In your neck of the woods, idiocy and incompetence may be a worthy defense around inappropriate credulity, but I'm not sure the supposed "smartest guys in the room" want to be portrayed as stupid.

An interesting rhetorical ploy: what you're basically saying here is we should quit whining about this because it makes us look like morons for thinking the retired generals weren't secretly doing the Pentagon's bidding.

For what it's worth, I ususally took these guys with a grain of salt. But guess what? That's completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter what I or anybody thought.

See, as a prosecutor, one thing I do at work every day is fairly simple: I read laws, then look at what people did out in the world that got them arrested, and figure out whether a law was broken. You're free to reject my professional opinion (although the last guy to try me is doing 20 years upstate - just so you know).

I've read the relevant federal code. I've read what the GAO says. I've read the opinion from the White House Office of Legal Counsel on these types of activities. I've read numerous inculpatory statements from program participants. And one thing I know is whether the program fooled a single person could not be less relevant. This is about misappropriation of funds.

In my opinion, if the DoJ were so inclined, they could easily make out a prima facie criminal case. Easily.

But, you know, just believe what you want.

These arguments tend to come from RWA pages with some personal interpretation. So I think the apparent intelligence of his posts is an indication of how successful the RWAs are at countering reality.

I think that's right. The point in engaging the rightwingers here has nothing to do with trying to change their minds. It has nothing to do with them, personally, at all. It's a useful way to keep up on the RW arguments and working out the best ways to counteract them.

It is interesting when multiple, incoherent defenses are thrown about: notice that Di Rita's defense ("Hey! We had critics in the program, too - not that I ever said those critics were in the program, I mean, uh, uh") squarely contradicts Shooter's ("Of course it was a propaganda campaign, gee, wasn't that OBVIOUS??").

I actually interact with a lot of politically conservative people in my life, and they are actually much tougher debaters than the clowns that troll around here. I guess that's like batting practice - it's not like it's so hard to hit a BP pitch, but it keeps you in form.

I liked the Wyle E. Coyote image of the RW troll that someone conjured here recently. I think of the blow-up Bozo clown that we keep here in our office - you know the one, with the sand-weighted rounded bottom. You punch it and it goes down real easy, just to come bobbing back up wearing that same moronic grin...

So let's see, the networks ask the Pentagon for commenters. The Pentagon complies and gives extra information to the people it likes, to make them more attractive......

That's a great defense! Only a couple of problems. First, it assumes facts not in evidence. Who said the retired generals were supplied by the Pentagon at the networks' request?

Also, everyone else defending the program, specifically Brian Williams and Di Rita, are making quite a different argument than you, namely, that the retired personnel were in fact independent analysts. And there's a reason they're not making your boneheaded argument, namely (and I don't know how many times I've typed this today) the statements by the program participants disclosed in the released documents concede the effort to make the generals appear independent although that was not the case. You still haven't reconciled your argument with those published admissions, and you have zero credibility with me until you do.

See what happens when you don't make it to all the meetings? You should really read the memos...

While I'm sure you're a gangbusters prosecutor, I know that prosecutors are political creatures.

You are correct, Grasshopper! My boss was elected, we prosecutors are political appointees, and as people we tend to be political creatures.

Politically conservative.

Learn something new every day, dontcha, pal?

The logical fallacy you fell into, here, is the assumption that any Bush critic must be liberal by definition. Are you really that myopic that you hadn't noticed the admin has plenty of conservative critics?

Are you really unaware of the sentiment that the Bushies aren't true conservatives? Yeah, you're probably one of those people that thinks Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neil were"left-wing foamers."