"The Straw Man has become the default argument." God, I do not miss American politics.

Kung Fu Monkey: New Year's Resolution:

"There are times I feel like we've reached a tipping point, where all the progressive and conservative grown-ups just looked at each other and said 'Right, time to step in here' ... orrrr I'm Ian Holm in The Day After Tomorrow: 'Save who you can.' It is very, very hard not to discuss other people's reasoning facilities without coming across an an arrogant prat, but here's my point:

-- There were no WMD's in Iraq. At all.
-- The Administration, it's been proved, used intel they knew was bad during the run-up to the war.
-- The Administration sent our troops to war with insufficient equipment, and has both cut funding for their medical care and undermined their families' abilities to survive financially with the Bankruptcy Bill
-- The Administration has rained tax cuts down for the rich, while just recently cutting benefits for the middle class and students -- not to mention the insanity of tax cuts for the rich during wartime.
-- The Administration did not plan adequately for the post-war period.
-- The Department of Homeland Security is a joke. (Oh, and let me be another voice in the chorus: when's the last time we had a terror alert?)
-- This Administration has openly argued that it must retain the right to torture people, even if they don't. Honest. To defend the American Way.
-- The Administration has been illegally monitoring our electronic communications, circumventing even the rubber stamp from the sluttiest Court in the land. Not only that, when confronted with this, the Administration used the opportunity to push the idea that this was okay, because the President has unlimited powers during war. And if that 'war' happens to last for another twenty to fifty years, oh well ...

... all this, and people still aren't, well, pissed off. Jesus, people, what'll it take? By any objective standards, standards set by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike, these folk have done a bad job of securing the Homeland, running a war, and protecting the Constitution in both spirit and deed. What's more, we're not even being allowed to have reasonable, sober discussions about policy because this Administration has validated the "scream and finger-point" methodology for dissent.

Listen, I may well be all for the goddam Iraq War if someone, anyone, could lay out the operational goals and specific strategies, with progress benchmarks, for the conflict. You may scream at me, you may think I'm a traitor for even asking, fine, but my point is even if you think I ought to be in a John Aschcroft Re-Education Camp, you ought to be able to answer the question. But no, that's "defeatist" thinking. Or, I'm "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" the "fine patriotic folks who are working so hard." Because it's not results that matter in this Bizarro World we've wound up in, it's intent. It doesn't matter that the President's broken the law, it's okay because he meant well. A rationalization we wouldn't let our eleven year old get away with, we let the President slide.

The Straw Man has become the default argument. If I want to know the benchmarks, I'm for "cutting and running." See, in my world, the real one, without benchmarks we can't know if something is working, or not working, and if it has to be adjusted so we can acomplish our goal of, say, winning. But nothing is ever adjusted with this Government. It's Plan A, all the time, all the way through to the bitter end, with lots of announcements about how wonderfully Plan A is working right now. "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" 24/7."