I hope you didn't wet the desk chair with that rant.

So here's the question I have for the Carry Nation Temperance Union here. How do you plan to score all extra base hits? How do you plan to score juiced pitchers against hitters? Because if Bonds is Lucifer then the rest of MLB is his minions of lesser demons. What are we to do with mediocre hitters who suddenly jack their BA because they can finally hit it out of the infield? What do we do with utility guys who suddenly have a slew of doubles? What do we do with average relievers, stretch and set up guys who suddenly and briefly start to look like Bob Gibson?

Because that's the switch you left open. You all stood on your coolers in the parking lot chanting against Barry the Poster Boy. Which of course will fix everything. Even all of YOUR issues, I'm sure of it. But it really doesn't. You all want to march up to the windmill with your torches and pitchforks and slay the monster. But there is no monster. There are whole groups of little monsters, really no more than irritants.

So here is what I propose. Let's put an asterisk next to every stat for every player in the MLB for the last 20 years. Just to be sure. Let's in fact do away with historical stats. There will always be something to corrupt them.

For example - about 25? years ago MLB lowered the height of the mound and the rubber to ~12" from an average of ~18". This immediately takes a tool out of the pitcher's kit and turns the game into a hitters game. MLB did this because they didn't want 1-0 pitchers duels anymore. So what are we to make of all the stats from the high mound era? What for that matter are we to make of the pre Tommy John era? What do you think those guys from back then would say about surgically replacing parts on a a pitcher to allow him to throw harder. Seems like blatant unfair advantage historically speaking. We're only a few years away from joint replacement that's good enough to replace a pro athlete's worn out part. What are we to do with the stats from the 'organic' era versus the 'synthetic' era and how is that any different than a drug?

But hey guys, you stay chanting atop your coolers in the parking lot. Have a cold mug of smug angry self righteousness on me.

To hear an endless chorus of people screaming about the evil that is everything and anything American since time was. I'm often accused, wrongfully I think, of drawing black and white comparisons but often all I see here is a blanket blind blockheaded thoughtless equivalence that states almost axiomatically that everything is the same thing. America=Iran (or whoever), if 'they' execute 100,000 people then we're just as bad because we have the Death Sentence too. If a bunch of paramilitary Sunnis truckbomb a market and kill 200 people then who are we to criticize if we have Eric Rudolph? It's patently stupid and dull. Yes we here, and in the west generally are far from perfect. That is because we are human beings and not angels. But to state that a parking ticket is the same thing as a concentration camp I think makes everyone look like an idiot. The problem with taking the moral position of absolute perfection, of Utopia or Hell takes all these people out of the interesting work of making meaningful decisions. It's an unassailable platitude to say that wrong is wrong and bad is bad. Ok, so it is. Then what? Do they really believe that the fact that yesterday my state passed its first death sentence in 6 years (North Carolina) is absolutely the same thing as stoning people to death without trial for the crime of adultery? Do they really? Is that what they really believe? Because if we truly rely on such insane absolutes I can tell you where I've seen that before, where it ends. It ends with things like Reign of Terror, Pol Pot and the Inquisition. It always does.

Further down there is a comment "no one said we should pull out completely and abandon them (Iraq)....we'll be there for 100 years..." I paraphrase, lest the Salon grammarnazis pounce.

A) Lots of people have suggested an immediate and complete withdrawal. This tenuous thing suggested is the exception.

B) How does a withdrawal that takes 100 years get to be called a withdrawal. That sounds like annexation. Which could I suppose offer new opportunities to Berkeleyites forced out of the high priced local housing market.

See I think that's just fence sitting. 'Withdrawal' for the folks at home who want that and non-withdrawal out of some misplaced sense of guilt. I say toss the keys to the flaming shithouse over our shoulder and leave. Today. Now. Getting in the middle of other people's civil wars is a no-op no matter how bad you feel about it. Let a soon to be nuclear Iran move in and carve off whatever piece of it they like. It's far less bloody to do that, just turning parts of Iraq over to them, than it would have been had they gone to war with Saddam's Iraq over regional hegemony. A soon to be nuclear Iran is going to force us out anyhow. Might as well get ahead of that before it becomes someone else's timetable imposed on us - and just leave now.

And by soon I mean a functional 'gadget' by EOY 2009, a weapon by 2012 and a nuclear tipped IRBM missile by sometime in the middle of 2014. It will be interesting to see that if by the end of that decade (2020) we will see nuclear armed states in direct conventional military confrontation with one another. Iran-Pakistan. Which is another good reason to leave.