--- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "jim_flanegin" <jflanegi@> > wrote: > > > > > Nope didn't miss a thing. No political compromises yet but 60 > > > pieces of > > > legislation passed. Killings, executions and bombings are down. > > > Sunnis are > > > turning on Al Qaeda and working with Coalition forces for a > > > change. The Democrats > > > have a lot invested in the failure of the surge. If it works > > > they look very bad. > > > > It is such a cynical view from both sides to use the death of > > men, women and children as a political pawn to score points. > > really sickening and cold-hearted. Whether the surge "works" or > > not, I just want this damned war to be over soon, and for us as > > a country to recognize that it has solved nothing.:-) > > *Nobody* is "invested in failure" in Iraq. Of all the > right's calumnies, that is perhaps the most unspeakably > vile. > > It's the old "stab in the back" strategy, dragged out > and dressed up in an effort to excuse the failures > that have already occurred.
Uh, Judy...using your *own* standards, aren't you insinuating above that either Jim or MDixon used the phrase "stab in the back?" You put it in quotes, after all. AND, you did so just after using quotes *fairly* "properly" (that is, accprding to the rules in Judy Stein's Big Book Of How To Write Gud) to *misquote* MDixon, who really said "invested in *the* failure," not "invested in failure." If you were doing the quote properly, you should have said "invested in ... failure," indicating with the elipses that you had left out one or more words. *By your own standards*, what you attributed to MDixon was technically a misquote of what he said. *By your own standards*, what you attributed to someone -- either Jim or MDixon -- was a made- up quote of your own, something that neither of them said or probably ever imagined. If it had been *me* you were having this dis- cussion with, and I had done what you just did, you would have been screaming to high heaven right now accusing me of maliciously claiming that you'd said something you didn't. You would have put this down to my long-estab- lished disregard for truth and honesty, and to my obvious malevolent intent towards you and my desire to portray you negatively here on FFL. And then you would have whined for a couple of more paragraphs, doing a smashing rendition of the Poor Me Blues. But it's *OK* when you do it. Right? Rules of punctuation usage and rules of "argu- mentation ethics" are only for *other* people. They don't *apply* to you. Right? And yes, for the others here who are rolling their eyes and thinking of Sal's song (nice work on that, Sal...more creativity and originality of thought in one post than Judy has displayed in 13 years), YES this is a silly nitpick. It's *insane* for me to claim that Judy meant to attribute the phrase "stab in the back" to either Jim or MDixon, just because she put it in quotes. So why isn't it insane when she claims the same thing about me and Vaj?
