David, I stopped taking YOU seriously when you took a serious discussion about the role of armor on vehicles and instead decided to cheap-shot me by saying I was against personal body armor. Instead of discussing my arguments, you wrapped yourself in a cloak of ignorance and superiority and lay the bodies of dead Americans at my feet. I can easily get over personal attacks, but to misuse and exploit those Americans' deaths so crassly is unforgivable -- to me, it rivals Kos' infamous "screw them" tirade over the slaughter of American contractors in Fallujah.

One of the wisest pieces of advice I ever received was "don't talk like an expert about matters you know very little about." You would do well to heed it, David.

Don't you have some tech gadget you've wheedled out of a company as a "gratuity" to talk about? Or more pictures of beautiful women to post? How goes the "Karl Rove Must Resign" campaign? If you're desperate for posting materials, I've been saving my 419 scam letters -- you're welcome to have those and reprint them in full.

Leave the grownup topics to the grownups, David. In the long run, you'll be much happier.

J.

Gee Jay, thanks for the advice. Coming from someone who has not had his head out of Bush's ass for so long, that light would kill im if he did, I'm affraid I am going to have to pass on taking it. You and your blog have become a joke, a parody of what you once were. And I never said you were against body armor, I said you pooh poohed the significance of it, just like you are pooh poohing the significance of capturing Bin Laden, both ridiculous attempts to excuse the unexcusable.

You wanna revisit that armor discussion? OK, show me a couple of things I got wrong in my pieces. (Here's a refresher: the two pieces are at http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004522.php and http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004604.php, and your piece is at http://www.grupo-utopia.com/blog/isou/archives/2005/07/i_guess.php)

I'm no expert on these things, but I know a bit. Can you say the same? For example, without using Google or some other resources, can you say why ceramic armor is preferable to plate? The difference between homogenous plate and Chobham? The distinction between ablative armor and reactive armor?

Earlier today, I wrote about how liberals tend to give more value to feelings over facts. This is a perfect example -- you don't have the ability to use facts to argue with me, so you marshal feelings and emotions and attempt to assail me with bluster and other bullshit.

By the way, at our prior disagreement, I said I would be ending my commenting and tracking back with you, and asked if you would return the courtesy. I presume that is no longer valid?

J.

I never agreed to it in the first place. You may do as you wish. On the armor argument. I dont claim to be an expert. As I said, you stated in your piece that you felt the armor complain was overblown, I simply quoted those fighting, not members of the 101st Keyboard Brigage, who seem to be NON Practicing experts on a number of subjects.

No, David, you took a piece that was a reasoned, serious discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of armor, in particular how it relates to vehicles, and took a chance to cheap-shot me in order to make a lurid political point -- barely, marginally related to my original piece.

And get your insults right. The term is "101st Fighting Keyboardists," although I personally prefer 101st Fighting Keyboardiers."

J.

Dude you need to get the hell over it. I appologized to you for the tone of that post. You never accepted my appology and went stomping away presumably to hate me for the rest of my natural born life. I personaly thought you and I could discuss politics, even heatedly without it coming to that, but I found out you could dish but could not take.

Now, I will make one last attempt here. Jay, I did cheap shot you in the post you are refering to. It was not necessary to make my point, and for that I am sorry. You have always been fairly decent in dealing with your dissagreements with me, and that particular comment about you and the families of the dead was beyond the pale. Now either accept my apology, and move on to debating other shit, or deal with the fact that for a blog like yours that regularly demonizes Liberals and Liberal positions, you need to learn how to take some scathing criticism.

My personal feeling is that you and your cohorts are full of shit on most topics, choosing to defend whatever the President you elected does. I have confidence that you will be eating that same shit in due course, because the writing is on the wall. Many of your own comrades in arms are calling "Bullshit," with alarming frequency. But we will see how it plays out.

In the interim, stop playing the victim Jay, it does not suit you, and it rings of hypocrisy... Especially considering that on any given day Wizbang is a model of anti Left hate speech that makes anything I have ever said, pale in comparison.

I do owe you an apology for one thing, where you were right and I was wrong. You said you never agreed to our mutual-ignore pact, and you are correct.

What I said was, "I fully expect this will be my last comment here. I will not track back to anything you post, and would ask you to do the same."

I assumed that if you didn't accept that, you'd say so. That would have been the honorable thing to do. But it certainly wasn't required, so more fool me for assuming you'd act honorably. Just goes to prove the old adage about "assume."

J.

Well if you are taking that as a definition of Honor, you broke it less than a week after making your declaration, therefore pretty much nulling the whole thing. But I have not commented or trackbacked to any of your pieces until today.

Now that is an apology. I accept it, and consider the matter closed.

Now, as to defending Bush, one of my most common recurring themes of late has been illegal aliens. I've openly criticized Bush for his utter inaction on the matter, and praised those who have struggled to find a way to deal with the crisis in spite of his inexplicable and inexcusable intransigence.

As far as my "colleagues" at Wizbang, we all pretty much operate autonomously. I have no authority over them, and they have none over me -- with the exception of Kevin, who has been almost absolutely hands-off to me, which I greatly appreicate. I've avoided your disputes with my colleagues, because I viewed it strictly between you and them -- although I will say that your recent trackback to Rob's piece on illegal aliens was a factor (along with numerous commenters) in writing my own "take" on the story.

I said it before, and I'll keep saying it: feelings do NOT trump reality. Just because someone feels something strongly does NOT give additional weight to their argument.

If you want to play out the Saddam/Osama parallel, that's fine. In both cases, both men ran countries that had committed numerous acts of war against the US. In both cases, the US removed both men from power. Yes, eventually we took Saddam into custody, but we didn't put everything else on hold until he was caught. The key element in both cases was getting them out of power, removing their ability to commit further attacks on the United States.

You're stuck in the "terrorism as a law-enforcement" model. We don't have to "arrest" them to bring a sense of "closure" to the matter. Destroying their power base is adequate in the short term; having to live the remainder of their lives as fugitives with massive bounties on their head ought to be enough to keep them from causing more problems. And, as I pointed out, Al Qaeda hasn't managed to pull off anything significant against the US since 9/11.

J.

I don't recall the violation you cite. I'm going through the Wizbang archives as I type this, to see what you are referring to. Or was it a comment? If so, was it on one of your pieces, or one of your guest's?

J.

It was a piece I wrote, and I called you on it at the time.

Cool, let us move on and debate substansive issues. As for your colleagues at Wizbang, you have done your own share of Liberal Bashing at times buddy.

Honestly don't recall that... sounds a bit out of character for me, but I'm not denying it... digging now...

J.

OK, now I see it. It was during your abortive "Paul must resign!" campaign. Now I recall -- I debated with myself whether or not I should violate my pledge, and ultimately did. In retrospect, that was the wrong choice. But I made it, and I will live with it.

I apologize for forgetting about that, and getting a bit too high-and-mighty about an agreement that 1) you never signed on to, and B) I broke a long time ago.

Of course, this could be a perfect chance to point out that our original tiff was on July 6, and I broke it on July 19, so your saying that I broke it after "less than a week" is a damnable lie, but that'd be dishonest and cheap theatre. I'll leave that up to the "Bush lied" crowd.

J.

Damnit, thats the Jay I know! Welcome back. And whats six days between friends. LMAO!

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