"(Two hundred years ago) the only thing being emitted (in London) were horse toots."

Prager can't know much about history. The Industrial Revolution was well under way, there were factories in London, and every home, if it was warmed at all, was heated by coal-burning stoves, fireplaces, or the like. Cooking was over dirty stoves. Livestock lived in the city when the owners could afford it. Horses poooped, they didn't just pass gas. The city had a sewage system, I believe, but many people did continue throwing stuff into the street. Many factories used steam power, heated with coal ... the list goes on and on and on. I've never been surprised to hear that the air back then was putrid and thick enough to cut with a knife. I don't know why you don't know stuff like this. Maybe you should read a book or three by Dickens. Vanity Fair might give you some info. Jane Austen might give you a few pointers on how houses were managed. Probably the Bronte sisters will have some info, ya think? Fielding? Try it, you'll learn something.

"forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great one"

Barack Obama has put himself in the position of "forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great one."

So says Shelby Steele, one of my favorite authors. Need I say more?

"In the final analysis, what's it (life) all about?"

Prager has settled on "doing good for others."

I can't think of a better goal. One of my religious friends once told me something he had heard in a class on his religion: "God put us here on Earth so that we could let him walk on Earth."

Or, in his words, God could walk this earth without a creature here who appreciated him, but what would be the point? We're here to do God's work and to demonstrate His love to one another and to do the work he would ask us to do. We are meant to act as His hands and feet. I would add that failing to do so is abandoning God.

Remarkably successful propaganda campaign

"You don't have to think to vote for the Left, all you have to know is that you oppose Nazis."

This is the crux of the whole issue. Many people are too lazy to think. Others aren't particularly lazy, and in fact they care about the issue, but nothing they have ever run into in public school teaches them how to approach anything with logic or with a critical approach. It is the triumph of our liberal educators that they have bought so many votes for the left wing, that for the last hundred years they have deprived succeeding generations more and more of their right to be taught good thinking.

My generation, the generation of hippies, didn't start this. But they sure did exploit it. "School shouldn't teach you WHAT to think," ranted the laziest bunch of people ever to land on planet earth, "but HOW to think!" They pounded the table demanding the schools eliminate every minute of "teaching facts to the kids" that could possibly be eliminated. As for the "how to think" part of the curriculum, they replaced that with iconoclasm. It sufficed for them to tell one another (and their elders) that every generation that had come before theirs was stupid, ignorant, didn't know what Life was, didn't appreciate the virtues of hedonism, and insisted there was no such thing as truth (is that true?) and that therefore there was no way to find truth or help anyone else to find truth. Then they threw out all the books that could possibly teach anything and replaced them with Rousseau's child-centered curriculum, where suburban kids should read about suburban experiences, because that's all that they'd be interested in, and inner-city minority kids were fed garbage about drug dealers and prostitutes, appropriately outraging the mothers of these children, whom the hippies subsequently patronized to death.

"These applauses are, i'm finding, more depressing than..."

...the fools who make the statements."

Well, our Left are, among all the things Prager points out, essentially bullies.

A bully only functions well when he has an unresisting victim, and he brings with him a posse of bully wanna-be's who form a backdrop of support for the bully.

In echoing or mirroring what the bully does, the posse gain a large degree of status as they borrow his importance and power. They are only too happy to join in on the game of ridiculing or belittling the target and watching him helplessly cry, run away, or grow to an outraged anger.

Maher's audience are "sharers in the indignation" and they need to promote Reiner's belittling and ridicule so they can bask in it all the more themselves. It's a rare person who steps back from the party and looks at himself and what he's getting out of the bully event, and then says no to it.

"There are people who take care of an infirmed person"

It's "infirm", Prager.

You love to say, "I'm extremely precise in my language."

Yes, you TRY to be, but you make many flubs, and some of them are big flubs. The flubs add up; there are many, many of them. It is to your credit that you work at it and you even take input from people who want to correct you. Except for me. I spend time reading books on English for pleasure. When I was a teenager I sat with my mother's Random House Unabridged Dictionary (copyright date was about 1963, when they were still a prescriptive dictionary, unlike today when they have turned into a descriptive dictionary) in my lap while reading literature and made vocabulary lists from words I needed to learn. I also studied several languages as I grew up, and expanded my vocabulary that way. I loved grammar as a hobby, and had a blast diagramming sentences for fun. All I'm missing is the proper terms for various grammatica. For instance, my elementary and beginning high school grammar texts referred to such verbs as "to be" as "linking verbs." The proper term is "copulative verb", but maybe in the Sixties that term was too risué for public school use.

Back to my point. You're just a wee tad short of the "extremely precise" area and must drop down into the "I TRY to be extremely precise" area. But since you try to be extremely precise, you'd want to use that wording anyway, right?

"So sad, the guy's an anti-semite..."

Prager had a caller who complained that Jews occupied a disproportionate number of seats (almost all of the seats) in the New York State Assembly. He may or may not have been correct, I don't think it matters much toward his argument. Prager wanted to know why this mattered to him?

"Because it's not fair! It's not fair that your people, who make up one or two percent of the population in your state, occupy all the seats..." I'm paraphrasing. Prager was already trying to interrupt this guy, obviously a liberal as revealed in his debating tactic, which conservatives almost never use: the Steam Roller Method. It consists in having a huge speech prepared ahead of time and delivered without taking a breat, and keeps the other person from getting a word in edgewise. It is a common practice among immature debaters to keep the other side from getting its points out. That way, among the immature and untrained (mainly, largely uneducated) among the populace, the steamroller gets only his point of view represented, and since the opposition appears to have no arguments to contribute, the innocent, naive, and uninformed have no reason to change their minds.

But that's not my point. "It's not fair," cries the caller, then adds, via my paraphrase, "You have more legislators than you have constituents. Pragers immediate question should have been, "If there were more than 12% blacks, should we fire them? Should we cap the number of women in the assembly at 50% The Latinos at 22% The African Americans at 12.8%?"

He's asking those questions now, I'm glad to say.

The poor caller has had his mind numbed by decades of howling from the democrat party. He doesn't know that he doesn't want the number of women capped at 50%. He has only thought about how "only" 18% of the members of congress were women (back in the Seventies) and that the appropriate action should be to elect more women to make the numbers "fair". Of course this should mean, to a thinking person, that "fair" numbers means limits as well.

Sorry, they just can't think clearly, they've had that process of thinking squashed by propaganda.