Explain the "strawman" argument.

Deciding who is innocent and who to murder "for no legitimate reason whatsoever" appears to be a game with you.

Since your view of "fightin' a war" begins and ends with Hollywood movies, it's understandable why your so cavalier about mindlessly murdering innocent civilians.

"Do you really think striking back at those who make a point of killing civilians via homicide bombers and missiles is in any way equivalent to threatening a nation with extermination for no legitimate reason whatsoever?"

-- Tommy777

Those are excellent talking points for why the people of Iraqi should support attacking the United States.

Remember: Any homicidal madman who would murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians "via homicide bombers and missiles" "for no legitimate reason whatsoever" in order to shock and awe them back to the stone age, can clearly not be reasoned with and MUST be taken out!

"ACORN is corrupt"

And a hangnail hurts, but if there was a cancer ravaging your body that might take precedence.. Unless the hangnail was black, of course.

This is the kind of clown who sees someone jaywalking in front of building just blown up by a right-wing terrorist (a'la Timothy McViegh) and is only outraged by the jaywalker.

Just keep eating the shit shoveled at you by corporate spokespeople like Limbaugh and Beck who want you to be outraged at someone getting $50 in welfare while they cover for those receiving billions in welfare.

Quick, look! There's a negro!

I wrote Charles McGrath yesterday about his column on Pat Tillman in yesterday's NY Times where he claimed "cynics on the left, who dismissed (Pat Tillman) as a mindless, knee-jerk patriot."

I asked him if he could provide any quotes or a link to back up his claim about all those "cynics". Here is his answer:

"Thanks for writing, though I'm somewhat surprised by your question. Not so much after Tillman died but earlier on, when there was so much fuss, I heard him dismissed all the time, by friends and colleagues, as an unthinking dupe of war propaganda. Krakauer himself cites a well-known cartoon by Ted Rail that depicted him as an "idiot" hoping to "kill Arabs." In any event I wasn't trying to provide "balance" so much as to suggest that the book depicts a Tillman far more thoughtful and complicated than just about anyone knew or suspected.

Good point. There were a lot of "cynics". I forgot all about them.

Mr Empty Head makes a damn good point! President Obama is handing ACORN 8.3 billion .. no wait, that's TRILLION .. no, no, wait that's KAZILLION!!! ... Hold on, it's still coming out of my ass.. RUSH!!! HELP!!!!

And President Carter calls these people racists. Shocking.

I, for one, welcome our new Formatting Overlords

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

- Mark Twain

Also - it's generally a good rule of thumb to not be condescending towards criticisms of what you've said if you want folks to believe you're sincere.

A minor point. Nit picking really. It's not as if the outrage on warrantless wire-taps was based ENTIRELY on the Bush administration agressiving flouting the law... A semantic miswording that has now been corrected.

Some people were also opposed to going into Iraq because Iraq posed a threat and had WMD's... Sorry, I mean was NOT a threat and had NO WMD's.

The rightwing has done everything short of offering a reward to one of their zombie followers to assassinate the president, and the national media still pretends they are the "true, serious Americans" whose voice is more important than everyone elses.

Pay no attention to the fact that more Americans live in New York City than in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas combined, and that more Americans overwhelming lean left than lean right, our media knows that "real Americans" are white, rightwing, gun-toting, racists who are dumber than a bag of dead hamsters. And anyone who doesn't agree is an elitist.

"And too often now people say, and we've all heard it, "But I read it on the Internet," as if that solves the bar bet, you know? And I'm afraid not."

-- Tom Friedman

As opposed to:

"And too often now people say, and we've all heard it, "But I read it in the New York Times," as if that solves the bar bet, you know? And I'm afraid not.

or

"And too often now people say, and we've all heard it, "But I read it in a Tom Friedman column," as if that solves the bar bet, you know? And I'm afraid not.

"Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?"

-- David Broder

Translation: "We're not talking about a nigger who robbed a 7/11 who should be locked up for life, we're talking about a Republican like my dadddy!"

"Greenwald spends some time on two figures in particular: Angela Williamson and Monica Goodling, appointees at the Justice Department. I regret to say that I had never heard of either of them, or their doings. It’s not that my memory is “either very short or very selective.” It could be that I’m not always a very attentive reader of the newspapers."

-- Jay Nordlinger

Gee, just like Sarah Palin.

Could it be that the top political voices on the right were not "very attentive reader(s) of the newspapers" at precisely the same time America drove off a cliff because the GOP was the one driving like drunken lunatics?

I'm going to make a wild assumption that if it was a President Gore or President Kerry that was as massively incompetent and unprecedentedly destructive as the Cheney/Bush administration, they would know all the players involved, much as they did with "Monicagate", "troopergate", etc.