or ANY type of search engine at all???
One of my favourite pastimes when I'm bored and can't get a Literati game going on Yahoo! is to go to neo-con sites and rile up the limbaughnistas...something that's not too hard to do.
Because I'm an avid Stern fan, my favourite amongst the far too numerous Reich-wing sites is Debbie Schlussel's, and she and her readers provide as much material for me as she does for Artie Lange, and the REALLY amazing thing is that these noodniks don't realise the reason they're the butt of all jokes, yet THEY look down on you like it's you who're the one lacking in education!!!
The first person who said "ditto" to Rush more than likely did so unwittingly, but THAT became a mantra for his callers, it had the same effect as Seig Heil on my feeble liberal mind...seems that all "liberals" are feeble-minded in Dittoland. One conservative virago tried to school me thusly--It was OUR party, in it's EARLIEST days who freed the slaves. Have you ever hear of Abe Lincoln. He was killed by a liberal pig! [ I swear to the DNC, since we liberals have no god, that I didn't make that up...you can go here http://www.debbieschlussel.com/... to see the whole exchange.]
Need I address the absurdity of that 'historian's' statement?
History is like Finnegans Wake--riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.--a never-ending story that has to be read continuously, and a lifetime of studying it will yield a lieftime of revelation, but will never reveal the whole picture.
On these sites I am either vilified as the village idiot, or an "elitist" intellectual--my schooling is limited to Jude Fawley University--and there's always a condescending attitude of WE'RE OMNISCIENT AND YOU'RE A MORON...godless of course.
I could not find who originally said "religion and politics should not be discussed in polite company" simply because I don't have the time to Google it up right now, but that little proverb does not translate to the internet. Bars usually have ESPN on the television instead of Fox "news" or CNN simply because a fight is less likely to break out over a game than a political story, but the oh-so-observant dittoheads don't see THIS ever present part of their off-line lives...and that's assuming they have one.
You DO learn something when you're debunking neo-cons though.
In my little battle against the Schlusselites, one of her followers talked about the GODLESS nazis and Russian communists. Somewhere along the line America has forgotten that their Protestant beliefs was based on Luther's 95 Theses, but their devout anti-Catholicism is never far from the surface. The godless Russian population has a church that existed four times longer than the American republic, and their veneration of relics did not end with communism--Lenin's tomb and Stalin's body permanently on display PROVES that the Russian people never abandonned their religion--but how do you explain these things to a dittohead?
One thing I did get out of the exchange though: Fascism is only possible when you have a religiously devout country.
Like most dittohead theses, the idea that fascism rises from a humanist and secular society is groundless. ALL fascist leaders started out by profitting from a cult of personality, and by its very nature, religion paves the way for this kind of government by promoting a messianic expectation.
Unlike a dittohead, I realize my limitations...so you guys can pontificate on this subject a lot better than I can