Suggest you come down from the ivory tower and visit my hometown of Springfield, Missouri - population 275,000. It may be the most pro-Bush city remaining in the country, where the half-morbidly-obese population are excited that their hero Bush has flopped so miserably because this is fresh evidence that the rapture is on course. That's right, rednecks who are fatter and dumber than pigs (since pigs won't eat themselves to death) enabled this cretin to destroy the world, and won't be satisfied until the job gits done. All of this is clothed in holiness, of course, in the home of the Baptist Bible College and world headquarters of the Assembly of God, where elder Ashcroft takes his turn Sundays running in place while speaking in tongues, even handling snakes on special occasions. You remember Elder Ashcroft, right?

After I escaped from this forced idiocy (about the time the Klan burned down the directors house on opening night of the college production of Larry Kramer's "Normal Heart") I was chilled to turn on the AM radio station in almost any city in America I traveled, to hear that the same ignorant rednecks were taking over the country, bullying their way through all rational thought, forcing endless war, destroying the U.S. reputation in the world permanently. I didn't need to question where all of this came from. I recognized it instantly. I had come from it.

Welcome to Nation of Rednecks.

I'm sorry, but this guy seems to be infected with a case of "high Broderism". The political internet is highly partisan right now because the political sphere is hyper-partisan. This has been going on for decades, with roots that stretch back at least as far as Nixon and were rampant during the days of Clinton's impeachment, long before people had even coined the term "blog".

I tried to read it to the end, I really did, then I got to this gem:

"The Internet is regulated heavily, by the way: The equivalent of trespass is forbidden. You can't libel people on the Internet. You can't commit fraud over the Internet."

At that point I decided to stop wasting my time, download a pirated movie, check my firewall to make sure my computer wasn't turned into a Ron Paul spambot, and then clear out my e-mail box with all the Nigerian scam e-mails...

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I am finding, amid the extreem polarization, a certain group of people who are looking for a way to bring things back into the normal sphere.

Not so much centrist but, more in the normal ranges of both sides. the more traditional or progressive left vs the more traditional Eisnehower style republican.

Both sides have embraced the polarizing propaganda. so, the right uses old 1960s charges to stereotype the left. They choose the incompetent but, evangelical Bush to taunt the left to get back for Daddy Bush's loss. We choose the DLC, war hawk Hillary to taunt the right for the impeachment of Bill. Both choices are a poor way to seek revenge (and why always revenge). And both are a destructive choice for the country, which we should think about first rather than our own hurts and grievances.

We cannot fix the problems that are facing us, serious ones, until we repair ourselves. the first step in doing so is to end this nonsense of never ending divisiveness.

I am hoping Obama is the nominee and our president because he is the one person who can end this whole mindset and start this country looking forward and begin to address the monumental problems we face.

As for Sunstein, he lost me with his 'soft spot' for O'Reilly. Top of the head, perhaps? This is more 'they all do it' bullshit, and contemplating someone who writes books and gets interviewed yet still gets taken in by Falafel Boy ... well, the ship be sinkin', as that basketball player once said.

I found this article thoughtful. While I agree that the author's enthusiasm for Bush in 2000 gave me pause, his essay forced me to consider my own partisanship. That's a good thing. (I do sort of get his "soft spot" for O'Reilly, though, but I mean that in kind of a superior way. He's an earnest, blustering fool.)

I'm often the one questioning conventional wisdom, whether I'm in a liberal or conservative crowd. For example, I think the very notion of hate crimes is unconstitutional (amounting to making thoughts criminal), but this doesn't play well among liberals. In my wealthy conservative suburb, on the other hand, questioning whether DARE (the drug abuse prevention program) actually works to keep kids off drugs is tantamount to advocating for pot for Kindergartners. In other words, depending on the context (the "conventional wisdom" of the particular crowd), questioning the common view can be seen as radical even if it's merely thoughtful.

One of the very best benefits of being in a book club, I've discovered, is being told to read a book I might not otherwise have selected--and getting something out of it. We meet once a month, and the host selects the book. Sometimes it's nonfiction, sometimes it's fiction; sometimes it's the trendy new thing; sometimes it's a classic. We've read the Hilary biography and Why Terrorism Works and some kind of cooking memoir (which I wouldn't have DREAMED of picking up on my own but found delightful)and a couple of crappy Christmas schmaltzy novels that frankly revealed more to me about those who picked them than anything else. Valuable information, nonetheless.

And I love Obama's nuance.

Given the fact that people are more inclined to post letters about things that they disagree with than they are things that they do hold with, I hope to come back to the letters here, tomorrow, and relish the irony. Yes, finding people disagreeing with the basis of Sunstein's claims (that hearing primarily those who agree with you increases the polarization of beliefs) as they read each other's letters and get more and more strident with their complaints. Oohh, look, it's happening already!

in our culture is doxa, Matrix. It is what provides us with Hillary vs. Obama and our delusion of that being a choice. It is what constructs petty thugs in black robes as “Chief Justices”. It is the lie that constructs Republicanism and conservatism somehow as ideologies or forces in social discourse, to attempt to mask their essential pathology. Subsuming under “political discourse” the range of antisocial traits we euphemistically construct as a “political ideology” termed “conservatism” is no more than the need of patriarchy to maintain the lie that entitlement and control require and to protect against insight and growth. As in a sick, homeostatic family, we must be civil – remaining comfortably ill depends on it.