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Edited on Thu Dec-18-08 02:47 PM by gcomeau
It is if I assign to you an argument you never made, for the purposes of then attacking that argument and creating the impression I has defeated your points without ever actually addresing what you were saying.
How, exactly, did I do the above? To be clear, I at no time claimed you were personally saying Obama was claiming Obama was giving Warren a say in policy related to Gay issues, but others here sure as hell HAVE been and I wanted that point on the table as part of my overall explanation of how this was in fact a "better than nothing" situation we were dealing with. I am rather confident that in the course of that explanation I directly addressed exactly what you said. You can argue against how effectively I did so, but that does not a strawman make.
As for the rest, you have solid grounds to make the argument. However, you may want to consider that there are two ways to approach loking at it. Focusing on people who advocate for the contemptible, or focusing on the advocating itself. I am personally reasonably confident that Obama has decided that if we decide to take the former approach we're going to very quickly screw ourselves. We can't work with THAT group of people on ANYTHING... because they have this belief we take serious exception with. And we can't work with THAT group of people with anything because they have this other belief we take serious exception with. And pretty soon you're left with a goddamn small workforce to get anything done, and a whole lot of people you've gone out of your way to make sure will line up in opposition because you threw them out of the damn tent.
OR... you can just say "look, I can do this based on issues first." EVERYONE who agrees we need to fix this issue we put to work on it, and we actually freaking get it fixed. And we make clear that just because we agree on getting that done that does NOT mean we're saying this other thing is ok... and we are NOT saying that we're going to compromise on that oter issue... just that we all knew, whatever our other disagreements and HOWEVER serious those disagreements are, this first thing needed doing. Right now. So we did it. We'll deal with that other thing seperately.
Now I know which of those two approcahes is going to get more accomplished. It's ridiculously obvious from where I'm standing. But if you think the alternative route has more potential to actually accomplish what we need to accomplish I'm all ears for how that is.
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