of the national character.

Dennis Kucinich has a bunch of positions, but no coherent vision. When he was mayor of Cleveland in the late 70s, he did have a vision and it was a disaster. Strausbaugh clearly knows about neither aspects of Kucinich. The interview is full of stupidity like this. Strausbaugh has some superficial ideas that seem provacative, but they fall apart when anyone with a little depth of knowledge looks at them.

Only someone who hasn't suffered the oppression and discrimination that women and gay men experience on a regular basis would be ignorant and insensitive enough to use the word "sissy" in order to "push . . . outrage buttons." Strausbaugh comes across more like a school-yard bully than any kind of skilled or insightful writer. How quickly can we make his 15 minutes of odiious fame tick by?

I'd like to preface this by stating that there's a good probability Mr. Strausbaugh is spewing this incoherent tripe for the sake of attention and doesn't really believe most of what he's saying.

I defy anyone to give a good, clean definition of what he means by "sissy." One the one hand, he claims Governor Schwarzenegger is not a sissy not because he acts like a manly-man, but because he "went his own way and made things happen for himself." Okay, so maybe Mr. Strausbaugh is using sissy as shorthand for self-made person with an individualist outlook?

Wrong. Later on he says that using an iPod at the gym makes one a sissy. What the hell? Then he claims JFK wasn't a sissy. Now, say what you will about JFK's merits, but the guy was practically installed in the White House by his father. I mean, Senator Kennedy basically bought Jack a Pulitzer Prize for God's sake! Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, and he bears the brunt of Strausbaugh's ire!

Strausbaugh also engages in some very painful rhetorical gymnastics when he tries to equate global warming to religious fundamentalism. He may have something of a point in that human beings do have a weird propensity for buying into crackpot eschatological theories, but then he blows his credibility by arguing about the evidence for global warming, which suggests he's not angry at the global-warming-is-real-and-we-caused-it camp because of the weird religious fervor that characters it members, but because he actually questions whether it's happening, which means it really all comes back to the evidence for him. Is he similarly angry at pro-Evolutions who get irate at Young Earth Creationists? I suspect not.

Strausbaugh seems to have started his project by compiling a list of things he doesn't like, which encompasses such disparate elements as George W Bush, Jimmy Carter, Apple, suburbs, and limited war. Then he slapped the word sissy and the cover, got a book deal, and made a bunch of money.

I have a book concept of my own. I call it "Wussy Nation" and it explains how such seemingly unconnected phenomena as people who talk in theaters, fat people, and provocateur authors who write mindless claptrap are all symptomatic of a growing wimpiness in the American nation state. Any takers?

"We have slid into a situation where our public discourse is so excruciatingly polite and euphemistic that we avoid saying anything."

This may seems like a small point, but is this guy f***ing kidding me? I think the exact oposite is true. We have turned into a society that can't f***ing shut up! I mean, don't get me wrong -- America is if anything a herd mentality nation. But ours is a herd where 'extreme' and 'in your face' is often the norm in public, whether it's waiting in line at the drug store or trying to change lanes on the freeway.

I actually see being loud and opinionated as (quite, quite incorrectly) what defines our national sense of individuality. I mean, come on. People can't wait to tell you their bad opinions on anything and everything, and often the less they know about the subject the better.

Sure, people should learn to think for themselves. Of course. But keeping a sense of decency and respect for one another -- which means being polite -- is essential and something that is sorely lacking in our society today.

'Excruciatingly polite' my ass.

I wonder whether M. Strausbaugh's doubts about global warming are the result of studying the contrary 'data' himself, or merely being told that such data exist. Questions to ponder.

His professed admiration for Ann Coulter is revealing, though. His is not the tearing down of the great façade of political correctness and bad faith; it is provocation, plain and simple, and it is not conducive to anything other than obnoxious hyperbole. Strausbaugh likes 'balls-out' opinions? I'd invite him to join us here on the internet, where he can watch daily as a bunch of anonymous howler monkeys fling their rhetorical shit at each other in the most balls-out fashion he could want. It may be honest, but at the end of the day, he and his brethren—whether they be braying across the web, over the airwaves, or from a book—are,despite hanging their bugling, cantaloupe-sized gonads out their flies, still just a bunch of poo-covered simians who have achieved nothing more than a powerful personal stench.

Perhaps I'm being unfair; I'm certainly being hypocritical. I've been focusing on one of Strausbaugh's examples of un-sissified behavior when his definition of a 'sissy' is anything but so clearly defined. Prevarication, black and white thinking, obsessing over trivialities, not reading long books: it would seem that sissification is an extremely broad category into which he has dumped everything that he finds objectionable about society and people with little regard for how or if any of his gripes actually relate to one another.

But hell, who needs thematic coherence? Bring on the outrage! Fire the presses! We've got fucking product to move here, people!