"There were literally thousands of posts here at FR calling for nuking Afghanistan, all the Arab lands, turning them into parking lots, turning them into a sea of glass, etc. "
Thousands of posts? I was reading FR at the time and I believe you are, at best, mistaken. And as far as Al Qaida reading FR, that's not the point. For each pusstifer, wusstifer, chunky monkey, and buggly ugly muttering mouthfuls of rubbish about Bush here on FR, there are thousands more doing so on the street and in the media. The portrait leads Al Qaida to doubt our resolve. The more they doubt, the more they will kill.
I'll continue to blast all these aid and comfort givers out of the water, lest anyone reading, hearing, or seeing, doubt our nation's willingness to defend itself.
Thousands of posts? I was reading FR at the time and I believe you are, at best, mistaken.
I truthfully would not be surprised if it was tens of thousands of such posts (posts, not threads). That was a slow time of year for me and I was on FR all the time, wanting news.
It seemed every tenth post on the subject was a nuke-'em post for a while there. I understand the anger but you just don't advocate such indiscriminate use of nukes.
I guess I don't know how I could prove how many such posts there were though. FR's search capability would be unlikely to retrieve enough evidence. I assume that this is a software feature, not a bug since Unix systems are all equipped with excellent textual search components. They bristle with them actually (grep, awk, etc.). And those nuker posts are examples of the kinds of posts you can't compile evidence about easily. The Team is pretty shrewd on this.
I guess neither one of us can produce evidence on those threads one way or the other. And I haven't ever written a program to worm FR's threads and create my own search engine. You're probably aware, though, that this is how some of our content gets found and posted and that some people run, um, helper applications inside their browsers. I don't think anyone has created a true search engine either because obviously it would be detected by management and you'd probably get banned.
So I guess I'm stuck with saying that I still find it incredible that you could have missed that many nuke-the-raghead posts here.
Aha! I just took a shot in the dark and searched for 'nuke'. Toward the bottom, I found this thread:
Where's the "Nuke Mecca" crowd today??
If challenged enough, I could probably be motivated to find a way to compile or present quite a lot of replicable textual evidence. But why don't you read this one first and then tell me again there weren't many nuker posts.