Okay. It's darker now. The night is halfway cool. It's no longer hotter than shit in here. Feeling my second wind.

#1: Of course I'm not saying that cops get a pay-off when the convenience store gets robbed (unless they do -- weirder things have happened). What I'm saying is that if you know for a fact that the cop makes money when the convenience store gets robbed, you have to wonder about whether or not the cop is gonna look the other way when a guy with a gun walks in. You've accepted, I presume, that the Shrub and his buddies do make money off of this pipeline, and that what the terrorists did leads directly to the installation of that pipeline. Your only response was "Welcome to capitalism, Afghanistan," and quite frankly you wouldn't have let me get away with a lame response like that. Capitalism is a motive.

#2: And by the way, I'd like to take an opportunity to make a funny face at Britney. You said something about how we're giving Afghanistan an economy and feeding them. How 'bout this -- go beat somebody to death with a crowbar, then leave five bucks and a Snickers bar on their corpse. See how it helps your conscience and the jury's opinion.

#3: You still haven't explained why underfunding made the planes late to show up. We're talking about New York and Washington, D.C. This isn't some plane flying over Anarctica, this is a situation where the two most obvious targets for terrorism in the entire universe, as far as cities go, with the possible exceptions of Israel or the Vatican, have got planes moving overhead -- and we're supposed to believe that they were caught flat-footed? We're supposed to accept the thinly-veiled implication that it's all the fault of us stingy liberals? "Lousy left-wingers would rather spend money on baby-producing crack-whores than jetplanes!"

No. I'm sorry. This kind of incompetence beggars belief, and Occam's Razor works against it. The simplest explanation is not that people who live in D.C. elected to put the ready-to-scramble jets in Detroit, or something. If what you're saying is true, and "underfunding" is somehow responsible for those planes not making it to their targets on time, that's just a different kind of conspiracy. That means that our territorial military bases are completely useless and serve no function whatsoever. That means that the world's most expensive military had no defense against this kind of attack -- and if you believe this, I'm sorry, but you're a moron.

#4: Comparing my argument to the ol' "marijuana leads to shooting battery acid and eating your kittens" argument? I don't think I'm the one guilty of misdirection, here.

This is not a slippery slope, this is a clear and obvious pattern of behavior. I defy you to find a single Shrub policy that doesn't make one person rich at the expense of somebody else's ability to go on breathing. His own administration tells him that pollution is a real problem, and he just blows it off, calling it "bureaucratic." There are people in the world who can bitch about bureaucracy and sound like they mean it, but when this guy talks, his own behavior makes it clear that he's just out to consolidate power. Every single move this guy makes is either to increase his own power or to show that he's already got it. He's done absolutely nothing else since taking office. If he were using a scalpel rather than the Oval Office, he'd be guilty of malpractice. If it were a knife, he'd be a serial killer.

Marijuana has not killed a single person, ever. The Shrub has killed thousands. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

#5: Not conceding the point that you were trying to make by quoting that article is not a "lack of style." It's called "reading the whole article." If you missed the obvious and blatant discrepancy in what they were saying, I'm sorry. That's not my fault, though. It just makes it harder than hell to explain anything, when you're going to be so deliberately obtuse.

I left this board a little while ago feeling frustrated because I just knew I wasn't going to find the words to explain anything to anybody that just didn't want to listen. B y'know what? It's just not my job to convince you. If you don't want to believe, fine. You're still wrong. These are not flaws in my logic, this is deliberate and pathological avoidance of reality on your part.

I'm not giving up, simply because I'm right -- and because if these guys succeed in destroying America, it isn't gonna be because I was too busy bleating like a sheep to try to make the obvious truth a little more clear.

And no, Rob. I don't "need a conspiracy." What's going on is that you reach instinctively for the blinders, because sticking your head in the sand in easier than doing anything about the world's problems -- which is precisely why assholes like the Shrub generally get away with their crap.