Bullshit.

Any ad executive worth his salary can describe to the minutest detail in terms of ad sales and revenue generation the difference between emotion and reason.

What a fucking moron.

(Even though, as has been ably pointed out above, he has not rationally deliberated anything, nor meaningfully contributed to so much as an informal Kaffeeklatsch?)

Either that or it’s just a particularly putrid piece of sophist wankery. Someone trying to be “different” and “intellectual” without bothering with the whole “thinking” part. Which is at least internally consistent, I suppose.

Is he seriously saying that the right and left are equivalents because the left feels smug when it has a reasonable discussion and the right feels smug when it shouts down congresspeople?

No. It’s worse than that. He says it’s about

the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate. (my emphasis)

He doesn’t simply create a false equivalence about smugness, oh no! It’s all about “belief.” There’s no such thing as a fact in Marc’s world. Those of us on the left haven’t actually rationally deliberated something, you see — we just BELIEVE we have. It’s all about beliefs, and of course we can’t judge one set of beliefs to be superior to another because they’re beliefs.

I’ve only been an investigative reporter for, like five hours, three and a half of which I was having dinner.

A three-and-a-half-hour dinner? What’re you, French?

Bullshit. CN reaserchers may not bench-press 180 without beaking a sweat, but they’re decidedly NOT pussies when it comes to a major scientific challenge. It may well turn out to be a false dichotomy in the realm of neurology, but even a bright child knows that science doesn’t EVER issue ultimate verdicts. The tell is “all but given up” – much like science had “all but given up” a unitary model for physics prior to Maxwell, Rutherford & Einstein – if by “all but given up” you mean “is working its ass off to find a solution” … feh.

The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.

More bullshit. The blatantly false analogy of an emotion that results from using reason with a position flying in the face of reason that’s based purely on emotion would make a first-year Philosophy student howl with laughter.

This may wear journalism-drag, but don’t be fooled – IT’S A TRAP!

Geez, that’s harsh. I’ve only been an investigative reporter for, like five hours, three and a half of which I was having dinner.

Okay, I’ve got a brilliant piece about Michael Jackson’s autopsy in the works, and not to give too much away, but I’m going to show how both conservatives and liberals are child molesting plastic surgery addicts.

Is that too much to ask for?

No reasonable American would disagree.

Why is the extreme right wing being catered to, even on THIS?

And it would be roundly applauded and cheered by the half-wits from the Teatoddler brigade .

So when the establismentarians see right wing public figures – in addition to teabaggers on corners – screaming that the Democrat health plans will kill poor Sarah Palin’s retarded baby — they see a reasonable group of people having a School of Athens discussion of the role of government in health care.

When I and others say, correctly, that Republican national leaders (and many Democratic co-hawks) are quite openly and consciously lying us into a war against and occupation of Iraq, they perceive a mass of screaming hippie radicals hanging upside down from trees and flinging shit at innocent, banker-dressed passersby.

Funny how that works. Screaming righties, and they hear democratic deliberation; sane, and correct, and proven analysy from lefties, and they see screeching rabid gibbons.

That is the dumbest thing I’ve read all day, and goddammit troofie was posting. A debater doesn’t appeal to emotion by appealing to reason, even if the logical, reasonable people actually enjoy being logical and reasonable.

She went through the usual litany of unsupported (indeed, unsupportable) assertions and she uniterntionally made it quite clear that there is no middle ground; anything but the status quo is unacceptable.

The host presented a question about the tone of the protests, does she think that hurts their cause? Her immediate, very defensive response was, predictably, “Its no worse than what the liberals did to Bush!”

Marc Assbiter just said the same thing in many more words and much less directly. All in all though, it’s the same rationalization.

He’s a Ron Paul supporter, who opposes just about everything Obama, including health care reform.

A Ron Paulista… who had to leave Arizona because it was too liberal. Oy.

Why am I SO not surprised?

Barton Gellman