Fine with me, after all, the "argument" that is the heart of this thread was just laying there as is to begin with.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I suppose you mean this part of post #137:For one thing, "treason" is your word, but that's a picky point. More important, your claim that moveon's evidence had nothing to do with their charge against General Patraeus seems incorrect to me. They cited previous statements by the General that they believed painted a false picture of the surge. Believing that he had mislead once, they had a good faith basis to say that Congress should be on the lookout for him to do it again.I'm not sure what you are referring to there, but what does that have to do with the difference you are drawing between moveon and Limbaugh?I don't see how that reconciles Kingston's comment about Limbaugh with his vote condemning moveon.

Upon re-reading that last post of mine, I realize it doesn't really make much sense.

I thought you were leaving the argument to lay?

betray,

deliver to an enemy by treachery; "Judas sold Jesus"; "The spy betrayed his country"

Treachery, a synonym for treason. I didn't pick the word. MoveOn.org did.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Different arguments, or so I thought.If you say so.

I already said that was a picky point. The more important point is the one you didn't mention, which is that nobody has offered a single fact to refute the claim that moveon had a good faith basis for questioning General Patraeus's credibility when testifying in support of the surge. Doesn't that bother you at all? Don't facts matter?

Whether or not one consider's MoveOn's point a good one is not important: It was their right to question Petraeus' actions, motives, etc. As I have said many times, reasonable people can disagree, and I certainly don't dispute that.

What I object to is MoveOn's reckless, unconscionable assault on the man's honor through the use of the phrase, "Betray Us". By choosing that path, they do their own argument a disservice and for precisely the point you bring-up and nobody cares to comment on: The meat of MoveOn's complaint. See, by choosing ad hominem argument MoveOn shifted the focus from their complaint to Gen Petraeus' honor.

Now let's say you are a senior Democrat, Senator Culkin, who has just this year gone on record as approving Petraeus for lord and master of our armed forces in Iraq. Here's MoveOn's piece which essentially undermines Senator Culkin's judgment concerning Petraeus. Sen. Culkin is now in a difficult position of wanting to shoot the message but having MoveOn place the general right in your line of fire. Instead of the media asking about all of the reasons to greet the report with skepticism, they want to hear what you think of MoveOn's character asssassination attempt on a general with an unblemished military record, whom Sen Culkin and colleagues (in the majority party) have recently approved for this mission.

B

Can't argue with any of that.That is probably correct, but we will never know how the public discussion would have gone without their ad. Last I heard, a large percentage of the public doubt what Patraeus had to say. Would that have been true without movon's offensive ad?And lets further say that it is snowing in hell, but I digress.That doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult position for a politician, but I've never understood how all that works anyway. I am constantly surprised by what the public and the media find persuasive and important.

It appears Harkin is the one who needs to apologies.


http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/10/05/a2a_jose_col_1005.html

From the above link:

A corrections spokesman this week confirmed Limbaugh has been a good boy and that the drug tests his doctor has conducted have been negative.

Only half-jokingly, meanwhile, Limbaugh said he considered lying on the monthly reports he sent to WPB-based state probation officer Louis Kurtz.
Filling out the forms, Limbaugh said, was at times "surreal."

The paperwork asks for the make and license plate of a probationer's set of wheels. In Limbaugh's case, it's a 2007 Maybach 57, with an MSRP of $335,500.

Under "Your Total Money Earned Monthly," Limbaugh wrote $2.1 million on a bad month and $3 million on a better one.

Guy has $$$jack

Sounds like ol' Rushbo is doing just fine.

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1980 300TD-China Blue/Blue MBTex-2nd Owner, 107K (Alt Blau) OBK #15
'06 Chevy Tahoe Z71 (for the wife & 4 kids, current mule) '03 Honda Odyssey (son #1's ride, reluctantly) '99 GMC Suburban (255K+ miles, semi-retired mule) 21' SeaRay Seville (summer escape pod)

I'm sorry, did your post say anything other than 2007 Maybach?

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Here is another example of how both the right wing noise machine, and Media Matters conduct their affairs. Mr. Tom Delay spreads a version of this story that anyone here can see by reading the above posted transcripts is in fact, well, to be charitable, a misstatement of fact. Mediamatters does not editorialize, it simply posts this oddity as a chain of, well, real facts:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200710040015?f=h_latest

And Limbaugh implied that soldiers who oppose the war are liars and phony, propped up by liberal anti-war activists.

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1984 300TD

Hey, thanks for the link on Wikipedia about MediMatters and David Brock. I never would have found this otherwise:

Minority Report by Christopher Hitchens
The Real David Brock

[from the May 27, 2002 issue]
When incurable liberals like Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman begin using the name Whittaker Chambers as a term of approbation, we are entitled to say that there has been what the Germans call a Tendenzwende, or shift in the zeitgeist. The odd thing is that they have both chosen to compare Chambers's Witness, a serious and dramatic memoir by any standards, to a flimsy and self-worshiping book titled Blinded by the Right, by David Brock. Meyer Schapiro, one of the moral heroes of the democratic left, once said that Whittaker Chambers was incapable of telling a lie. That might well be phrasing it too strongly, but I have now been provoked by curiosity into reading Brock, and I would say without any hesitation that he is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it.
The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer--that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him--was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock's new story--that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy--is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.
On page 128, Brock does what many defectors do, and claims that it was his party, not he, that had changed. The tone of the 1992 Republican convention was the alleged tipping point, with its antigay, anti-1960s, Christian Coalition themes. On page 121 Brock makes the demented assertion that the GOP had "virtually launched an antigay pogrom," before sobbing, "there was far less ideological affinity between the GOP and me than when I had first come to Washington. The party had left me and many other libertarian-leaning conservatives back in Houston." So at least that fixes a date, in what is a very rambling and egocentric narrative. And the date makes it easy to demonstrate that Brock is a phony. His early hero Reagan made alliances with Jerry Falwell, fulminated against the 1960s, refused to mention the term "AIDS" in public and encouraged Jeane Kirkpatrick's veiled attack on the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. As a longtime Bay Area denizen, Brock would have had a hard time missing that last reference, or any of the others. So he's plainly still lying about his past. He's also lying about his future: the "Troopergate" allegations appeared under his name a good while later than 1992, and sometime well after that he was billed as a featured speaker by the Christian Coalition.
Who is such a sap as to take the word of such a person? Brock masks his deep-seated mendacity from others and (perhaps) from himself by a simple if contemptible device of rhetoric. He switches between passive and active. Thus of one conservative smear-op, he tells us that "I allowed myself to get mixed up" in it. His masochism even permits him to say, at a reactionary award ceremony in far-off St. Louis, at which he somehow found himself, that "I was miserable. Yet this was how I made my living and it was who I had become. The conservatives had bought my brain." And paid well over the odds for it, I should say. Never mind, he always cheers up by letting himself be drawn in to another bad business. And here we get the same paltry narcissism in its opposite form: "I was a full-scale combatant, I had war-wounds to show for it, and I needed the thrill of another round of battle."
He finds it difficult to refer to himself--when he isn't crippled by self-loathing--without using the words "icon" and "poster boy." There are actually very few revelations in the book, unless you are surprised to learn that a cabal of right-wingers tried to frame the Clintons for killing Vince Foster. (Brock now prefers the even more far-out view that Foster was murdered by the Wall Street Journal.) Referring to the anti-Semitism of a famous conservative, he cites what might be a joke in poor taste and says it was "one of her gentler remarks." What, couldn't he have cited a more damning one? There are countless silly mistakes, including the date of Theodore and Barbara Olson's wedding, and many innuendoes, such as the (unsupported) suggestion that it is Richard Mellon Scaife who has committed not one but two murders. In his coarse attack on Juanita Broaddrick, whose allegation of rape was supported by several contemporaneous witnesses and has not yet been denied by Clinton himself, Brock does not even do the elementary work of stating the case he is trying to rebut. Instead, he inserts a completely gratuitous slander against a decent woman, all of whose independent assertions have survived meticulous fact-checking. The defamation game is still all that this creep knows. Etiquette requires that I mention a very rude description of myself, concentrating on the grossly physical, which includes the assertion that I am unwashed as well as unkempt. Those who know me will confirm that while I may not be tidy, I am so clean you could eat your dinner off me. Perhaps I did not want to put Mr. Brock to the labor of proving this. At any rate, I am relieved to find I am not his type. However, I forgive him this sophomoric passage because its empty hatred was so obviously feigned after the event, and because it describes me as five years younger than I am.
Still, I wanted to take an extra shower after trudging through this dismally written, pick-nose, spiteful and furtive little book. It glitters with malice and the more cowardly kind of "disclosure"; it's a dank, filthy tissue turned inside out. And it is all written allegedly as a defense of the Clintons' right to privacy! As someone who despised Clinton from the very first, I remember resenting the damage done by hysterical and fabricated right-wing attacks, which bought him time and sympathy. Anyone really interested in this period should grab the paperback version of Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, a verifiable story told by a serious journalist, who began by disbelieving the rumors and discovered by honest exertion that many of them, and some that had not even been suspected, were true.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone