Glenn, I enjoyed reading this cogent apologia for a world filled with shades of grey. I think, along with the much-heralded "death" of irony on 9/11, subtle thinking also suffered a body blow, from which we are still in the very early stages of recovery...

I am curious why you felt compelled to insert the "ironically enough" comment before the Chomsky quote. I was assuming you were using "ironic[]" in the sense of "counter to ordinary expectations," which left me scratching my head, as one can hardly find a commentator with a less Manichaean view of the world than Professor Chomsky. Am I reading you wrong here?

Also, "principle" at the beginning of the second paragraph should be "principal." :-)

I'm really not sure what your point is. It seems clear that you disagree with Newman and Broadsheet, which is certainly your right. I cannot determine upon what you base your assertion that either would scare away this notional "swing voter," or what you want to do about it.

I think that the national discourse is narrow enough (all points of view between centre-right and hard right are acceptable) without us self-censoring, especially on the web.

'Course, that could just be because I am a kook.

I think, as I have said before, that skeptic is welcome to his opinions about DFHs, fringe leftists, men-hating feminists and the rest of the colourful cast of characters in his head. Obviously. Stipulated.

Where this whole show runs off the rails is in the what should be done about it level. It seems that skeptic has made it clear, insofar as he or she has answered the question, is some sort of mass shunning of the fringe by the so-called mainstream left blogs. Since, skeptic, me, you, and everybody's favourite uncle George knows that is never going to happen, can we safely assume that skeptic is a particularly voluble, persistent, and either independently wealthy or managerially unsupervised concern troll?

I mean, other than a food fight in comments, what is really going on here? Even shooter is absent.

How?

How exactly?

don't know a "hippy" from a "flapper."

It's two thousand fucking seven.

Time to move on.

Who actually made it illigal to go to war?

The United States Congress, when it ratified the UN Charter prohibiting wars of aggression.

I forget where I first found this (maybe here?).

In his 1963 essay in Commentary, "My Negro Problem—And Ours," the Podhoretz wrote:

"[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me… [It] was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around."

http://www.lukeford.net/Images/photos/out.pdf

Thirty years later, Podhoretz reflected on the controversy his article about "black thuggery" had caused:

"In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South, the "heroic period" of the movement, as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.

"Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one's reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963."

209,279,149 as of the 200 census:

http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t31/tab01-01.pdf

are you personally willing to risk Israel and all it's inhabitants against the proposition that Iran doesn't really mean what it says about genocide?

It is not up to me, or you, or the U.S. government to decide the defence policy of the sovereign state of Israel.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons. If Tehran launched a nuclear attack on Israel, Iran would cease to exist as an inhabitable country within hours. Furthermore, Tehran knows this.

And bellicose rhetoric, however racist and hateful, is not yet a casus belli.

I would suggest that now would be a good time for panties to cease being gotten into a bunch.

before somebody slips in all the sarcasm that was dripped around here... :-)

"In the fall of 1989, at a time when Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was only nine months away and Saddam Hussein was desperate for money to buy arms, President Bush signed a top-secret National Security Decision directive ordering closer ties with Baghdad and opening the way for $1 billion in new aid, according to classified documents and interviews."

-- LA Times 23 Feb 1993

http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg00776.html