Why Are We Back In Iraq?

Joel Stein of the LA Times is just as stupid as William Blum.

The first line of his essay, Warriors and wusses: "I don't support our troops."

And it gets even worse after that.

Cernig at News Hog pretty much sums up how I feel about Stein's essay, which hopefully was meant as satire.

UPDATE

Dan Whitcomb reports for Reuters that Stein has been "bombarded" with "hate mail" over his article.

Whitcomb notes a comment left at the Little Green Footballs Website:

If I ever run into the a**hole, I'm going to knock his frickin' block off.

It's the least I can do to support the troops.

Curiously, a Little Green Footballer seems to be taking pride in the notoriety:

It’s a first. Al-Reuters notices Little Green Footballs, in their defense of the LA Times columnist who admitted he doesn’t support US troops: L.A. Times writer defends incendiary Iraq column.

From Whitcomb's article on Stein:

Asked if he had regrets, he said: "No, because I'm against the war. (I have no regrets) if this helps us get out of that war and bring our troops home safely."

Yeah. That's gonna happen.

Any day now the troops are going to come back home because of an essay that Joel Stein wrote.

In reality, it's the kind of stupidity displayed by (supposedly) liberals like Joel Stein and William Blum (who cackled and crowed about making Osama's first book club recommendation) that will - most definitely - not help "us get out of that war."

ANOTHER UPDATE

From Benedict Carey's A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious , an article from Tuesday's New York Times Science section:

Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.

True that.

Carey continues:

Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

And that's pretty much the case.

All of us...all of us...say some stupid shit sometimes.

And yeah...let's continue to call each other out for saying stupid shit (whether left to right, right to left, left to left, right to right, x to z, etc.) or publishing stupid shit (whether blog to press, press to blog, blog to blog, press to press, z to x, etc.) but to remember that we all basically share similiar brains.

We all know more than the average folks...and many of the average folks rely on us to inform them about what's going on...not just in blogs or in print but in daily life...so we all have a tendency to believe that all we know is all that there is.

The name-calling is one thing. People that want to be rude and like to be rude are going to continue to be rude. Maybe we all have to accept that. Times have changed.

But it's the calling of motives which should be chilled.

Calling someone a GOP shill or a liberal moonbat just because you disagree with what they wrote or said just distorts whatever truth you claim you want to fight for.

My brain makes me say and write stupid shit all the time. So forgive me if this qualifies as that.

# posted by Ron Brynaert : 1/24/2006 06:47:00 PM