In a correctional treatment setting, this type of evasive defense, regardless of its truth, might accurately be termed “shifting blame and focus” and treated as a criminal thinking error. In other contexts, it might be termed “finger pointing” or simply “juvenile”.

I watch "In Treatment" like any other good HBO subscriber, and I often defend the more touchy-feely aspects of various elements of psychotherapy as I understand them to their detractors, but I will have to side with my father on this one and accuse you of trading in "psychobabble."

Basically, the scenario you describe seems to be something of a non-sequitor, literally. The reason that institutional rules prevent their victims from using rhetorical devices like this in treatment has more to do with the maintenance of authoritarian order of therapist over patient than it has to do with intellectual honesty; and frankly, that makes sense. If a rhetorical defense mechanism is effective enough to be banned in an institutional setting, it is at least effective enough to enliven a political debate.

If Obama was to answer as you suggested, hell, if everyone in the world behaved and spoke in that manner -- well, I shudder to think, but I imagine I would need either medication or therapy to prevent myself from committing suicide due to the abject fricking BOREDOM if would face day in day out.

Obama gave the noise machine a, in my opinion, respectable, measured and even lyrical taste of their own medicine. If you want to accuse him of rhetorically stooping to a level beneath what you wish our national political discourse was at, you are yourself divorced from reality.

That said, Obama will win because he is clever, sarcastic, quick-witted and engaging, like Romney wasn't, like Clinton isn't and like McCain wishes he could be (McCain was shut down by Jon Stewart, for god's sake -- can he go 10 rounds with a natural like Obama?). Words do matter.

Speaking of rhetorical devices, please tell me what the success rate of the sorts of institutions are for treating inmates, drug abusers, or juveniles with antisocial personality disorders or other related common mental illnesses shown in the institutional or inmate community?

give up, HRC is not getting the nom.

..damn straight. Maybe I'll finally be able to find a decent bagel or corned beef sandwich around here.

Why can't the Israeli's play nice with their neighbors, and why is it that we have to pave their road (or airspace) so the hardliners can bomb whomever they want to whenever they want to in the region?

And, let's just add a log to that fire, and add, I personally wish someone, anyone would have been able to step in our way and keep us out of Iraq.

Its the same thing. Israel going after Iran is dangerous. The United States going after Saddam was dangerous. Someone should have stopped us, and I am sick of being labelled an anti-Semite if I should dare suggest that maybe we should stop enabling the Kingdom of Saud or the Likud party.

And yes, maybe if the Jews stop beating up on the Syrians and Palestinians, some of them will move here to San Francisco and make me a fricken real bagel.

There, ulterior motives on my part. I agree with everything the anons said about not wanting to stick my neck out for Israel anymore (and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or any other anti-freedom hack, war party member for life or shady foreign policy adventure we have stumbled clumsily around in the last 120 years).

Lift the Cuba embargo, free Palestine, stop genocide in Darfur, stop buying diamonds, quit buying oil, growing corn, selling out labor to China, Mexico and India. Straighten up and fly right.

Supporting endless Middle Eastern war is not the way. That's what HRC represents to me.

..was trying to take over France, I probably wouldn't have "their back" if France fought back.

I might step in and intervene, under the auspices of the U.N., and certainly if France decided to, for whatever reason, invade England.

But I sure as shit will not sit around pledging my friendship for England while they fly sorties over Belgium, France and Luxomberg (and possibly Germany), and bulldoze Paris to make way for English settlers.

F*ck Zionism.

You are little better than Martin Peretz or Norman Podhoretz. They regard Arabs & Muslims as less than human; you regard Israelis the same way.

How's that math work? I thought that, according to David Sugarman, the Likudniks were supposed to be so far superior to Arabs in IQ that their forced hegemony was a gift, a sort of "Jewish Man's Burden".

Or maybe Greenwald is, rightly, pointing out that the body-count is slanted disproportionately in favor is Israel. Allow me to extrapolate that maybe, just maybe, that's why oppressed Arabs in the region continue to "hate on" the Glorious Free State of Israel so much.

Maybe, and I'm going out even further, there are those in Israel whose interests are somehow served in continuing to foment and fuel rage against the state of Israel.

So, before I get labelled an anti-Semite (again), let me state what I personally feel: no one in this conflict is less than human -- Arabs, Jews, Americans, Europeans.

If anything, we're all acting like the apes we are.

Well, that's a sad and cynical viewpoint. But it fits.

A real man puts down his gun and comes to the table to negotiate.

How do you think this will all end?