Boy, did I make a big mistake. It’s apparently really really politically incorrect to have appreciated the Ted Rall column in the Village Voice to which I blinked a few days ago. I should’ve known from the get-go, that with a title like “How We Lost Afghanistan” it would set the teeth of alot of the warblog set on edge. I’ve seen several polemical responses like this one that start by doing the linguistic equivalent of rolling their eyes in the first paragraph just because it’s another of his columns, and then fall flat on their faces trying to demolish his arguments. I agree, Rall is at times knee-jerking, but for the critic to say “you really have no idea what he wants” condemns the critic’s reading ability much more directly than it does Rall’s expressiveness, because if anything Rall’s expressiveness is over the top. To be fair, the critic did characterize himself, in candor, as ranting. He uses the classical “straw man” rhetorical artifice of setting up a caricature of your opponent, demolishing that, then smirking in self-satisfied hollow victory before the other shoe has dropped. Like, perhaps, we’ve done in the war on terrorism?