"I generally avoid it when it devolves into a pissing contest, though I do enjoy the ripostes of WT and others. I like bear-baiting the trolls when I feel like it, and not when I don't."

Funny, this is exactly how I live my life. I piss on the street when I feel like it. I litter in my neighbor's yard, when the fancy strikes me. I swear invective at people when the mood strikes. It provides no model of behavior for anyone to emulate, and encourages only spite and revenge! And that's fantastic! God bless ME! But hey, I'm doing what I want to do and that's the most important thing about living in this world.

You seek to make this about me and it isn't, thin skinned or not. Its about this environment. My initial comment was about the fact that the use of alias and instigation downgrade this space and make it appear like an unapealing place to outsiders. Having been an outsider more recently than you, it would probably behoove you and others to listen, rather than instinctually attack. Like any any environment, people who use it should act responsibly if they want it to endure as a thriving place.

Sorry, Paul, wrong Paul that was to Paul Daniel Ash. I am self-flagellating as I write this.

I'm not sure what so cultish about what I am expressing. I have to say I throw my hands up on this one and abdicate from this thread. Please move on all, you've convinced me to shut up about it.

Think of it this way. If you acted this way in the real world, someone would have punched your lights out (or worse) by now, and you would have stopped doing it. There are such countermeasures in some areas of cyberspace (rightly or wrongly, the BAN comes to mind) but not here. When the rules are relaxed, responsible people usually observe some level of order. There is no one here to punch your lights out or ban you. Does there need to be?

Not that I'm not glad. But we are dealing with only one source for this information, and its only been 24 hours. Given the inordinate amount of work Republicans and the Bush administration put into this, I'm not convinced they will simply surrender. But we'll see. Maybe they're looking at polls that show an overwhelmng absence of sympathy for telecoms...

That's pretty coincidental, I suppose. And pretty explosive. Do you think it really is a factor? PacBell already had a similar whistle blower, and I doubt anyone (meaning everyone but us) even knows his name or remembers the tone of his whistle.

"...before I could knowingly say that these pissing contest really are just men's games, not even boys'..."

I find your self-delusion charmingly refreshing. And yes, women piss with the best of them.

Ad hoc and without reviewing the original McCardle post, I think this piece could have been a bit more well-rounded if you had taken a broader stance on Mcardle's claim that she "repeatedly" argued against torture. I googled her and did find a not too recent example here:

http://tiny.cc/2oGZE

She did, in fact, make this point at least once, and probably made it at least another and that constitutes repeatedly for all its worth. It would have been fairer to indicate that she took the previous stand of 2003 and then changed her tune when popular sentiment did.

That's not to take away that she blows in the wind like a reed, and apparently jumped on and off the bandwagon as career necessities dictated. I tend to agree that Glenn's writing sometimes vectors into screed, and that his targets would have less ammunition if he was a little more nuanced. That's not to say I don't also harbor the same kind of anger towards establishment journalists who enable our government's excesses with willful disinformation, but angry writing often isn't very convincing writing.