Actually, Rosie is interesting, especially recently. As you probably know, she's one of the cohosts on The View. One of the other cohosts, Elizabeth Hallenbeck, is very much a high RWA type, who seems to get her talking points direct from Karl Rove and/or the RNC every morning. I don't know how she does it - but reading Glenn's and Paul's essays - I understand her type better. Anyway, Barbara Walters, also on the show, while not rabidly right wing as Bitsy, is certainly very conformist and obsequious to observances of corporate & Upper East Side propriety. Joy Behar, another cohost, has a background as a stand-up comedian and ostensibly provides the "liberal" point of view. Usually not all that hard-hitting or original - and wrapped in a joke.

Rosie is making waves because she's not following "party-line" hackneyed views. She's more like the Peter Finch character in Network - "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." She says (or implies) truly controversial things, that buck the authority of Big Corporate interests, such as the corporation she works for. That's what I think is making her truly shocking to the Bill O'Reillys and others on the hard right. She is anti-authoritarian. The View is not an intellectual show, but she's making people (probably especially women) think and question. She's shocking them.

She *does* remind me of Glenn, in that in her own way, she is challenging corporate/governmental authority and the "received wisdom." She may not have Glenn's intellect, but for someone on a mainstream show, she's not afraid to express her views (right or wrong) and she can be fearless and fierce. I personally feel a little empowererd by her example, even if I don't necessarily agree with her views. It's her willingness to say "that emperor has no clothes - there, I said it." I say, we need more like her!

Also, she's an "outsider" on many levels - "fat" and "lesbian" - for which she's constantly being attacked. But Rosie the Outsider doesn't bend over backwards to try to fit in. She plays a classic jester role, telling it like it is...

but your pal nabalzbbfr just likened human souls to healthy cells that are unfortunately adjacent to malignant ones. Yet he no doubt considers blastocysts to be sacred.

For just once I wish that self-identified Christians would read their own founding document and understand it.

"Why haven't you dumped heavily on the insurgents for using chemical weapons?".

And why are you not dumping heavily on the US for using napalm?

http://tinyurl.com/3wxh2

FALLUJAH NAPALMED

US USES BANNED WEAPON ..BUT WAS TONY BLAIR TOLD?

By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor 28/11/2004

* More News

US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah.

News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.

And last night Tony Blair was dragged into the row as furious Labour MPs demanded he face the Commons over it. Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh.

Some possible responses:

(1) The fact that the insurgents use chemical weapons does not make the US's actions any more or less moral, the speech of people like Reynolds and Ledeen any more or less moral. How the US acts and now the insurgents act are not logically related. Why don't you "dump heavily" on the rapists and murderers here in the US? Because we're discussing something different -- the apparant rightwing racism of Ledeen and Reynolds, not the insurgents, not domestic crime.

(2) Because the insurgents obviously know what they are doing, and they're not going to listen to Glenn Greenwald's richeous indignation.

(3) We don't elect the insurgents, so we have no power to control their actions or to hold them responsible.

(4) They are not participants in civil society who are validated by being columnists are mainstream publications and law professors at mainstream law school, like Ledeen and Reynolds are.

Some questions:

(1) Could you describe this cancer in greater detail?

(2) Would you personally be willing to stand in for an innocent bystander who is killed in this surgery? If not, why not?

(3) Would you trust the doctor who injected you with plutonium to perform this surgery? Surely you are aware of the long history of US interventions in the Middle East, from toppling democratically elected leaders (See Iran vis-a-vis Mossadegh) to funding and helping terrorist groups (See US helping al Qaida in Afghanistan in the 1980's), to even PRESENTLY supporting terrorist groups, (See "An Iranian opposition group based in Iraq, labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, gets protection from the U.S. military despite Iraqi pressure to leave the country."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/04/05/protected.terrorists/index.html )

I look forward to your response.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen080602a.asp

"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.

That's our mission in the war against terror."

Well then. Cauldron Accomplished at least insofar as Iraq goes. Iran and Syria are still works in progress.

Ledeen's wish seems to be Cheney-Bush's command.

Since G Reynolds was quoting reader mail anyway, it wasn't his idea.

Oh, but Glenn Reynolds has had plenty of ‘bad ideas’ of his own and has suggested that at some point those Americans who oppose this war might be violently confronted if they are too successful:

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not. [1]

Reynolds is warning the “anti-war left” that if it keeps criticizing people like him, and continues to criticize our troops for murdering innocent civilians (his example was Haditha) then Reynolds (and those who agree with him) say they will reach the point where they might as well start murdering Americans who oppose the war. And he makes clear: it will be entirely their own fault that he has to murder them.

You have to wonder just “where” that point is that this Professor of Law at UT will unlock his gun case and start killing his fellow citizens. Just where is that line that must not be crossed? What will it take for him to start pulling triggers?

If we withdraw from Iraq will Glenn Reynolds have no choice but to become a mass murderer? Is he serious or is this just bluster? Does he have any “compunction about respecting” the left now? It sure doesn’t sound like it. What’s he waiting for?

[1] http://thismodernworld.com/2930