| Come to think of it, why are you, as has been said elsewhere in this thread, his apologist?  I hate to talk about myself, but since you are new here, I will. Depending on which thread I am in, I am either an apologist for the drug companies, the IBM Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, Enron... I've forgotten all the people I supposedly work for. Now I see that I can add the Saudi Royal Family to the list of my nefarious sponsors. Very well.
I should probably also tell you that if Grover Norquist and I passed on the street, he might recognize me as someone he has seen around, but if he remembered my name, it would surprise me. That is the succinct description of where I am in the world of Grover Norquist. For me, this isn't really about Grover Norquist; nor is it about taking anybody's "side." I have a private business that has nothing to do with any of this. My whole involvement in politics is a very part-time volunteer deal. I'm a Freeper, not a Washington Creature.
For me, this is about BS. I would probably be here hassling you had I never even met Grover Norquist. People on this forum will tell you that I will jump in and take on 15 people at a time if I think somebody is trying to sell BS in this forum... and it almost doesn't matter on what subject. I regularly light into Scientologists, Microsoft shills, feminists, economic quacks of various kinds, all kinds of things. Sometimes when I go into these things I already know the guy is peddling BS. Sometimes I don't know; it smells like it, but I'm not sure. So I poke around to find out.
To me this "Get Grover Norquist" crusade is another instance of "I smell BS." Take your long and very condescending note. Here we have more scary stuff that the Arabs did, something I view as an appeal to emotion and as stage-setting; more attempts to make me pin all the dead bodies on Grover Norquist; a few paragraphs exposing a fair amount of personal animosity towards Mr. Norquist; and finally a sincere inquiry into my motivations, or an insinuation, depending on how polite I choose to be here.
So what do I do with this? Well, first I add the personal animosity stuff to the growing pile of evidence that this is a personal feud of some sort. I don't really know whether it is. But I've heard that, and so when I see evidence for it, I note that. Second, I note the overpowering whiff of "I told you so, in fact I told everybody; if only they had listened to me" in the whole thing, and add that to the list of possible reasons for the jihad-grade intensity here.
Then I notice that you're trying really, really hard to get people to stop at Grover Norquist when assigning crap-points to what went on here. But I'm not that easily led, and I can't help but notice that there's no reason not to continue up the chain and to award crap-points to Karl Rove, the White House staff, and even to the President for all these nefarious associations. "Bush meets with indicted Moslem terrorist; questions surface: did he know?" That sort of thing. You would like me to take your word for it that Grover is the bad guy here, but I don't think Americans for Tax Reform has the same level of resources for checking up on people that the White House has. So I'm wondering why we're supposed to hold Grover Norquist to a higher standard than we would the White House staff.
As soon as I get to that point, I wonder two things: One, should I add the attempt to target Grover Norquist as the one guy who is supposed to absorb all crap-points for these events to the pile of "personal animosity" evidence, or do I open a new evidence drawer and label it, "Back-handed attack on Bush and/or Rove for reasons unknown." That one is interesting, because in your long narrative here you contradict yourself and in your zeal to hose Norquist you tell us that the White House should indeed have been able to avoid the embarrassment of meeting with al-Arian, and presumably Alamoudi as well. After all, anyone versed in the arts could have put two-and-two together; they didn't need any FBI wiretaps to guess that these guys were Bad News. You would like me to hold Grover Norquist responsible for having failed to suss this out, but I think I'll continue to wonder where the people in the White House were who are supposed to protect the President from this sort of thing. They are more "versed in the arts" than Grover Norquist ever would be.
Actually, I can stop wondering now because you've told me. They did know. Even if they hadn't figured it out by reading widely available materials that I haven't read, Frank Gaffney helpfully pointed it out to them. That way they could have the popcorn ready and the lounge chair in place when Karl Rove stepped on the banana peel. Tough place, Washington.
OK, so what I get from that little tale is that the spooky types don't like Rove and they decided to let him get the President mixed up with something the Democrats might have made a lot of hay with. That's because they're not political. Clinton, Bush, what's the difference. They don't do elections. I guess they don't worry about the impact overseas of pictures of Bush and al-Arian together, either.
Anyway, down that alley lies a maze of twisty passages all alike, that smell like they probably go down into a sewer.
As has happened with previous exchanges here, the issue of whether this "Get Grover" crusade is BS has not been settled. There's more evidence that it might be a personal feud, some new evidence that it's a righteously satisfying (for you) game of "I told you so," lots more prestidigitation trying to direct all the crap-points at Norquist instead of at more logical targets on the government side, and another whiff of what might be a very large butt-covering exercise by the "Frank Gaffney wing" of the government, which appears to be trying to shift blame onto the domestic politics crowd for intelligence failures.
Since we are talking here about taking down a guy who, while not irreplacable, has brought -- and still brings -- a tremendous amount of drive and energy to conservative causes and conservative politics, I would like to be convinced that I'm not joining some guy's personal vendetta; or a political hit from RINO's or Democrats or somebody else; or a bureaucratic butt-covering exercise emanating from inside the government, to blame Norquist and/or the "political" side of the house for failing to know things that they should have known but didn't; or a hit on Rove disguised as a hit on Norquist; or a hit on Bush disguised as a hit on Norquist (a lot of your material is ammo in the hands of a Democrat). The fact that you point the finger at Norquist and say "it's all his fault" is not all that persuasive to me, particularly when it's obvious that you hate the guy's guts. I do not expect domestic politics types to know spooky things. We taxpayers hire spooky people to do that. They are supposed to do it... not hide in the weeds and then jump out afterwards to say "gotcha!" to all the people who didn't know what they knew. That's BS.
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