Now that you are addressing one another directly, Aycharaych, Talesofunrest, & Dounia, maybe you could take it to an IM session? Kitt's right; we're not that interested, and LWM has too much patience... not for incrementalism, but for responding to your comments. I usually have more patience, too, but it's just about used up.

-- Anonymust

I don't recall even exchanging with the two posters you mention, except about a Roseanne joke mentionned by Aycha.

How you, Kitt, LWM feel about my views is irrelevant to me, but I have to say, you all do seem eager to shut down a frank conversation on the Democratic Party, its leaders, its policies (foreign and domestic) over the years, and its total collapse in the face of the worse Adm in the country's history.

Why you imagine it is legitimate to preclude this sort of discussion is beyond me, as it is part and parcel of the core problems we are now facing.

What has been termed ‘shock politics’ is hardly a post-modern concept, it is a fairly typically tactic. I want to be clear, lest the dogma guardians get all riled up, that I am considering an idea, not advocating a policy, but, hypothetically, say you concluded that your government had “become destructive of” certain “ends,” and you decided to “alter or abolish it,” leaning towards abolish. A pretty standard tactic at this point is to make things generally unpleasant in order to incite the population. This is why Iraqi insurgents do things like destroy water pipelines; it is flat out destabilizing, which, if you are trying to upset the stable equilibrium, is exactly what you want. Also, I was not even considering manufacturing any such crisis, simply voting for the guy who I thought was most likely to do it all on his own. If enough people make that selection, than I have to conclude that either a) a whole bunch of people reasoned just like I did, or, b) a whole bunch of people are going to get exactly what they asked for. Either way, I fail to see how the idea gets to ‘borderline criminal’ (and do I really have to point out the intellectual laziness in throwing around terms like ‘beyond idiotic?’)

So I think our efforts would be best employed by incrementally chipping away or tossing pebble by pebble as GG and other bloggers are so capable of doing.

Glenn's efforts may not [yet] have as much impact as hand grenades, but at a minimum, they are in the cherry bomb category, don't you think?

And perhaps that much quicker retraction at the WaPo re: Obama's religion was at least partly in response to their observing the relentless attacks on Time re: Joe Klein?

As for the rest of us, I'll settle for the pebbles, but I still prefer the sawing-the-legs-off-the-table metaphor a bunch of you settled on one or two posts ago.

...you all do seem eager to shut down a frank conversation on the Democratic Party, its leaders, its policies (foreign and domestic) over the years, and its total collapse in the face of the worse Adm in the country's history.

Why you imagine it is legitimate to preclude this sort of discussion is beyond me, as it is part and parcel of the core problems we are now facing.

-- Dounia

For cripesakes, go back and read some of the threads that have taken place on this board. You'll find a Quarter of a Zillion Glenn Greenwald posts uncovering the corruption or acquiescence of the Democratic Pary, and a full several zillion comments in reply and in recognition of the corruption and acquiescence of the Democratic Party.

Go around them. Make new institutions. Discard those that don't work.-- Ché Pasa

The ripples from the pebbles are getting stronger, stronger and spreading wider. The table legs visual seems too quick and easy unless that table has an awful lot of legs.

Ever try to shorten a table? One leg at a time? There is always a wobble after you turn it right side up again. So you turn it over and make another cut. Same result, only shorter. Eventally, by George, the table no longer has any legs left, but at least it no longer wobbles. ;o) Clumsy way to go about it, maybe, but it does get results.

And accused two of them – the King’s nephew and the Pakistani air force chief – of having advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

The scenario seems plausible, though as bamage points out the cited material from Posner contains no substantiation aside from "I reported on this in my book, too."

The thing I have a hard time believing is that Posner's scenario would lead the CIA to hide the tapes from Congress. There were a bunch of Qaeda symps in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? And some of them were in government? This is a surprise that needs to be hidden from Congressional Democrats?

As for knowing about the September 11th attacks in advance, look, I hate to say this but anyone who did not know that al Qaeda was, in general, trying to fly fuel-laden airplanes into the World Trade Center was willfully ignorant, and it didn't take special knowledge or genius intelligence to observe that by 2001 it had been longer than usual since the last time al Qaeda had been caught.

And by "anyone" I don't mean anyone in the Bush administration, or people with top-secret security clearances. I mean anyone — you, me, everyone in America who could read the New York Times, which quietly covered enough of the covert war against al Qaeda to convey everything one needed to know except the names and dates of the next attack.

So why should "so and so knew about 9/11 in advance" be such a damning crime? Why would the CIA need to protect itself from Congressional knowledge of that fact? Many Americans who knew nearly as precisely about al Qaeda's plans, and said so at the highest levels of government, are alive and well — if somewhat demoralized at having been proven so tragically prescient.

I agree with Posner's general point as cited by bamage, but the specific conclusion in the case of missing evidence doesn't add up. Means, yes. Opportunity, yes. Motive? I don't see it.