I'm a little puzzled about why my letter appears to have been removed. Yes, I was angry, and yes, I told Sirota to grow a pair, stop shrieking, and say something useful, but the misogynist trolls who comment on Broadsheet consistently say things far more offensive than anything in my comment, if I recall. I can't find the original letter text, so if by all standards I went beyond the pale and said something genuinely hurtful and inappropriate, I apologize--I certainly did not mean to. The point I was trying to make was that there are a lot of "Yoosta Bees" buzzing around (as in "I yoosta bee a librul until I got mugged")--people who were never really genuinely liberal to begin with, but have constructed a fake narrative about having seen the light and rejected liberalism, and that Sirota seemed to be becoming one of these people. It does seem as though he's trying to distinguish himself from the pack and is succeeding, if developing a reputation for histrionic sackcloth-and-ashes screeds can be considered making a name for oneself.

And, as I am about as perplexed by red_gti2000's response as it claims to have been by mine, I have to wonder, looking back over its voluminous correspondence, whether it is one of those stealth Republican PUMA trolls, a vocal supporter of Hillary who, had she actually won the Democratic nomination, would have promptly started bashing her because it simply considered her to be a more convenient and easily-defeated opponent than Obama. After all, here it is, conveniently promoting a brand of F.U.D. suspiciously indistinguishable from that currently being peddled by Limbaugh, Santelli, Jindal & company.

The Bush administration's actions, which you and your cringing ilk evidently supported, weakened our defenses, our civil rights, and our standing in the world. Why, yes, on the surface, those of us who opposed the Iraq war on the grounds that it threatened our national security and was an obscenely useless waste of human life and resources appear to have been right. History will, of course, provide more perspective, but for now it would appear that, well, you were wrong, and you're quite sore about that.

(Be grateful that you've only lost face; there are hundreds of thousands of people, both here and in Iraq, who've lost far more than that. Really, I think it deeply disrespectful to them for us to treat this as an intellectual game of chess, so I won't pursue this any farther.)

The rest of your response--well--just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Please enlighten me--I defer to the higher knowledge you claim for Those Who Are Smarter Than Me, which would presumably include your esteemed self. If his no-frills approach to talks with U.K. PM Brown is any indication, it seems that Obama clearly recognizes that the British economy is going down, though blaming government-sponsored junkets to Majorca and Phuket for Britons on the dole for its destruction seems to me a lot like blaming defaulting homeowners for our own economic crisis. (Incidentally, are these for real, or is this like the GOP canard about the high-speed rail-line between Anaheim and Las Vegas?)

So, you know, if you were verging on launching into a tiresome screed about how the coming Yerpean-style Welfare State would invoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, thus (you hoped) deftly proving Sirota's thesis, well, you might as well not waste your breath, because it would appear that he's not too enamored of it--or, at least, not the British version of it.

I'm so glad I don't have kids. I tend to be absent-minded, so I'd be terrified of having this happen to me. Even though I very, very rarely forget anything I've got in the back seat (where I put my laptop bag when I drive to work) it only takes one memory lapse to bring about the unthinkable. I used to be a lot more outraged when I heard about this sort of thing, but then I would read something like this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/08/AR2009030802194.html?nav=hcmodule

I have a very, very hard time putting that female monster in the same category with the guy who walks into work convinced that he's dropped his kid off at day care because he's done it 200 times in a row this year and his working memory fails him. Whoever said that people are harsh and judgmental about these kinds of cases because they think they can convince themselves that it wouldn't happen to them hit the nail exactly on the head.