Didn't read her this time. I will, however, keep reading the posts! Now, that is a good compromise, like public choice instead of single player. No need to read about triggers, or coops, or voluntary ho ho ho curbs by insurance companies.

It is too late for Camille to turn "it" -- whatever it is -- around, but I look forward to the letters, fer sure. I do hope, however, that you don't go all nasty about it. Keep in mind, she isn't that bright, had an unrequited crush on a real intellectual at one time, and has been bitter about how she is laughed out of serious conversation for, well, for forever.

Shortly before the US invaded Afghanistan, one of my colleagues,a Pultizer prize winning biographer of Khruschev, told me he wanted to write an op ed for the NYTimes (where his father had been a critic in the 50s and his brother is a senior editor), about how you just don't go into that country. He never did. But you just don't go into that country! There is no way out, and blodd and money are drained.

This pragmatic argument, of course, doesn't address the horror of a country about as far away as possible from the object of its desire. Our empire must end. I want us to be Belgium, not Russia. (Though those aren't great choices, admittedly).

In regard to the debate -- beyond the hypocrisy of Freidman and the swalloed words of Brokaw, there nonetheless seemed to be a consensus that we need to leave. Given context, Glenn, sometimes it is best to look a gift horse in the mouth.

They may well be Obama Administration officials. As Glenn has rightfully pointed out time and time again, the gap between our president's rhetoric and actions is large. That the CIA is no longer torturing prisoners may well become the next lie to be exposed. I have no evidence, of course, but when you begin lying as systematically as the Obama Administration officials have been doing,it becomes plausible to think that there may well be shifts occurring in their attitudes toward torture as well. And, by the by, where does the confirmation of the one nominated White House counsel who denounced the Bush legal decisions stand these days? Is it really that difficult to undo the block on her nomination?

Growing up in town that had at one point twelve parishes, as kids we would compare notes about which order of nuns was the worst. We all had horror stories. It wasn't one or two nuns, it was the order of discipline that they advanced -- at ALL of our parochial schools. They weren't trained as teachers for the most part, and they were social maladjusted for the most part. This was the 1960s, and while Vatican Two occurred during this period, there were damned few signs of thought among these nuns or anything beyond rote learning in their classes. I remember being humiliated for blending two crayon colors together in a second grade art project, to try to capture a sunset. Sister Mary Verona (Order of the Sisters of Mercy) held up my effort in front of the class, mocked it, and to complete the humiliation, slapped the back of my hand with a ruler ten times. How about first grade? Sister Mary Giuesepe forbad me, a left-hander, from using it in class. Eventually I developed a stutter. My pediatrician figured out what was going on, a note came to school, and she stopped the practice, but made me stay after school for two weeks running, and yes, the ruler was used then as well for telling on her. Humiliation of others, a classmate who had been held back from advancing to second grade was called retarded by other kids, and the nuns did nothing to sop it, and even sometimes joined in. In seventh grade, (1966-67), Sister Mary Jacinta, the "cool" nun, guitar Mass etc., told all of us she loved us, and when some of us resisted her advances, yup, we suffered really awful punishments, including being kept alone in an office for days at a time, and then being flunked on tests we were unable to take.To imagine that these were exceptions is naive at best. The old Catholic Church in the United States was filled with abusers, and the nuns were as bad as the priests. It is past time that their crimes be investigated and prosecuted. Boy, did you hit a nerve! Well done.

NO

Stephen Smith of Yale has ignored the fascism comments as well. As for Drury, yes, she is a conservative scholar of Aquinas, but ANYONE who investigates the master who isn't a student, or a student of a student, is trashed by the Straussians as not being a serious scholar of the Master.

Recent research has revealed letters that Strauss wrote while in France (after being recommended for fellowships to study Hobbes by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmidt) praised fascism as what was needed at the time. All the subsequent apologetics by Straussians that he "wrote as a friend of democracy" -- note, not as a democrat -- is horseshit. As prominent a disciple as Werner Dannhauser (himself a sexual harasser when I was student at Cornell in the early '80s, and Allan Bloom's best friend), when the letters were found, noted that they were disturbing and disappointing.

Nicolas Xenos, a political theorist who teaches at UMass, Amherst, has documented this discovery most thoroughly in a recent book published by Routledge Press. To my knowledge, not a single current neocon has addressed this matter. And the bulk of the Straussians in the academy, such as Thomas Pangle, have for the most part ignored the matter.