ATTACK!

Today Jeff at Protein Wisdom has a post about some Democrat's latest stance on Gitmo.

Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats are now claiming (rather too adamantly for my tastes) that they support the troops serving in Guantanamo Bay?which, it follows, then, that they are not prepared to blame actual camp guards for the what they insist is the egregious and systematic torture of Islamic freedom fighters being detained there, but rather wish instead to hold accountable only those higher-ups in the military and Defense Department (with Donald Rumsfeld the chief villain) responsible for the prescribing camp policy.

I don't have a problem with what Jeff is saying, but I think that his post points out an ongoing problem with the conversation between the left and the right and so I'm going to use it as an example and I hope he wont be mean to me because only 10 people read this blog anyway.

If you have ever been in a position opposing a war in the US, you will be very familiar with the idea of "Supporting the Troops." If you don't remember all of the "Supporting the Troops" propaganda that was trotted out around the beginning of the Iraq war then I think you should be checked for Alzheimers. Any statement against the war, wasn't a statement against the decision to go to war, it became a statement against the Troops, against American fighters who were just doing their best to protect the country and ipso facto proved that you were a communist or something.

And now, the same logic is being used in reverse, how can you support the troops, when you don't support what they are doing in Gitmo? If Nancy Pelosi had come out and been negative towards the guards at Gitmo I would bet money that we would have heard about how she hated American troops who were just following orders.

And I think that at some point we are going to have to start listening to the point people are trying to make without spinning everything we can in order to invalidate their statements. Both Liberals and Conservatives are guilty of doing this. It is much easier to invalidate someone's statement because, say they used the word Nazi, than it is to actually converse about the point they were trying to make. And so then any possible conclusion or compromise that could have been made becomes lost in a sea of bullshit.

All of this crap is just a distraction from the real problem. What is the real problem? I don't know yet, I'm still filtering through reams of inconsequential rhetoric.