An asshole, is someone who thinks that people who say things that offend them should be tortured and killed.

These people are so stupid they need to be slapped in the face to wake them up. They need to have their mouths washed out with soap and be sent to bed without dinner. They need to be sent into hard labor and allowed to die of starvation.

…or, even worse (emphasis supplied)…

If you think Obama is Hitler you deserve to meet with others who agree with you, starving and freezing and dying in a cattle car, sitting in each others’ excrement, on your way to a concentration camp and its ovens and gas chambers, along with your children.

Want another definition of an asshole? Someone who sees a disgusting post like that in Google Reader and clicks the “like” button. Like these folks:

10 people liked this – Alberto Serafin Lopez, Anil Dash, Claude LaFrenière, Evil Poet, Fred McHale, Josh Fraser, Lloyd Davis, Mats Lindholm, jcator, px

Today’s “brilliant” idea is, guess what! Overpopulation caused the economic decline because we subconsciously know that the world has too many people on it:

Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn’t growth the whole problem? Shouldn’t we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.

The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we’re adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can’t sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven’t done anything to limit growth.

Ignoring the bizarre link between the economy and Al Gore’s hyperbole, I still don’t get it. Even if we assume as fact that we are irreparably destroying our environment — neither the “irreparably” nor the “destroying” part are agreed-upon fact — there’s been no credible source saying that we can’t grow in an environmentally friendly way.

But, Dave, I support you in your endeavor to lower the world’s population. Since population growth is nothing more a greater birth rate than mortality rate, and we can’t stop people (at least in the U.S.) from having more kids, the only factor left at our disposal is impacting the death rate.

Mahatma Gandhi is quoting as having said “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Dave: be the change you want to see in the world: kill yourself. Thanks.

The site’s a dud. The latest Compete stats show that NewsJunk fell to 2,300 users in the entire month of October, even though it was the height of the presidential campaign when most political news sites were shattering traffic records.

The site’s traffic peak was 32,000 users after it got some press from Mashable and other easy marks in the Web 2.0 world who think everything Winer shits out is worth sifting through for corn. But if you compare NewsJunk’s traffic to Memeorandum, which Winer claimed as his competition, his site got killed. (And Memeorandum spiked towards Election Day, while NewsJunk entered into a death spiral.)

Winer bitched last week on Mashable about how they didn’t get the appeal of his site (them and just about everybody else on the planet):

This is a work of fiction. You should put a big disclaimer on it up front — you’re wrong on so many fronts, and you missed what was interesting technically about the product and you’re supposed to be a tech pub.

It’s amazing that Winer thinks there’s anything technically novel about the site, which is just a human-selected list of RSS items from media feeds that counts clicks. The programming and concept are both trivial. You could code it in an afternoon and still have time left over to walk the dog.

As NewsJunk suffers the same fate as Flickrfan and Share Your OPML, even with all of Winer’s pimping on Scripting News, is he completely washed up? It’s been a long time since he was involved in anything that could even charitably be described as a success.

I know some of you are honorable people, good Americans, taxpayers, people who love your families, pay your taxes, do your best to live by the Golden Rule. People who try to do the right thing, whatever that is. It’s to those Republicans that I wish to have a few words.

After all of the screeds we’ve read about your disdan for Republicans, how they’re stupid and evil, to then turn around and try to butter them up is just absurd. If you believe what you wrote, you owe those Honorable Republicans a gigantic apology for the way you’ve maligned them for simply having a (R) next to their names in the past. I suspect, though, that you don’t mean it, and that’s fine, because someone has to off-set the crazy Republican partisans, and that job falls to crazy Democratic partisans.

Now, as to the substance of your open letter to Santa Claus Honorable Republicans…

Honorable Republicans do not believe everything that comes out of Palin’s mouth. Those that do are not going to be found with 100 miles of your blog and, if they did happen across it, would dismiss you as a radical leftist anyhow.

As to whether or not McCain is “safe from Democratic counter-attacks”, please do not insult the intelligence of your readers. Your blog is one giant “Democratic counter-attack”, as is the rest of the leftist blogosphere. This to say nothing of the pathetic “OMG McCain can’t send email” ad. This is politics… the left is giving as good as it’s getting here.

Feigning impartiality isn’t going to impress anyone. You might not be a member of the Democratic party, but you sure do make a great lap dog for them. We’ve covered that in depth here. Pretending as though yours is a vote that could be won is also silly. Nobody believes it. Go back and read your own blog, you probably won’t believe it either if you’re being honest with yourself.

I only have one more thing worth thinking about, Dave:

Deliberately misleading like this is bad politics.

Does this extend to Obama’s hyper-exaggeration of his role in the Illinois legislature? Or like Biden’s two cases of admitted plagiarism? Or the whole infanticide issue?

Lying an politics isn’t a good thing, but let’s not pretend like Obama’s a saint. He and Biden are every bit the politicians that McCain and Palin are.

Dave wrote a novel today. Let me give you the executive summary:

I have a bunch of prejudices against conservatives and republicans. Allow me to explicate them in great detail. Except, instead of calling it “prejudice” I’m going to call it “truth”. Now do you see how terrible Republicans are? (Not that I’m a Democrat, no sir!)

Republicans hate me because I’m so awesome. I’m such an incredible American and they’re all just jealous of all of my knowledge and wisdom and worldliness. They’re stupid because they don’t want to go to Europe.

In summary, I am great, and the reason that the discourse in this country is so terrible is because so many people are too stupid to know they should just listen to me. But fuck them, because they’re stupid and I’m not.

That was the gist of the article. I still don’t understand what the point of it was, if not to stroke his own ego a little bit and reassure himself that he is, in fact, superior to everyone who thinks differently than he does.

Then we get more tripe about Palin. A woman about whom I am incredibly sick of hearing. Consider this hypothetical scenario:

Step One: Dave reads up on Obama’s platform and policy proposals. This is necessary because, at present, he knows virtually nothing about what Obama really wants to do. All he knows is that they love him in Europe, he says pretty things for the camera, and he’s not some stupid Republican.

Step Two: Dave sends his time educating his readers about Obama’s policies and proposals. Everyone who reads Scripting News knows more than they did before.

If Dave had followed those two steps he would be doing so much more for the Obama campaign than he is right now with his constant attempts to play political analyst.

Anyway, I digress. How long before Dave completely loses his shit? (Assume, for the sage of argument, that this has not already happened)

Okay. From the links: Winer for CTO of the United States?

Dear Mr. Riley,

Have you lost your fucking mind?

Signed,

People with more than seven braincells

Despite all of the press he gets for “inventing” RSS and Blogging, relative to people with real CTO capacity and experience, Dave knows zero about technology. A golden retriever would be a better fit — at least they’re likable.

Then there’s this laughable piece of logic:if Paulson’s plan is for real, Bush and Cheney should quit to prove how serious they are about it.

Pardon?

In what world does that make sense? I will say, though, that the post seems to employ so many logical and rhetorical fallacies that he may have just created a new one.

• Calling Palin a Stepford Wife is not at all sexist, right?
• Likening a female VP candidate to a chick-flick plot: also not sexist.
• Republicans shouldn’t get air time. Why do they get air time? Because if they didn’t it would invite some pretty serious legislation. To say nothing of the fact that, whether Dave likes Republicans or not, the goal of the media is not to promote a party, but to inform. Getting into a petty pissing contest with a political party is not exactly “journalism”.
• Dave writes: “He assumes, like royalty, that Republicans always know what’s right”. This from a post titled Frum’s annoying wrong idiotic argument. Sad he could put that all together and not notice the delicious juxtaposition. Probably because he thinks he’s always right.

I guess, at the end of the day, we’ve not learned anything new. Like many partisans, Dave will stretch logic, consistency, and integrity to their absolute breaking point — and then some — in order to defend his party and their politicians.

I think “citizen journalism” has a long way to go.

Yeah, right. Nobody really buys it, except maybe Dave himself. He clamors for respectful debate, but that seems to only apply to people who aren’t Republicans, which should really tell you everything you need to know about his alleged independence, but today’s post about McCain’s potential Vice-presidential pick really does away with any pretense (emphasis supplied):

I hope he chooses Lieberman — I think he’d be the easiest to run against. I don’t see too many Republicans going for him, and no one wants a traitor a heartbeat from the Presidency . . .

A traitor to whom, exactly? A true independent welcomes the idea of politicians who make their decisions based on ideas and ideals rather than party affiliation. I think both Democrats and Republicans can agree that there’s not a huge gap, practically speaking, between McCain and Lieberman… so, really, who’s being betrayed?

Simple: partisan Democrats and nobody else. No wonder Dave feels the way he does.

In other news, via anonymous tip, Dave claims, in the comments to this post to have donated $1,000 to Obama’s campaign but neither OpenSecrets nor the FEC has heard of him. The reporting minimum is $200 in aggregate (2 U.S.C. 434), so even though Dave claims to have made ten $100 donations, he should still be showing up on these lists.

That is, if he’s actually donated anything. It would be a silly thing to lie about, but what’s the reasonable explanation?

There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It’s semantic nonsense to apply the verb “win” to the noun “occupation.”

Winning in war or sport is not vague or ill-defined. When the clock runs out in football the team that’s ahead wins. When two runners are in a race the first to cross the finish line wins. When you fight a war, when you take the other guys’ capital and disband their government and army, that’s winning.

The words are correct, but they don’t mean what he thinks they mean. Just because you can’t “win” an occupation doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between withdrawing now or withdrawing later. There are plenty of differences. All other things being equal, for example, you’d rather withdraw now than later. I’m sure Dave would agree with that.

The problem, though, is that all other things aren’t equal. You can even talk about what those things might be without having to debate time-tables. For example, when deciding whether to stay or go, you’d want to know whether the current government is viable. Will it sink or will it swim? Does it matter to us one way or another?

You might be careful to consider who is going to fill any power-vacuums that might arise when the most potent military in the world heads back home. Not just on the national scale, but in that region of the world as well as the various provinces and cities within that country.

When people talk about “winning” in Iraq, they’re being lazy with their English, but the sentiment is not as bizarre as the words are. There are places along the time-line at which withdrawal would be disastrous. The debate isn’t how soon we want to come home — this isn’t vacation — the debate is about when would be the optimal time to withdraw.

Dave seems to be implying, as many on the left are wont to do, that we should get out right now, no questions asked. It’s a debate for another time and place, but one there’s one thing that’s indisputable: that you can’t “win” an occupation does not mean that one time to leave is as good as any other.