The intro to this story says:

The building tycoon and reality TV star is not a pop-culture hero. He's a bully with a combover.

I have no idea what this brouhaha is really about, and I don't have any special reason to take sides, or to give a hoot. Full disclosure: I have a mildly positive impression of Rosie O'Donnell and a mildly negative impression of Donald Trump just from the little I've seen and read of them. It's also true that I know very little about either of them.

But if one of the most important things that Joan Walsh has to say about the situation is that Donald Trump has a combover -- then this instantly throws her article into a category of prose so profoundly shallow that it's not worth reading another word of it. (Granted, but I thought an oxy moron was appropriate.)

(I did watch the Video Dog video of what appears to be a Larry King show, with Rosie ranting about Donald's affairs and divorces and Donald responding in kind about Rosie's appearance.)

Unless the facts are truly known in great detail -- which is rarely the case -- I think it's stupid for one person to start passing judgment on someone else's sexual liaisons or divorces. No one really knows what's happening with someone else's inner life.

It's equally stupid for the target of one person's dumb rant to lower himself to her level.

Just two stupidly feuding celebrities. If Joan Walsh thinks she can successfully choose sides in this matter and paint one celeb as the good one and the other as the villain (after all, he has a combover!) . . . then she has another think coming.

It is universally true that humor articles by college students have a very low success rate. This is such a commonplace that writing an article highlighting this fact in a specific case is so colossally unnecessary.

But wait! The author of this article thought she was pointing out that rape jokes aren't funny (and few could disagree with this). Well, guess what? The admittedly unfunny article about a rampaging vagina had nothing whatsoever to do with rape. At minimum, the quoted material had not even the slightest indication of sex under coercion.

So it's clearly not rape jokes that are bothering this author, but rather sex jokes. Or possibly bad sex jokes. Or maybe the author, under pressure to produce, just took an innocuous failed attempt at student humor and tried to stretch it into more than it is.

Well, no one particularly likes bad sex jokes -- or bad jokes, period. But -- is this really something worth writing about?????

I don't think so.

Sure, Cary, porn is terribly dangerous -- just as eating chocolate in lieu of a nutritious meal is dangerous. Sure, porn is dangerous -- just as a woman's using a vibrator or dildo in lieu of having a satisfying romantic relationship is dangerous.

Sure, of course. Goes without saying. Or thinking.

Your responses are usually impressively deeply thought out. Once in a while they seem foolish. This time your response is as preposterous and ill-considered as your writing has ever been.

I'd appreciate if you would try harder to avoid spewing utter balderdash such as this response into the minds of your readers.

Sure, no question that these people are wingnuts and crackpots.

But why should anyone care what a bunch of imbeciles think?

The point is not whatever epithets you, Joan Walsh, can fling at them (no matter how well-deserved). In fact, that's the lamest imaginable journalism (a concept that you are apparently not quite clear about, given you long indulgence of certain extreme voices in salon.com). Your epithets play no role in helping us understand the situation.

The point is that these people are each right-wing columnists with a large audience, who said what they said.

That is what's so scary about these people and their columns.

We don't need your mediation to comprehend what they said and what it means, thank you. Please, can the epithets in the future.

Although the gist of the article seems fairly convincing (that much of the stuff marketed to parents has little or no effect on the development of young kids) . . .

. . . it is equally nonsensical to contradict existing research by writing:

[I]s there something to be said for just leaving kids alone?

Life itself is very stimulating -- children don't need a lot of this extra stuff. Just being with your parents and getting to relax and hang out, or even just sort of sitting in the bouncy seat and watching your mom type on the keyboard as she does her work, or going to the market, or just taking a nap and cuddling, is all the stimulation a baby needs.

This is massively ignorant and arrogant advice, since it ignores mountains of research that show that talking to your little baby is immensely helpful in its mental development, as compared with its "just being with [its] parents and getting to relax and hang out".

Since such an article could easily negatively affect thousands of readers' babies, article like this should be vetted by experts before being allowed to be published.

But then again, accuracy and quality have never been serious concerns of Salon, alas

Not just talking, by the way. But almost any means of keeping the baby occupied interactively to the extent that it cares to be.

Besides the parent's talking and giving eye contact to the baby, this could include almost any kind of little Playskool or Fisher-Price-type thingie -- items hung within reach across the crib, different shapes and holes to push them through in the playpen, things that make various sounds when turned in certain ways -- almost anything interactive. (Which is one reason TV is virtually worthless, since it asks only for the passive attention of the baby.)

But if the author doesn't know this -- and it certainly appears that way -- she shouldn't be giving advice on this subject.