Nice work Dennis. What a moonbat Smiley is. I wonder whether she realizes that blaming people for their ancestors' behavior is precisely the sort of intolerance she pretends to abhor.

"classic republican feelings of superiority" assumes those who voted for Bush are all republican. It also, in context ,is delicious irony, because what is Ms. Smiley indulging in but "Classical democrat feelings of superiority"? (Feelings of superiority furthermore that were bestowed on the "progressive" view of the world by the now-defunct view of an ever "improving" and mechanical society that could be tinkered with and perfected, like any other machine, without regard for the feelings of the individual "cogs".)

How appalingly devoid of self-knowledge Ms. Smiley shows herself. And how unaware of contradiction. And reality.

Eric on your comment above, I'd like to point out that "holding people responsible for the actions of their ancestors" isn't her greatest sin. I'm sure you realize -- if Ms. Smiley won't or can't -- that we're a nation of immigrants and that very few of us had ancestors here in the nineteenth century. Also, we move around a lot. People with ancestors in "red states" are now living EVERYWHERE including the North East. So Ms. Smiley is actually holding people responsible for the actions of someone else's ancestors. How's that for a fine piece of nonsense?

Ms. Smiley is so far out of touch with reality I'm starting to wonder if she wrote speeches for the Iraqi Information Minister during the invasion. I'm also sure if she met me and knew I voted for Bush, her head would explode.

The election is over. Bush won. The GOP dominates both Houses of Congress. They will pick the next Supreme Court Justices. The Right controls the military. Even more important, the Right controls the churches, from which the majority of the American people derive their moral values and their cosmological world-view, their most fundamental beliefs about the origin, meaning, and destiny of human life.

Therefore, who cares what moonbats of the Left think? Jane Smiley, James Wolcott, David Niewert, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Maureen Dowd, and the like are now rapidly on their way to being about as relevant and influential over large masses of people or over the central, morally-guiding, law-making, law-enforcing institutions of American society as is the Flat Earth Society, though not yet quite as amusing.

They are not only nowhere close to a majority of the population, they are also not a strategically-placed minority like the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. They may take over the lectern of a university seminar in post-modern deconstructionism. They will not take over the United States of America.

If the Democratic party continues to listen to them, it will lose election after election. Since politicians like nothing better than to win elections, and since the Democrats have four years to think about it, I think they may start doing just that. Don't know. Don't care all that much, since I don't identify with the Democratic party, but most of my family do, so I do care to that extent. And, it would be good for the country to have a viable two-party system.

As to the direction of the Republican party, as to the direction of the Right, whether they decide to ascend to the heights of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or to descend to the ant-heap of totalitarianism, that is what I care about now, in any serious sense. The choice now is not left or right but up or down.