If Democrats will calm down and quit running around like a chicken with their head cut off, it's gonna be fine. Of course if Salon would quit salavating over Governor Palin (who is probably days away from indictment, at best) that would help too.

You can say that again. The polls are wrong. The pollsters are so way off this time. Obama's candidacy has redrawn the the notion of "likely voter" to the extent that the pollsters' models are out of date. There are significant pools of new voters out here who are under the radar screen. You'll see.

Palin only energizes the Republican base, she doesn't bring new voters to the Republicans so the best strategy is to just ignore her. Please!

Finally, Palin is part average person, part figure of beauty, and part subject of intense empathy (with her son going off to war and her disabled child). Fans see in her a cross between Lech Welesa (the mechanic turned president of Poland) and a right wing version of Eva Peron. She really is a force to be reckoned with.

It puzzles and confounds me that people take up obsessing over these personality qualities and base their vote on them. It's astonishing. I realize that what you say is true, that to a great extent that is what American elections are based on, particularly at the Presidential level. Although how much of a "force to be reckoned" with Sarah Palin is is yet to be determined.

It's just weird to me that people can so mindlessly confer enormous powers on elected officials with scant regard to what public policies they support and what the impact of those policies will have on our lives, our Republic, and the lives of other people in the world. In our celebrity mad society, they are more concerned that the candidate's personal life and physical attributes reflect exactly their own than they are what the candidate actually believes or has done and how they would govern. It reduces the concept of "representational democracy" to meaningless narcissism. It's shallow, immature and dangerous, as we have seen from the last eight years.

For the last two, now three Presidential election cycles, my mind drifts back to the story of the woman in the crowd who asked Benjamin Franklin emerging from the vote on the Constitutional by the Continental Congress, "Mr. Franklin, what kind of government have you give us?" "A Republic madam, if you can keep it."

...is an oxymoron. War is war. You can't insist you've prevented war, i.e., maintained the peace, by starting one. That's the definition of Orwellian.

If you think the government should have to provide a justification to a court before spying on Americans, it goes without saying that you SURELY must support the same safeguards before the US can bomb and murder potentially innocent people.

Your attempted moral lesson comparing spying to a war of aggression falls short. Questions about warrantless spying are legal/Constitutional questions, not moral ones. There may be moral questions in the uses to which spying is put. Bombing and killing potentially innocent people is not the moral equivalent to spying, although it could be a legal/Constitutional equivalent.

I'm a gay man with a several close male friends, gay and straight. I've had some of these friendships for more than 30 years. All of the straight men I know, including my two brothers, do not have a single close male friend. The only person that any of them are around most of the time is their wife. I've always thought it enormously sad and my heart goes out to them. I can't imagine a life without close male friendships. It's exceedingly psychically wrenching to be a straight man in this culture. For at least 15 years now, I've thought there is something profoundly perverted about American society in the way it brings up men.

It is so strong for many of us that it seems to be nature and not nurture.

On the other hand, I've met few similarly driven gay men. Go figure.

Obviously, the only gay men you know are the ones on TV. And your argument here turns out to be a syllogism. If it's nature and not nurture, as you insist, despite your ugly attempt to belittle and smear gay men as "sissies" gay men are just as much real men, even more so, than you are. Jesus Christ, how many gay men have I known over the course of my 55 years who have raised and provided for their own children, and also for their nieces, their nephews abandoned by their straight brothers, (and sisters) or who have reached out to the community to offer their time and energy to right a wrong or provide for those in trouble. How many have opened their wallets in a thousand ways to offer their hard earned money, just as hard earned as any straight man, to give where the needs are greatest. Gay men are trying to "fix it" exactly like straight men do. Gay men are men first.

I'm not impressed with your version of masculinity nor your false dichotomy between "gay" men and "straight" men. It's small minded. And that's too bad because on some of your other points, I tend to agree with you.

Yep, you got it exactly right. Great post.