We've all been getting along so well, but, no, George Bush really is the worst president ever. Actually, Andrew Jackson killed all those Indians and nobody seems to care, and Truman did drop nukes on Japan and even McNamara admitted that was a war crime, but after that, it's definitely George Bush.

He's put us behind the rest of the developed world in every way imaginable. He has done everything in his power to establish a totalitarian state. I just can't say enough bad things about him.

That's an important point, and good for you for getting on it. I took the question to be about the Politico's journalists.

What can you even say about a BS answer like this. The combination of condescension and evasion gives you the arrogance and the incompetence all in one package. "Good for you, li'l man" along with "I wouldn't have even thought to wonder."

Of course, big corporations that own media outlets have their own interests, so a key question is whether a newsroom

is truly independent.

As if the relationship between Politico and its owners warrants no more concern than any other corporate-owned media outlet--which is to say "none whatsoever," in Kurtz' professional opinion.

What turns a "journalist" into an ideologue these days is excess criticism of the prevailing Beltway power structure and its most revered and important figures. That -- and only that -- is what distinguishes Olbermann from those considered to be "real journalists." The function of modern "journalists" is to serve as spokespeople for the Beltway system, to defend it, to adhere strictly to its rules of conduct.

You consistently hit this nail on the head. The pundit corps has become so (let's hope not inextricably) intertwined with the govt it's supoposed to cover that they behave as a single, self-protecting entity. Olbermann is crashing the party, and the fact that he takes on both govt players and their media enablers makes it the job of the old hands at AP to dispatch him posthaste.

Writes Paul: "One way or another, the libertarian philosophy is based on what works best for those in privileged positions in privileged societies--or those who strongly identify with same, whether through wish-fulfillment fantasy, or other psychological mechanisms."

So, paraphrasing Michael Savage, you're arguing that classical liberalism is a mental disorder?

Claiming that people who disagree with you must be acting out of bad faith isn't argument; it's a way to avoid argument.

If you want answers to your questions about unions, Social Security, the environment, &c., I'm prepared to share my thoughts, if you really want to know, though, you'd be better off reading Rothbard or Mises or any of the many much more thorough and intelligent liberal writers who have covered this ground.

Okay. But I'll write "I Told You So" when you're arguing that Fred Thompson is the Worst President Ever in a few years.

You wrote

When Hitler gassed or otherwise slaughtered the Gypsies, homos, Communists or dissident Xians, his violation of human rights was no worse than when he targeted the entire Jewish race. Each of those human beings, Jew, Pole, Xian or gay, had a right to live and to liberty that was violated at the level of individual.

I never argued otherwise. What I was arguing, however, was that among the rights those individuals possessed, was the right to identify themselves with a group, and to belong to that group, i.e. to form their own individual and collective identity. Although I may disagree with the way they went about it, I must first posit that right in order to have it for myself; you, at least in theory, must also believe this if you have any claim to universalism (as clearly you believe you do) in your theory. The Nazis, on the other hand, believed that you only had a right to identify yourself with one set of groups, groups that worked to the advantage of the German state (and from that to the groups that the German state was run to advantage: Nazis and industrialists who supported the Nazi party), and that any group which they felt threatened their ideal society deserved to be eliminated, because the Nazis were a priori superior to them.

In the case of the Communists and dissident Christians, to the extent they were put to death and not worked to death, it was because their ideologies clashed violently with Nazi social priorities and led them to resist the Nazi government. Active resistance was brutally suppressed, regardless of origin. However, the Jews and Gypsies are another matter; they were regarded as racially inferior, a threat to the racial health of Aryan society. Although many were worked to death, they were also specifically singled out for mass executions (as, of course, was the Polish intelligentsia, for reasons having to do with both their inferior racial status and their ideological opposition to Nazi rule) on the basis of what?

You guessed it: their group identity. The Nazis, acting as a group, implemented a policy that led to the mass killing, deportation, imprisonment and repression, and expropriation of groups of people, on the basis of belonging to the group to which they belonged - because that group, in the Nazis' imaginations, threatened their ideal society. One cannot sensibly analyze anything about people without considering who they associate with, and why they associate; as abstract as these groups may be to you, they operationalize themselves in human behavior all the time. Notions such as race, class, nationality, ethnicity, culture, family, etc. are at the core of a lot of our thinking and behavior.

@IngSoc

Unionism did not come out of Marxism; the seeds of unionism, in fact, pre-date Marx. See, for example, Chartism and Syndicalism. Unions evolved from medieval guilds, which certainly pre-date Marx.

Labor Unions certainly were not a Marxist or "communist" concept and did in fact have their roots in medieval history. While a very few modern day (i.e., early 20th century) Union advocates and leaders in this country may have been correctly labeled as "communists" (although any advocated alternative to the rampant capitalism of the time was unfailingly labeled as such), the commonly accepted idea that Marx spawned Unionism is simply an indication that conservative propaganda works.