I was referring to your mode of discourse with her, not to its content. I have not had sufficient interactions with Mona in the past nor have closely followed her comments here since they've tended to concern issues that are not of great interest to me at present (mainly what she calls libertarianism, from what I can gather, which to me is a side issue given all that's been going on these past 6 years, although certainly not an unimportant one), so I simply don't know enough about her to have strong feelings about her as you seem to.

But generally, I find such personal attacks to be distasteful and unnecessary, and was basically saying so. I certainly don't agree with or buy into her faux libertarianism, which I view as more corporate hegemonism (i.e. if Hayek said it, it must be correct). But I also don't feel the need to insult her personally just because we strongly disagree. Anyway.

Ironically, and perhaps hypocritically, here I am lecturing you on civility, when I myself sometimes go off on certain people who deign to participate in this blog dishonestly, as I just did a comment or two above this. I guess that trollism is in the eye of the beholder. I didn't view Mona as a troll--i.e. someone who deliberately lies and disrupts and just makes stuff up--just as a mistaken and misguided wannabe libertarian who was quite muddled in her thinking on certain topics. Nothing in her responses to me have changed that opinion. But I also saw no reason to treat her hostily.

NOFP, though, is clearly a troll, whatever legal expertise and erudition he claims to bring to the discussion, and I went after him as I sometimes do with trolls, untill they start to bore and annoy me, when I just ignore them, and which I think is a generally good policy with trolls. So I don't understand why you can't do this with Mona if you view her as a troll, which you clearly do, and instead feel the need to feed into what you surely view as her trollism.

Surely you could spend you time more productively and satisfyingly exchanging ideas with people you have more regard for? But as it is, you do seem to have an obsession with her, which causes you to lash out at her in quite nasty ways. Seriously, if you don't like her, just ignore her. We all know what you think of her, so just let it go.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents, "pal". Do with it as you wish.

In case anyone's interested, I YouTubed Mitchell's remarks on public opinion on the Libby pardon some months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcIIXlAAsGw

Unless she had a dyslexic moment, she lied. There's really no other way to interpret it.

There is a special place in hell--one that Dante surely would have written about were he alive today--for journalists who betray the public trust in such brazen and dismissive manner, as if we simply do not exist or matter, except as mylar foils for Mr. Stengel's self-reflection.

The nobles and courtiers at Versailles were all well-fed and smugly content in their luxuriant isolation from the unwashed masses...until one day they suddenly weren't. What happened to Blair, Raines and Miller, will someday happen to many of these latter-day courtiers.

Nothing major, just what I thought was a slightly amusing clip of what I believe is pro-war neocon WaPo editiorial pages editor Fred Hiatt sneak in behind Peter Baker and stare oddly and somewhat creepily into the camera during an appearance on Charlie Rose last week to discuss his article on Bush's decline:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dwHrzqYNnM

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it almost felt like he was afraid of what Baker might say and decided to hover behind him to make sure that he wouldn't undermine support for his best buddies Bush and Cheney, almost eavesdropping on the interview.

Anyway, my take on it. YMMV.

That is, that according to all these Al Qaida-inspired polls, the majority of Americans clearly hate America and simply do not understand what great and glorious leader George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney are and what virtuous patriots their devoted and most wonderful followers in the administration and congress are. Don't people understand what great sacrifices they've made in order to secure our oil and military industry billionaires' access to endless supplies of taxpayer-supplied revenues and cheap Iraqi oil and targets? This is simply outrageous!

Why do most Americans hate America and love the terrorists so much? That 70% who oppose the war are clearly on the far-left radical Jane Fonda fringe and should all just move to Canada.