Nice to see that all of you are being so stridently held to the Mudcat standard of "no personal attacks".

I've been playing with quotations pages all morning, and I discovered a great one by the late, great Carl Sagan. It seems quite apropos regarding people who are so driven to dominate the political threads for "their" candidate, "their" party, or "their" ideological bent (read: 'liberal'). He said:

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."