Nuanced Analysis

As usual for when someone's rhetoric outpaces their thought process, and is called on it by someone with a good enough grasp of reality to notice, Atrios did quite the backpedal earlier.

The start:

[snip]Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn't mutually assured destruction, it's you f**k with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE B*****S!

The call...

Nuanced foreign policy analysis... etc. etc. ... snark...

The backpedal:

I of course never even implied the notion "who cares about a city or two?" The point is that the deterrence that kept a few thousand ICBMs coming our way from the Soviet Union should also work with smaller state nuclear powers, with the added benefit that "mutually assured destruction" simply becomes "assured destruction" - theirs, not ours.
...
I'm quite against nuclear proliferation in all of its forms and it would've been nice if we had been taking it more seriously. But thinking that Iran shouldn't have nukes is not the same as imagining that Iran with nukes is the "greatest threat to the Republic" that we face. I just have no idea how that computes.

See, folks. This is what comes from simply throwing out the first thing that comes to mind when writing on a blog. I try to sit and think things through before setting fingers to keyboard, particularly when I have my dander really up on a subject (just to point to the most recent ones), which is probably one of the reasons why I'll never be as prolific as the aforementioned Atrios. Likewise, such restraint will probably be one of the reasons why I won't be as popular as Atrios. It seems that liberals and conservatives alike will demand raw bloody meat, preferably ripped from the still-living flanks of the opposition with a rusty chainsaw and served with super-sized sides of viscera and tripe, with their political commentaries these days, and this place is like a five-course fine dining experience as served by an upscale kosher delicatessen by comparison.

Well, that and my fondness for parenthetical comments. I'm absolutely certain that's a traffic-killer, but it's too much a part of my writing style to give up easily.

Of course, all that extra thinking provides for yet more things to type. Which is why I tend to be sitting here, sweating over a hot keyboard at quarter-after-dawn, with still more details to put into text and still more research ideas burrowing their way though the raw data mass of Google. Which, in turn, tends to be the time I dump the whole unfortunate mess into the trashcan and never come back to it. At least 5 posts last week suffered from such an unhappy result, which is much higher than my normal average. (And should the premature culling of blog posts ever become a moral issue such as abortion, I just know I'll be spending a few aeons in hell...) (Drat. Did it again.) And that doesn't even count the extra editing I do to try and improve the readability of my posts, which is a Herculean task to begin with, at least by my estimation.

And that doesn't really help improve my anti-prolific posting habits either.

I seem to be the antithesis to folks like Glenn Reynolds and Duncan Black. They can toss out a quick link, a few snarky comments, and put that on their blogs with the greatest of ease. And yet, as the blockquotes that started this post show, oftentimes that can lead directly into typing something that can lead to the virtual lynching of your entire concepts. Again, such as is shown in the very first snip.

Here we have a highly valid point by Duncan, which was essentially that even the slightest actionable move by the Iranian military, whether on the US or her allies, would be considered by us to be a justifiable cause for the absolute destruction of every living thing within the national borders. And yet, because he didn't preface it in a well-considered manner, he falls to the snark attack from Bryan York. And so Duncan has to backpedal and amend his original snark to rebut the valid snark of Bryan.

The thought of such an event happening to me leaves me to shudder in fear.

Then again, I am, after all, a blogger. The thought of the massive flood of hits to this little soapbox that would ensue from such a public dressing-down leaves me almost giddy in anticipation.

But for the sheer satisfaction of my intellectual honesty, this is the best compliment I could think of. And that is precisely why I will continue to take the time to think things through before thrusting them upon an unsuspecting blogosphere.

Now if I could only do that and get even ten percent of Duncan's traffic, I'd be dancing in the streets from sheer joy.

Le sigh...