John:

I apologize if you have been named Bushite erroneously by me. And I dislike resorting to labels and categories in place of intelligent discussion. You will, I hope, agree that this offense -- resorting to ad hominem labels and knee-jerk phrases -- is as much a fault of the vehement right as it is of the vehement left. Thanks to spittle-sprayers like Ann Coulter the very word "liberal" took on a sort of overtone of disgust and was made to sound vaguely fecal, as if it were a synonym for treason and leprosy combined, instead of its actual meaning. Sound-bites have been slung much more vigorously and viciously (in my observation) by right-wing Tory types than they have by the "liberal" contingent. Anyway these labels are useless, really. They were only slightly useful to begin with in describiong the classic political spectrum, and there has been so much PR by redefinition of terms and slanging and semantic chopping and glueing that it is not easy to see what they really mean. It is as if the map of the territory is not only not the territory but has itself been cut up and sewed and pasted together until it isn't even a map!

I don't know how often I have used the word Bushite, but I don't intend to use it to mean other than I indicated.

As for poor logic, I think there is more than that enough to go around without piling any further rhetoric on top.

A