Or the: "flaws and faults none of you sweet-faced little cherubs and intellectual giants possess"

Look- a few years back you and Tom B were happy as a bug in the rug being part of the pack of hooting partisans that ran all dialog on this place, maniacally screamed anyone down who dared question the party line with chants of "TRAITOR! COWARD! YARRRGH!". So what, you were not the most offensive voice, neither was Tom, but neither of you lifted a finger to halt the decline of discourse.

So what, the pendulum turned, and now in response to a much more civil dialog, one that involves a heck of a lot less name calling, but also one that had been relentless in 'back checking' the promises of ideology and position against how things have actually turned out, Tom and the rest of the howlers (ebnelson, Frank 'The Trenchknife' Nelson, Gary-the-Traitor-Howling-Monkey and etc etc etc ) have now packed up and taken their wares elsewhere.

Sorry, but you guys ain't getting 1/10th what you dished out, or tacitly and silently allowed to be dished out. If I had a dime for every time I got called Coward, Traitor, Liar or Complicit in events of 2001 on this board between 2002 and 2005, I would'nt be here, I would be enjoying my privite island in the bahamas.

Will I miss Tom? Sure! Did I enjoy Tom? Sure! Do I feel like its the fault of the folks here that he took his toys and left? No! If you have not noticed, stock in the Ideological right has tanked lately. That 'team' had 8+ solid years of complete power, a free hand to run foreign policy the way they saw fit after 911 and pretty much the domestic and economic agenda they wanted. Empiricism is a bitch. The idiology Tom and all the other Howlers pretty much screwed up everything it touched, and its pretty hard for anyone anywhere to ignore it, except the die hard blow hards, whose reaction has been to retreat from discourse and blame it all on the people who won't listen to their BS anymore.

Yeti