However one main question that needs to be asked is WHY? And what is the bigger picture that this supports? Many of my posts touch on issues that for most may be difficult to believe but please remember for more than 26 years I lived in a family who is part of these issues. And it’s not to mention the years that followed of what I had to deal with too. A bigger picture exists and there is also a huge support network to protect it.

A side issue: The Rezko trial in Chicago does surface a number of interesting issues to consider. And for me, this is personal as my youngest son is involved with Rezko. However there is much more that still will need to be said to explain what the bigger picture is all about and that is expected to eventually happen.

Marty Didier
Northbrook, IL

Simulacra and Simulation.

This is why “24″ is so bloody dangerous; they point to it as if it were real, Jack Bauer saving the world through a simulation of torture, becoming simulacra as reality is completely rejected and obsoleted by the progressive preference for the the unreal model of torture as salvation.

We are damned as long as we cannot transcend this breach with reality.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/b…..24.article

(I didn’t know that Rove was Peter Fitzgerald’s campaign strategist when PetFitz was running against Carol Moseley Braun for Carol’s Senate seat.)

You are utterly and totally missing my point. I understand what you’re saying, I just think it is strategically counterproductive and possibly much weaker than you claim.

What I don’t understand is why you–someone who knows better–would choose THIS to go after BushCo on, rather than any of the huge number of other equally clear-cut cases, when in doing so you would rhetorically give credit to Libby’s story.

I’m making a pragmatic argument. I’m saying people who know that Cheney ordered Libby to leak Plame’s identity–and who focus on anything but that–are helping to perpetuate Libby’s story.

Furthermore, your covert argument falls flat when it becomes clear that Condi overtly, back in June, leaked some of the things you’re so wrapped up in Libby leaking covertly. Or that Libby provided them overtly to Sanger with his press aide present before he gave them to Judy covertly. If you really want to go that route, go after Wolfowitz with the Jan 24 document, not Libby and Judy. But don’t become a willing participant in Libby’s lies.

In response to bobschacht @ 141

What ticks me off at this moment is that this isn’t what I would call ‘parsing’: it’s something else — I just can’t come up with the proper term for it. I LIKE parsing. Parsing is fun. Parsing clarifies how a language works. This ain’t parsing. This is being a smart@ss.

I was not trying to be a smart-ass, but rather playing back to you what the MSmedia means when the word “parsing” comes up. Not MSM, but see for example The Politics of Parsing, and Chris Cilizza’s column, “Parsing the Polls on Bill and Hillary Clinton,” including the comment Posted by Helena Montana on July 26, 2006 8:30 AM that

The word “parse” related to politics rather than grammar came into usage during the Clinton/Lewinsky affair (pun intended).

I am unable at this time to do a more thorough history at this time. I agree that it is a distortion of what true parsing means. Perhaps the operative word should be “deconstruct”, as in “It depends on how you deconstruct the word ‘is’.”

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Bob, if you’re still here — it’s Thursday AM now — (and if Bob’s not around, somebody please pass this on to him) — I most certainly was NOT saying that you were acting badly. I see now that I had conflated two gripes: 1. using a string of narrowly-directed verbs to intentionally fail to cover all possibilities while giving the impression that all possibilities were being dealt with, and then some, and 2. calling that behavior ‘parsing’. The person who does the former, I was suggesting, might be a, well, you know. My apologies for phrasing that rant in a way that could be misunderstood.