It's time for liberals to get in touch with the antiheroes of "Deadwood".

[Kire]

"I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness," Hearst Corp. representative (and big-time sinner) Francis Wolcott confesses in a recent episode. "But I am not a government official."

At a time when Washington is passing laws to intervene in individual medical cases, and self-described federalists want to amend the Constitution itself to prevent individual states from experimenting with marriage laws, "Deadwood's" skepticism of government and celebration of individuality couldn't be timelier. And its viciously profane yet pragmatic demonstrations of tolerance feel more stiff-spined and American than an anti-defamation industry that has been enthusiastically adopted by the same conservatives who once mocked it. Episode 22, for example, has this delightful live-and-let-live exchange:

Silas: You talk like you take it up the ass.
Hugo: I do not, my friend Adams, take it up the ass.
Silas: Don't call me your fuckin' friend!
Hugo: But I suspect those that do consider that they advance their own interests. Like them, shall we not pursue that which gratifies us mutually?

In Episode 2, after Bullock objects to Swearengen's anti-Semitic insults of Bullock's partner Sol, Sol refuses to let words get in the way of business: "I been called worse by better."

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/05/21/deadwood_democrats/index.html">The New Face of the Democrats
by Matt Welch, Salon.com - May 21, 2005

[ixion]

1. good article

because I fully believe in the 'live and let live' postulate.


(your link is messed up however) ;-)

[Simeon Salus]

2. Link misdirects to Microsoft.com

try this

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/05/21/deadwood_democrats/index.html

[Kire]

5. sorry about the link, thanks for posting the real one

that's weird. apparently that's what happens when you have an extra http:// in the URL

[robertarctor]

3. Au contraire, a lame article

Like quite a bit of the current content at Salon.com since Joan Walsh took over as editor there (see: anything by Farhad Manjoo), it's a regurgitation of GOP talking points masquerading as an article that appears on the surface to be sympathetic toward Democrats. Read the damned thing. Writer Matt Walsh makes a lot of bald and, frankly, stupid assertions toward the bottom of the first page.

I wouldn't be so hincty about it, but I spent almost five years at a so-called alternative weekly paper, and toward the end of the first year, we got a new editor from McWeekly (i.e., the New Times chain) with the same surname, interestingly, as Salon's current topper. He would openly mock progressive story ideas in our Monday editorial meetings ("Whoah, don't you think that's a bit, ahem, out there in lefty-left conspiracy-theorist territory?" was a favorite snarky comment of his). Meanwhile, he hired a "fair and balanced" bi-weekly political columnist who was about as rational as Ann Coulter on a good day, and he continually foisted (and still does) political stories with the same m.o., with gratuitously inserted right-wing talking points in the middle of stories. (One laughable example featured a long quote by California GOP politico Jim Brulte in the middle of a piece on Karl Rove's Teutonic meat puppet Arnold Schwarzenegger's Rovian attempt to foist a mid-decade Texas-style redistricting on California. Here's the quote: “With 20 Republican seats in California, Republicans should control the House of Representatives,” Brulte wrote. “That means that California legislators gave President Bush the tools he needs to keep our taxes down, protect us from terrorism, ensure accountability in our schools, protect family values, and save us the billions upon billions of dollars that a Democratic Congress certainly would spend if they regained control of the house.”)

Anyway, I got tired of seeing that sub-rosa Republican shit in the paper where I worked, and I get tired of seeing it at Salon now. Especially since the charge money access to their content. And if it wasn't for Salon's Table Talk, I wouldn't bother to go there these days.

[dameocrat]

4. Yes it is stupid

also if you read the end of the article this Matt Welch is a writer for right wing libertarian reason magazine. He pretends he dislikes south park republicans, but in reality this is an attempt by corporate libertarians to take over both parties. Yeah "we liberals" are supposed to idealize a world where men with guns and money control everything, most women are reduced to the status of hookers and sex objects to the degree that a man can literally buy the death of three prostitutes, just because he has money, and we are supposed to consider him cool because he isn't a government official. Oh and spontanious peach trading makes up for the fact that is a hell hole. I haven't bothered to resubscribe to it.

[Kire]

6. idealize? no

don't you know what antihero means?