Lisa, yay! Friends = good. Hope you don’t mind though, I have every intention of continuing the snark from time to time. Don’t take it the wrong way. It just means I care.

btw, any idea what the commenter after you is talking about?

Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus
Main Entry: egocentric
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: Concerned with the person rather than with society.
Synonyms: egoistic, egoistical, individualistic

Anyway, your link to the Massachusetts sentencing guidelines does indeed tell us all we need to know about his particular argument. (I want to learn even half the research skills you have– you seem to regularly pull out these amazingly relevant links.) Absolutely, it’s true that changing the law so that minimum sentences go from 8 years to 15 years will probably have no bearing on how viciously a defense lawyer grills opposing witnesses.

But that information is not something any of us could have reasonably known without research either– and it wasn’t included in the article in question.

Anyway, though, yes, you’ve convinced me. I agree with you that Fagan’s argument was stupid and, if it had gotten any traction at all, dangerous. Now can we be friends again?

In a post I put up earlier this week, I was rather snarkily harrassed for displaying the second half of the definition above…and fascinatingly enough, I was harrassed again today in a different post, for failing to display it. Now, clearly I’m either partisan or I’m not…there isn’t any gray area in terms of blind, prejudiced unreason.

Though you don’t mention me by name, I will be so bold as to presume that you are talking about my comments in both cases. Certainly I am guilty as charged on the first charge, but I plead not guilty to the second.

If you’ll notice, I only used the word “partisan” in reference to FOX News, never to you. I never claimed you were partisan, and I didn’t mean it as an implication, either. I was not urging resistance to FOX News’s spinning because We Must Defend Our Democrats, but because, as I saw it, people on that page were being too accepting of FOX’s partisan hackery. When I asked people not to buy their bullshit, I wasn’t suggesting we buy the other team’s bullshit instead.

Thus, I see no inconsistency between my two comments.

By the way, do you really consider my comments to have been harassment, or are you just using forceful language?

When the story is clearly a smear job (the purported Michelle Obama tapes, for example), left-leaning sources pillory it to death. When the story is genuinely defensible, left-leaning sources defend it. When the story is neither, they are ominously silent.

This is a very good point. I think the problem here is that, while FOX is clearly misrepresenting the truth, due to the uncomfortable subject matter, nobody particularly wants to get embroiled in defending what the truth actually is, either– or else risk looking like an enabler of child sex abuse.

Now it appears you and I have some disagreement about what the truth is here, to whit:

3. The only part of his statement that was cut out was the opening phrase: “Let me tell you why it’s so wrong, It’s so wrong because in these situations . . . that 6-year-old is going to sit in front of me, or somebody far worse than me and.” This in no way changes anything he said subsequently, other than that instead of specifying that only he was going to do what he described, other lawyers were going to as well as himself.

I do not categorize him; he has categorized himself.

That missing introduction is what transforms the intent of his remaining words from a “shocking public vow to torment and ‘rip apart’ child rape victims”, in FOX’s elegant turn of phrase, into a not-unreasonable-sounding argument that taking away any chance for a plea agreement will cause prosecutors to immediately attack the victim without pursuing other options. Yes, he included himself in with the other prosecutors– but the missing introduction makes it clear that he was said the nasty things he did precisely for the purpose of pointing out, and decrying, the effects that said prosecutors have on children.

ONCE AGAIN– and I’ve said this, like, three times already– I am NOT agreeing with his argument, because I don’t know enough about the issues. Same for their relationship to rape shield laws. Knowing how much I do agree with you on many things already, Lisa, I’m inclined to think that, if properly educated, I would probably come to the same conclusion as you have. (In fact, I’ll put aside a half hour to try to do so tonight.) ALL I’ve been saying is that his (quite possibly still wrongheaded) argument has been repackaged and resold out of context for partisan advantage.

I find rational thought a relief. Don’t you?

I don’t know. I feel like it’s just been getting me into trouble lately.