With apologies to Xrlq for the continued semijacking of this thread: Except for the part about Glen Phillips. What do you have against him?

Not much, actually, but enough to make me incurious about his other stuff. I didn’t dislike some Toad stuff back in the day, though don’t ask me which songs as it was a long time ago and I’ve had a kid since and men, I’m here to tell you that what they say about a woman’s memory going haywire when she has a kid is *dead on*, but I recently bought the Mutual Admiration Society disc he did with Nickel Creek. As a big Nickel Creek fan, I was seriously underwhelmed. It was less a mutual admiration society and far more It’s All About Glen; the material didn’t impress and neither did his voice or his lack of taste in completely and utterly marginalizing Nickel Creek. I was surprised Chris Thile, not to speak of the other two, allowed the disc to go out like that, honestly.

“Our sons and daughters need to realize that choosing to be a soldier means a decision to place themselves among “the damned,” since no matter what they end up doing while on the field of battle, they will eventually be damned.. damned if they do and damned if they do not. Realizing that compliance with a superior’s order to shoot and kill the enemy may well lead to the damnation (the self-extirpation) of one’s soul.”

Does anybody here really believe that that could possibly be among liberals’ reasons for being anti-Iraq-war and anti-troops? Concern for the soldiers’ souls? Like Coulter (presumably), I don’t.

All right, then, Pat, as you’re so curious:

I am a fervent believer that Roe and Casey should be overruled

By gosh! You’re absolutely right, Patterico!

See? Just like that, Savage creates the impression that replacing O’Connor with Alito might create a Court with five votes against Roe.

By gosh! You’re absolutely right, Patterico! And man did that tick me off when that was going around. I can count up to five just fine on my own two hands, thanks, Savage.

Michael Schiavo: Heartless Jerk

By gosh! You’re absolutely right, Patterico! I think in another place you also called him scum. Right again.

A little more recent:

Sorry, Times editors. It’s called democracy. It’s messy. It’s run by idiots. It produces unfair results.

As the old saying goes, it’s the worst system out there — except for all the others.

BG!YAR,P!

And because I just … can’t … resist:

You’re jealous … Because we went to see Glen Phillips tonight, and you didn’t.

Wrong. Never ever gonna be jealous of that. :)

Now, is the revised version of Statement 1 misleading? Of course not. Because everyone knew Xrlq’s reference to bombing Patterico’s neighborhood was a shot at Patterico, not his neighbors. The second statement is just a snarky way of repeating the first.

That depends on what the reaction to Statement 1 was. If the entire outrage had been over the fact that Xrlq took a cheap shot at Patterico, that seems like a strange thing to have gotten outraged about in the first place, particularly among people who don’t much like Patterico themselves. But if the outrage was over the fact that Xrlq had joking about bombing in the wake of a recent, real bombing, and with concerns that such a crack might inspire a real act of terror by some Xrlq-worshipping yahoo who didn’t get the joke, then taking the joke back at the critical period is an important part of the story, and does not become unimportant simply because a kinder, gentler, more obvious version of that joke was reinstated later, at a time when everyone was more comfortable joking about anything.

In other words, two wrongs did not make a right.

Just as with Coulter: nobody thought she was originally saying that the janitor at the NYT building should be killed — just the editors and reporters.

And – as with the OKC bombing – anyone else who happened to be in or near the building. They weren’t the targets, of course; just “collateral damage.”

So really, as regards the real-life example, Statement 1 is not misleading at all. Nor is it a Dowdification.

Wrong, and wrong. It is indeed misleading. Whether or not it qualifies as a “dowdification” depends on a semantic meta-discussion I’d prefer not to engage in further at this time. That said, it’s less misleading since the hypothetical retraction only clarifies that Xrlq doesn’t want to target Patterico’s neighbors, while the real one, even if taken seriously, clarified that Coulter would not have been OK with McVeigh going after the editors and journalists at NYT the way he went after the feds in OKC, i.e., not specifically targeting them, but making no effort to avoid killing them, either.