Yes I twaddle while I waddle. “You however spend words like they are worth nothing”- Unknown

Congratulations, you just made one. And mine do say something. DLS also has the same affliction even if he is opposed to most of your views. (And, there are others, L&R.)

They certainly deserve it, but that's not why they're getting it. They're getting it because they decided to attack the Obama administration, in every possible venue and at every possible opportunity, for, at least verbally, repudiating Bush-era policies. Since almost his first day in office, Republicans have been accusing Obama of being soft on terrorists, of endangering national security, of abandoning the “successful” C.I.A. interrogation program, of fomenting terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by trying suspected terrorists in civillian courts and housing them in U.S. prisons, of releasing Gitmo detainees who then turn around and rejoin Al Qaeda and launch attacks on Americans (ignoring the fact that all of the released Gitmo detainees who have done that were released by the Bush administration). Over and over again, Dick Cheney has pulled himself out of mothballs and gone on Fox and written articles and given speeches declaring that Pres. Obama does not think terrorism is a problem, that he never uses the word “terrorism,” that he thinks we're not at war with terrorists, that he's dangerously naive and inviting another attack, and on and on.

This has been going for a year, dduck, and every single last one of those accusations I listed above are completely and utterly and absolutely, 100 percent WRONG. It's the Republicans who have been heaping venom on Obama for changing disastrous policies that violate our values and incalculably damaged our national security. It hasn't been Obama's people proactively blaming the Republicans all this time for the mess they made of national security. It has, however, been the Obama administration implementing and carrying out the smartest, most sensible, and most successful counter-terrorism and national security procedures in decades. Just the approach they've taken to Abdulmutallab's interrogation alone has already been hugely successful in getting crucial intelligence without sacrificing our principles or violating the law. They have put Bush and Cheney and the rest of those cowboys to shame. And they know it. And they can't stand it, for a Democratic president to be better than they are at national security. And for you to say “You're back in prog form, blame the other guy” is just you saying whatever feels good to you and happens to come into your head, whether it's actually true, or not. You did not engage with my points from before at all (which is why I'm repeating them). You made absolutely no attempt to refute them in any way. All you have left, then, is to ignore everything I wrote and repeat the same nonsensical twaddle. And I'm sure you'll do it again.

I see your back in full prog form. Blame the other guy. (Oh, let me help you; they deserve it).

In many cultures, including the Western ones, we glorify and often live vicariously through the sole male (or sometimes an appropriately masculine female) who realizes the inadequacy of the systems' alloted protections and go rogue, taking out their own justice. Falling Down, Death Sentence and tonnes of “revenge” movies with various scope. You can't get justice through Good means, so you turn to Evil and triumph, the audience gets their moral pornography.

But when the vigilante strikes imprecisely, desperately and emotionally, like the mediocre, pasty, pipe-chewing and “Ayrab”-hating good-ole-boys who torture and abuse prisoners, we retch and snarl with distaste. Nothing is more satisfying than a competent vigilante, which is why nothing is more aesthetically displeasing than an incompetent one.

America is an ostensibly, symbolically Good Guy desperately and childishly trying its hands at Evil in order to scrub off the imprint of 9/11. This is why I loathe all the people who defend waterbaording and want the ugliness of the last administration to be forgotten – not because they acted evilly – I can defend many acts of Evil used against Evil (I would for example heartily defend a person somehow cheating in an election to defeat an anti-gay bigot) – but because they *tried to be the Good Guy Turned Slightly Rough*, which is so pathetic and dainty it fills me with pity.

If you had caught one of the girl-killing, acid-throwing taleban and tortured him after positive identification, I would probably have forgiven it. But instead you incompetently and smugly let loose a bunch of redneck scum on some random Arabs while then letting some snarling old dog and his little puppy daughter boast after the fact while moaning about “criminalizing policy differences”, thus managing to smear the good names of Good and Evil *at the same time* for no benefit. You wanted to *dabble* in Evil, symbolically *take off the silk gloves* – and I laugh at that kind of pathetic, unworthy vigilantism.

Put another way, there would have been no negative references to the Bush administration — no blame, zero, nada, zip — if Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, the Republicans in Congress, and the entire right-wing side of the blogosphere had not started piling on Obama the instant the attempted bombing on Christmas day hit the news, and if even before then Republicans in Congress AND a former vice-president and his daughter aided by Fox No-News-Here Network had not been screaming and pounding at and on Obama since Day One of his presidency about how he was endangering national security by adhering to the law and traditional American values.

If you don't want to be blamed for something that, objectively, is your darn fault, then don't try to cover up your own culpability by aggressively blaming others for your own failures.

In other words, and in short: Give me a break, dduck.