A candidate for this years SDMB Most Successful Hijack Award, though.
Of course, you don’t. When your knee-jerk, emotional, partisan rants are challenged you like to run away. No surprise at this point. You’re all yap.
Bricker challenged you and now you handwave as you beat a hasty retreat. Maybe you’re not a complete dummy after all.
Bricker challenged her? When? I must have missed it. Did he do it sometime after the Pentagon Paper hijack?
Post #2. That’s why you gotta read the threads. 
I for one, will not play that game.
The thread never mentioned Ellsberg. That was BRICKERS hi-jack. The thread was about Novak ,the traitor. Ellsberg had nothing to do with it at all. He did a quick and bad job of shodanizing.
How could we, you never even mentioned his name. :dubious:
I have never met a poster with a less appropriate username.
When did pit screeds become a sacred thing that must be kept on the pure path? And what is being lost by the “hijack”, a bunch of “yeah, what a douchebag” posts? Such a loss.
It was? If so, then why didn’t the OP mention Novak?
(Actually, Bricker was quite brilliant here)
Novak was everything that was wrong with professional journalism. He crowed about lauding his sources and trashing people who refused to be his sources. He was Goebbels without the uniform. Hey, Goebbels didn’t pull the trigger on anyone personally. Did Novak believe he was doing the right thing? Sure, but so did Goebbels. I could actually have forgiven the Prince of Darkness for outing Plame and ruining her multi-billion dollar anti-proliferation operation because it might have been defensible had Novak admitted a mistake in a rush to print. But his unrepentant line of bull was that it was widely known and it wasn’t a mistake. So he waived the mistake defense.
Any journalist who serves as just a propaganda tool for his or her masters is a little Goebbels, either of the right or the left. The public good is done by those journalists who get the sources and find a way to tell the story, either in their paid job, or in a book or blog. Novak was a well paid little Goebbels. I’d call him a hack, but most hacks don’t deliberately help provoke wars and destroy people just for shits and giggles.
(emphasis mine) You think outing a covert CIA agent, one who we now know was working on gathering WMD intelligence, putting her life and the lives of her family and the lives of her co-workers and contacts in danger, is trivial? And it’s our souls that are dead?
You know how I know you’re full of shit? Because if the situation were reversed, and it was Democrats who outed a CIA agent out of spite and malice, you and your soul-dead conservative friends wouldn’t shut the fuck up about what an outrage it was.
Well, I guess you can march out here with your head held high.
But it’s pretty clear to me you reached your result by noting than Novak’s acts assisted a Republican, and THAT made them vile; Ellsberg’s acts hurt a Republican, and that made them forgiveable.
I disagree. I think he was able to successfully weave a rationalization for a lame attempt at distraction because he is slightly more skilled at the art than is Mr. Moto or Scylla or Shodan or any of the others who would typically employ this debate/discussion strategy.
Here’s my evidence: He apparently agreed that Novak could be considered a traitor. If two people observing a referent agree that it is a member of a particular category or construct, what then is the point of bringing up a different referent altogether, except to have a different discussion altogether.
If I want to talk about Roberto Clemente, and I say what a consummate ballplayer Roberto Clemente was, and you say “Yeah, he was a consummate ballplayer. But do you agree that Ty Cobb was also a consummate ballplayer?”
Now, if I engage you, you have successfully distracted me from a discussion about Roberto Clemente, even though you agreed with me in the first place about the term I chose to use to describe him. If you don’t want to talk about Roberto Clemente, shut the fuck up.
That’s all very true, Hentor. (And very well put together.) However, I think that the predicate of a statement is as much up for discussion as the subject, if not more. If the OP thinks John is the scum of the earth because he did so and so, then it is perfectly proper to ask whether the OP also thinks Jane is the scum of the earth since Jane did essentially what John did. Now, if the OP had complained about the condition of Novak’s yellowed and rotted teeth, or his cheap Men’s Warehouse suits, then Bricker would be hard put to bring up an equivalent “douchebag of liberty”.
I take no position as to whether Novak’s actions in the Plame affair could be considered traitorous, but I think the Daniel Ellsberg comparison misses the mark because I don’t think Ellsberg’s motives were partisan in nature; he was as much a part of the Washington establishment as one could be. In Novak’s case, it’s been a point of debate whether certain American journalists and news media types have maintained their independence and impartiality or have allowed themselves to become mouthpieces for the government. I fail to see how casually outing a CIA agent in a news story meant to respond to criticism by that agent’s husband served the public interest.
I’m sure Biggirl can speak for herself, but as I review this thread I don’t see her forgiving or even addressing the issue of Ellsberg. She objects to your attempts to divert attention from Novak, but she does not offer an opinion on Ellsberg, as far as I can see.
So, while we’re busy ascribing motives and all, it’s pretty cler to me that you assume Biggirl forgives Ellsberg while she attacks Novak. You apparently believe that someone who attacks a conservative must automatically excuse that behavior in liberals. Now, you’ve been around here longer than me, so maybe you have a long history of watching Biggirl do exactly that. Or maybe you’re just jumping right to the conclusion that those who attack conservatives are guilty of hypocrisy, and not bothering to evaluate their actual statements.
What, Laotians and Cambodians too dumb to notice they were being bombed by the US and complain about it?
I’m *totally *taking this for my eHarmony description.
That from somebody who can dismiss lying us into a war, killing hundreds of thousands along the way, as “petty politics”.
Bzzzt.
The comparison you raised is a fair one; however, concluding that someone finds one a traitor and the other not because of party affiliation is dishonest.
If my moral compass says that publicizing classified information is OK if I believe it will save lives, and repugnant for a lesser reason, I find Novak to be a traitor and Ellsberg “guilty with explanation,” or however you phrased it.