Thanks for the compliments, Jim. I didn’t seek out the HuffPo as a promotional venue; they approached me to write a piece during lousybookcovers.com’s fifteen minutes of fame, when complaints against the site by some thin-skinned writers accidentally sent it viral. While I don’t agree with most of the political content on that site (or the political subtext which informs just about every other thing on there), I still remember that the HuffPo originally started out as a site of more variegated politics before it succumbed to the forces of progressive orthodoxy (as evidenced by the fact that Andrew Breitbart was a founding contributor there). So I certainly wasn’t going to turn up my nose at a promotional opportunity offered to me by a venue with which I personally rarely see eye to eye, especially since there’s nothing overtly political in what they were asking me to write.

(By happenstance, I received the HuffPo invite shortly after I had been asked to do an e-interview by The Guardian UK, which is The Great Satan compared to the HuffPo’s Little Nicky. I scratched my head, turned to my wife, and said, “If I get featured on MoveOn.org next, it’s time to seriously reevaluate my audience.”)