And yet you endorse the same type of comments, but worse, in the Weekly Standard article, which is filled with nothing but irrelevant sneering and selectively applied anecdotes.
From the very first sentence, the cracks about things like Naomi Wolf advising Gore to wear earth tones are worse misplaced snideness substituting for any actual argument - and the arguing method of cheery picking the areas in which the US is not a full-blown police state, which Wolf did not claim, to disprove the ways in which the US *is* on the wrong road, but fails to actually address her arguments, is the same lack of argument you criticize. But no rusprise, TLC, your own posting norm is to post dishonest attacks and run when caught.
Of course, as the article talks about how Sheehan is not a political prisoner, it fails to dicuss the fate of the half dozen homeless, mentally ill people in Florida the government trumpeted as a major terrorist group caught, who were guilty of nothing more than talking a lot of trash, with no means, no equipment, no organization, and who had committed one key crime, adding Al Queda to the many things they praised - when a government agent suggested to them it'd be cool for them to do so. 'Oh, ok'. Bingo! Arrested.
Of course, the lack of any *actual* terrorist attacks in the US, when any one terrorist could cross our uncontrolled border, get ahold of a gun, and shoot up a mall or school shows the absence of actual terrorists, and the need for the government to prop up its justification for ongoing hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money with the sort of arrest it did there.
When it tries to sarcastically refer to the corporate media trashing of Plame, it can't even make that case, when it's an article of faith among the right that her husband was nothing but a partisan liar, who was selected for a boondoggle by his wife - things that are lies, spread by massive propaganda by the right-wing media. And that's *their* hand-picked example of the media not being able to trash anyone.
When they are sarcastic about the muzzling of dissent, I think about the violent emotional reactions by the right to Michael Moore, the inability of one of our best investigative reporters, Greg Palast, to get published in the American news media (outside of books and liberal magazijnes), such that he describes himself as virtually in exile, reporting for the BBC.
The article's argument fallacy is like watching Nazi Germany say "ya, we oppress Jews - that's why Einstein was kill, rather than leaving safely and now trying to get a nuclear bomb built to use against us." You don't dispute one thing - the Holocaust or the charges in Wolf's book - with anecdotal evidence contradicting some straw man generalization.
Putin could use the same style today to say that obviously he's a dictator, because the world is unaware of his enemies' message, as they are silenced in anonymity, instead of being major national news stories with movies made about them; he could cite former Chess champion Kasparov, who ran against him in the last election, as a strong critic, who is safe and sound. Like the Weekly Standard article, he could do that instead of addressing the reports of hundreds of journalists killed, as the Standard ignores its enemies' points.
The argument style in the article is fallacious and falls short of proving anything but defeating its own straw men.
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