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• Sunday, May 18, 2008 04:18 AM

  I just read all the WaPo comments on Parker ; all 33 pages of them

  amazing stuff. It looks to me that the majority of people claiming to be Hillary supporters in those comments are actually Limbaugh's Operation Chaos crowd. Many use similar names (female first name plus random number), many end up saying GO HILLARY!, and they all put in as many GOP talking points as they can. Some of them go out of their way to claim that Parker is a sincere Hillary supporter too, not a GOPster. Quite a lot of the Obama defenders don't seem to realise this, and respond as if these characters were genuine disillusioned Hillary fans.

  Bucky : these people that Rosenblum mentions seem to me to correspond to Presbyterians in British terms : Northern Irish and lowland Scots with a penchant for Freemasonry, Zionism, and Unionism (i.e. the continued union of as much of Ireland as possible with England and Scotland). Over a couple of hundred years in the USA, they naturally fragmented into all kinds of things, and are probably not too keen on Britain, but it would be interesting to know how many of them would say that Britain's mistake was in not fighting harder to keep the whole of Ireland, and so on.

  This is very complciated stuff and I don't claim to be an expert, I don't even have a degree. I do have one interesting book about the subject, by Ian Lustick, but it's hard going, and I haven't got far with it. It's called "Unsettled States, Disputed Lands" and it's a comparative history of the irish, Algerian, and Palestinian disputes over the last few centuries - quite a big topic!

  —Rowan Berkeley Read Rowan Berkeley's other letters
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