like you Glenn, to grasp the more disturbing truth, that the "haircut" story is alive because the manipulative, rotten apples in the "news" business know very well that a large number of American citizens are actually swayed/influenced by this crap.

I think you give these swine too much credit for being oblivious, when they are in full command of the awful message, and do it willfully, with forethought and even glee.

I can't say which I find more abhorent, the message or the fact that many of my fellow citizens are listening to it, and making decisions based upon it.

Incidentally, it’s laughable that members of the establishment media and politicians like Lieberman (as well as hacks like Gerstein) continue to attack the liberal/progressive blogosphere for promoting unacceptable discourse. One need only pop over to some of the most popular right-wing blogs' comment sections for hate speech, death threats, incitements to violence, etc. that, at least in my experience, are nowhere to be found on any respectable liberal/progressive blogs.

For people like Gerstein, Lieberman and many members of our establishment media, the most unacceptable discourse is that which, like yours, exposes institutionalized disinformation and hypocrisy. Why? Because, naturally, it threatens their stranglehold on public perception.

If views like yours - of which many progressives and, I'd argue, more Americans than are given credit for concur - became mainstream, well, Gerstein and his ilk would be finished. Their views would be sought after about as heartily as Rich Little's take on contemporary politics.

I think we will see a sea change, but not the one you are expecting. It will be directed by President Bush. By now he has realized that is futile to cooperate with the disloyal opposition. His genuine efforts to try to find a common ground have led to naught. Even his uncharacteristic attempts at appeasement, such as the unwise move to replace Rumsfeld with Gates have only whetted their appetites for more. The last straw has been this disgraceful attempt to defund the troops and leave them in the lurch. Instead of consenting to become a lame duck, you will see a new liberated President Bush, no longer constrained by electoral politics. No more kowtowing to arrogant Democrats or craven Republicans. Gonzales and Wolfowitz will stay. If they fail to fund the troops, President Bush will provide funding on his own. No more cooperation with politically motivated wasteful investigations. The problem of Iran and Syria will be confronted head on. Just fuck off and try to impeach if you dare. And they will be crushed in 2008.

Yes, successful. Electorally successful. You don't think so? You don't think they've been rather good at that despite everything else? The fact that that went right over your head and you insist on dully preaching and regurgitating the same old rhetoric sort of proves that. Yeah yeah they suck. And they get elected more often than not. Why is that? It's because they get people away from their blogs and out in the world doing the scut work.

Glenn's article exposed Gerstein for what he is, a former Democrat who is disgruntled by the internet blogs and their ability (at least on the left) to get to the TRUTH.

Isn't that what journalism, and now, internet journalism, is supposed to be about? The TRUTH? The MSM has long ceased being a source of truth, even before the fraudulent run up to the Iraq War.

Let's hear it for the truthseekers, whoever they are, including Glenn Greenwald.

Well, opposition to "speech codes" is simply not an example of a moral panic. Moral panics are a fascinating topic, and they usually cause great harm, such as the wave of sentiment that Satanists were raping toddlers at day care centers.

But there ought never, ever be a "speech code" at a campus, of all places (except for authoritarian private religious schools enforcing their dogma). If someone had wanted to call me a "dumb cunt who should be out of the classroom and in the bedroom breeding," whether said in a bar by some idiot patron, or another student in a classroom debate, I'm not going to credit that person with any power or sense. And if the person wants to express the sincere view that women are, in the aggregate, inferior to men in terms of spatial relations skills, they ought to feel free to say so without terror of the thought police coming after them at a *university.*

L.W.M.:

I'm sorry...

Fools on the left started this PC shit and it has come back to bite them on the ass.

One more rightwing myth. It deserves a bit of refutation, so here goes.

It was folks on the left who coined the term "PC." It was used--first and foremost on college campuses--to describe those who were obsessed by the minutia of language, to the detriment of any systematic understanding, and action based on such understanding. Those who were PC were the clueless minority. I wouldn't go so far as to say that "PC" was a term of ostracism, but it was a term of opprobrium. You might tolerate someone who was PC in an open meeting or organization. But you would never invite them to a party.

This then got conflated with something larger, which was not, strictly speaking, a leftist idea at all: campus speech codes. As a matter of record, campuses have had speech codes since forever. (Heck, back in the 1960s, when I was in college, someone posted a dress code from a nearby college on our student union door as a joke/reminder what the rest of the world was like.) Colleges have always been regarded as privileged communities, and they have always had rules.

What the influx of the unwashed in the 1960s accomplished was a significant loosening of the exclusionary bonds that had previously been taken for granted. Speech codes--like dress codes--were largely ignored. But this was only a relatively brief period of time, and it lead fairly quickly to incidents of harrasment, and more sustained fostering animosity.

The introduction of revised speech codes to curb abusive racist and sexist language was certainly informed by a progressive viewpoint that saw such abuse as detrimental, and saw those being abused as worthy of enjoying the same collegial atmosphere as anyone else. But that progressive sensitivity went into writing codes whose form and purpose reflected long-standing college norms and practices, altered only to acknowledge women and minorities as full-fledged members of the college community, worthy of being treated with the same dignity as anyone else.

In short, the colleges were simply asserting their traditional values.

There was a wide range of different ways that such codes were written and enforced, most rather sensible, a handful of exceptions, not so much.

Then, around 1990, with the fall of communism, the right suddenly experienced a severe demonization vacuum. This is when they picked up the term "PC," and ran with it. The media just ate it up. It became a classic example of a moral panic. (See Wikipedia on this--they have a pretty good entry on moral panic.) And in the process it came to mean anything that the right didn't like. Global warming was PC. Wearing seatbelts was PC. It was an authoritarian codeword for projecting their own authoritarianism onto others.

Buying into (or, at the very least, mindlessly exploiting) the authoritarian logic that casts loser control freaks as rebels, Bill Maher thought it was a hip to name his TV show "Politically Incorrect," signalling a defiance of authority. Then after years and years on the air, shortly after 9/11, he actually said something that actually was politically incorrect (that whatever else you could say about them, the terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers weren't cowards) and he ultimately lost his job as a result.