[NYC GOP Chick]

I asked him and later demonstrating the technique he developed during his teenage years for hypnotizing chickens.

WTF?!

[Billthedrill]

It is simply no longer as accessible to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals in the way those ideas were freely and vigorously exchanged during the period of our founding.

Given that this appears on a website whose politics are anathema to Mr. Alterman in the first place, offered for comment, and will generate numerous replies from all over the world, I would classify this statement as quite the silliest and most blatantly mistaken thing I've read in a long time. I know that Gore made it, but Alterman repeated it. It is simply factually incorrect.

Political discourse has never been more widespread or accessible to the general public, never. There are, to be sure, those who have difficulties with the way things used to be, notably professional scribes such as Mr. Alterman, whose monopoly is long over. Tough.

[GulliverSwift]

Gore summed it all up over the weekend of February 5-7 in a speech at a New School University conference on "Uses and Misuses of Fear" in our political system

This coming from a man who was the chief candidate for a political party who's favorite tactics involve reckless racism charges, lies about the environment, trumped up non-scandals (Bush AWOL), and is joined at the hip with tort lawyers whose sole purpose in life is to scare naive jurors and with a news media which specializes in scaring people on a daily basis, often of imaginary things.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

...The most doctrinaire postmodernist would have a hard time keeping up with the myriad literary inventions, textual subversions and convenient fictions necessary to sustain the ever-changing narrative...

Speaking of postmodernism and Algore, it's been noted by Lyotard that "class is fundamentally dead".  Thus, Marx promotes the use of subdialectic textual theory to challenge capitalism.  Derrida uses the term 'Marxist capitalism' to denote the role of the artist as participant.

In the works of Burroughs, a predominant concept is the concept of preconceptualist narrativity. But Baudrillard's critique of capitalist deconstructivism states that culture is capable of intentionality. Any number of discourses concerning Marxist capitalism may be found in Algore's closet.

CONTINUE...

[Tamzee]

[GulliverSwift]

"Larry Flynt?An Unseemly Man, as he called his autobiography?was starting to look a little cuddly; as cuddly as an admitted onetime chicken fornicator can be."

http://www.bunnyranch.net/news/larryflynt.htm

(Don't visit the home page, fyi)

[anncoulteriscool]

****Washington Post's Ceci Connolly--who spread false stories****

LOL! When this 'writer" bashes Ceci, you know he's fallen off a cliff. She generally seems to shift to the left whenever I see her.

[Dan from Michigan]

I asked him and later demonstrating the technique he developed during his teenage years for hypnotizing chickens

I've never even heard of that, and I know a few farmers.

For some odd reason, all I can think of here is Rocky Balboa chasing the chicken.

[dennisw]

GoreBasm alert!!

[Dolphy]

"How could our precious nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics?"

He should try looking at the 8 years he spent manipulating our politics so that we didn't see that the Clinton response to terrorism was ineffective, ill conceived and out of proportion to the risk. Perhaps a more communicative and serious administration would have not have left the nation so painfully vulnerable.

[Vision Thing]

I'm glad the dem pundits such as Alterman enjoy showing off their intellectual abilities. It loses so many of the people they need to reach. If he keeps this up, the dem minions and the independents will scratch their heads and ask: What the heck is this guy talking about?

Alterman and the elitist dem leadership are no great communicators. As a result, they will lose because they will never influence the majority of voters.

[Freedom4US]

The only thing more disturbing than an article full of so many logical fallacies and pompous, arrogant gobbledy-gook is the authoress apparently really believes it.

I have to hand it to leftists on one thing, though - they show an astonishing organizational competence with respect to talking points - the same old lies, sometimes recycled but cleverly hidden, always ridiculous but repeated early and often, often enough that people start to believe them. But see above.

[nicollo]

...there's been a dramatic change in the nature of what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has described as the structure of the public forum--the way our political discourse takes place.

Wow, I guess masturbation really ain't all it's cracked up to be... He really didn't need to explain it.