I was going to post this link but decided not to.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/061907.html

Granted it would be quite a competition, but is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen the dumbest columnist ever?

Until Paul R. mentioned the author and site by name.

This "Ace of Spades" is like "Shooter243"; a parody (but not as clever as "shooter243") of the real McCoy.

My theory was that the fake Ace was planting evidence so the real Ace could come back later and cry sockpuppetry and blame Glenn for sullying his sterling reputation!

Would you please stop being pathetic? To think, I actually defended you in previous threads.

The biggest problem with the internet is it has a longer memory than the average brain. You said what you said, you were called on it, you denied saying it, then you said it again and now you're daring us to prove that what you denied saying isn't true.

But I distictly remember asserting that even in the reality-challenged times we live in that this was an idea too daft to even be mentioned anymore.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSL1982814520070619?feedType=RSS&rpc=22

Tougher sanctions or a blockade on Iran could help foment growing internal dissent to topple the government, former U.S. Republican senator Fred Thompson, a potential presidential candidate, said on Tuesday.

Nothing like cutting off food supplies to win friends and influence people. Best be sure that there's a steady supply of flowers though. The grateful populace will need them to greet their liberators with.

That the tendency to view the world as a cartoon representation is pretty much universal. If you consider the fleeting nature of our actual sensory inputs, its easy to see that most of our understanding of the world is constructed from whole cloth within our skulls. With that realization in place it's easier to see how our own opinions of others are actually projections of ourselves.

If a person like shooter (just for example)happens to see an Islamofascist hiding under every bed, its because he knows that they will never be comfortable as long as such people are in the world and assume the Islamofascists feel the same way. The obvious difference though is that he feels totally justified in his conviction while the Islamofascist on the other hand deserves to die.

We are all, at our core, binary thinkers. Some of us just have more elaborate layering on top of the core.

What we're discussing is simply the failure to see ones owns actions through the lens of another person's eyes. Someone upthread asserted that GWB is simple incapable of feeling empathy. I beleive that and I beleive it explains a lot. (It's not an accident that Dean's book is titled "Conservatives Without Conscience")

Add the grandiosity implicit in the "Clash of Civilations" and you've got a pretty solod story-line.

America's most ruthless enemies are countling on the Greenwald's of the world to help them destroy America from within.

Epic battle of good vs evil indeed!

My point is that we shouldn't waste precious time and energy figuring out Bush's psychology

That would be great if this were ONLY about Bush. Unfortunately there is entire industry that has grown up around taking this simple narrative of Good vs Evil and pushing into our living rooms 24/7.

If we're going to have any hope of reversing course, it's necessary to examine the entire oackage of circumstances that brought us to this point.

The fact remains that American exceptionalism or the idea that anything we do is moral because we're the ones doing it has transformed our nation into becoming the very thing that we've been sworn to defeat ever since WWII.

Oh, this is the mentality that has led to many of the sanguinary excesses and abuses of the last six millennia.

Religion is simply politics seasoned with the extra confidence that comes from thinking that the Creator of the Universe has your back.

Is there a single one of those views which can remotely be described as fringe, radical, extreme, out of the mainstream, or even rigidly ideological?

Sadly, we also all agree that the mainstream media is part of the problem. Democracy sufferes when not being held accountable by a vigorous press

As long as our favorie media stars and our favorite defense contractors are joined at the hip (think GE) then the "center" will remain just slightly to the left of fascism.

Would the 'left' blogosphere be against the invasion of Iraq and torture of detainees if Al Gore had done these things instead of George Bush?

Um....yes....next?

No....actually his enablers among the press and public are at least equally responsible. Present company included.

Oh hi shooter, I didn't see you come in!

You'd have a good point if it weren't simply incorrect. While there are always people able to fit into the caricature of the fringe your describing, the idea that most Americans are sick of the fringes is a myth that you and the David Broders of the world are perpetuating. Just because you're uncomfortable with certain positions doesn't mean that most Americans are.

Trying to get certain people to STFU out of fear of offending middle Americans is step 1 on the way to conceding defeat to Karl Rove.

We've already been down that road. Trying to appeal to the mushy middle is how Democrats get tarred as weak in the first place. YOU are part of the problem.

That healthysceptic has been called a few names recently and is trying to disassociate from the dirty hippies. The reason his/her attitude is dangerous is because it distracts from the primary mission which is to save the Constitution and end the war. The ability to paint those as fringe issues is precisely HOW the Right-wing noise machine gets it's way. Healthysceptic is an enabler.