How to be hideous: the right wing tries to discredit the Parkland school shooting survivors

[Bryan_Ekers]

Due to problems further up the supply chain, I’m sitting idle at work so as a research project, I went ahead and compiled the following google query:

site:boards.straightdope.com daterange:2452708-2453074 +“Great Debates” “Find all posts by Starving Artist”

Ideally, this would find all of SA’s posts in Great Debates prior to March 09, 2004, i.e. the early months of his membership on this board. The results are a bit of a mess and the daterange doesn’t seem to work as intended, but the first hit is a GD thread started by Starving Artist himself on June 22, 2004, i.e. less than seven months after he registered here:

@Starving_Artist

An epiphany regarding a liberal paradox…

This just occurred to me! I can’t imagine why it took so long. It seems to me that the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq war/and general war-on-terrorism posters to these forums almost uniformly slam Bush and his administration vis-a-vis the fact that no significant WMD have been found in Iraq, which gives the impression that they believe the war would have been justified if WMD had indeed been found; yet many of these same posters are quick to condemn those of us who perceive a synergy between Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda as being idiots who have fallen for Bush’s war propaganda, and claim such things as “Bin Laden would never purchase weapons from a secularist such as Hussein;” or that “there has never been a relationship shown between Hussein and Bin Laden;” and that “if Hussein were ever perceived as having provided WMD to al-Qaeda, he would have hell to pay via the U.S. response and would therefore never be so foolish,” etc., etc., etc.

So, which is it? Would finding WMD’s in Iraq cause these posters to do an about face and proclaim that Iraqi WMD’s were indeed a threat and we were justified in invading Iraq after all, or would they then simply claim there is no evidence Iraq would have provided al-Qaeda with WMD and we still should never have invaded Iraq because Iraqi WMD’s posed us no threat?

So, you can’t have it both ways. Would finding WMD’s in Iraq have justified the war? Or would it have made no difference because you’re just flat out against the war in the first place and this is just an argument you use to try to discredit Bush’s motives and/or truthfulness, and you would then just fall back on the “no evidence of a relationship” argument to decry the war in Iraq, thereby exposing the hypocrisy of the “no WMD’s found” stance you use to assail the war effort?

Perhaps this was immediately after the epiphanic moment when he realized that being earnest, polite, honest, sincere, reasoned, etc. on this board was a waste of his time. I’ll look for his earlier posts but to be honest, I’m not hopeful of finding Starving Artist’s El Dorado period, just evidence of the shrinking window of its possible existence.