This is just too good. The entirety of this week’s “Gadfly” column by the Memphis Flyer’s Marty Aussenberg is devoted to yours truly, and, oh, how I cherish every word. It seems he’s pretty shaken by the fact that I tore apart his last offering. Ironically, instead of countering my post with anything resembling a set of facts, he continues his “anyone who disagrees with me lives in a parallel universe” theme while claiming it is I (and my “ilk”) who have put my “fingers in [my] ears.” What remains for the Gadfly is a lengthy, though ineffective, attack on my character, my intelligence and even my choice of dwelling — this, while (again, ironically) strongly implying that I resorted mostly to ad hominem arguments. Add to this a healthy dose of inaccuracies and we’ve got ourselves a winner! Does it get any better than this?

Let’s go line by line…

As a lawyer, I’m quite used to adversaries making specious, fanciful, or outright dishonest arguments to persuade tribunals that their positions on an issue are more meritorious than mine. So, it didn’t come as a surprise that someone who blogs under the bizarre name of “Fishkite” (sub nom: “the blog between church and state”—further proof that those two should never be conjoined) would try to take me to task for my most recent piece regarding Zach Wamp and one of his congressional ideological soul mates’ attempt to rewrite history.

Aussenberg begins by listing his jurisprudential credentials and setting up the straw man, thus launching an entire column filled with an assortment of “I’m right, you’re stupid” comments void of any real substance. Instead of using his own “meritorious” arguments, Aussenberg sets out to present himself as an authority, creating a perch from which he can look down upon his lowly conservative “adversaries,” namely me — though I don’t exactly blog under the (is it really that “bizarre”?) name Fishkite. I post commentary on a blog called Fishkite under the name Mick Wright, which conveniently happens to be my real name.

Also, I’ve never considered Zach Wamp to be one of “my ideological soul mates;” if that were the case, you might expect to see at least one other mention of his name on my blog, which according to a quick search doesn’t show up in any of my archived writing going back to 2002 and beyond, until earlier this month with my rebuttal to Aussenberg’s column. That said, I probably do agree with Wamp most of the time, though certainly not always. I wrote in opposition to the Gadfly column on Wamp not to defend a conservative Representative but rather to criticize the misguided musings of a left-wing editorialist.

It didn’t even bother me that, bereft of any logic, he had to resort to ridicule (i.e., my picture on the Flyer’s site, or even my weight—both of which I’ve been told by many bolster my gravitas) to promote his points (more about his comparison of me to Tom Petty later). That’s what ideologues of his ilk usually do. I also wrote his attack off to the fact the author apparently resides in Germantown, Tennessee, the local conservatives’ equivalent of Lake Wobegon, a lily white enclave on the outskirts of Memphis which owes much of its popularity to the desegregation of the Memphis public school system 30 years ago, and is most noteworthy, hereabouts, for its overzealous speed limit enforcement. What did bother me, though, was the inanity and dishonesty of his “arguments.”

Aussenberg focuses on my brief, whimsical reaction to his silly top hat and shades photo on the Flyer’s website. My “weight” comment is more a knock at Tom Petty’s waif-like figure than anything else; let’s be real here — if Tom Petty didn’t carry a guitar around his neck, any slight breeze could carry the man off to his next gig several states away. Aussenberg uses my throwaway line about the photo as license to attack my character and disregard and avoid my actual arguments.

But on top of that, the man doesn’t even get it right. We did live in a Germantown apartment for a spell, a spit’s distance outside Memphis city limits, after having lived in various other apartments in Memphis. For a year or more we lived on Tucker Street in Midtown, not six blocks from Aussenberg’s current dwelling. But if Aussenberg had been paying attention, he might have seen the Commercial Appeal’s Local News front page headline last Wednesday: “Cordovan champions Rice presidential bid,” emphasis added. That article came out five days in advance of his current dateline and featured my name, location and the address of this website prominently. I don’t reside now, nor have I ever resided, in “a lily white enclave.”

But, remind me, which one of us is “resort[ing] to ridicule”? Two full paragraphs into his column, and readers still get not a hint of what my “arguments” might have been, nor are they treated to any of his own. Instead, they get an ad hominem attack seasoned with a dash of race-baiting.

The inhabitants of “wingnuttia,” as the far right has come to be known in the blogosphere, are fond of living in the 51st state (i.e., the state of denial). Their heroes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter (need I say more?) use distortion, falsehood, and yes, personal attacks, as a substitute for facts, reason and logic. It matters not that all of these right wing ideologues have, at one time or another, been completely and thoroughly discredited. The same audience that will watch people eating live bugs for money on television will continue listening to these unprincipled rabble rousers, and worse, believing what they say. They are surely Exhibit A to H.L. Mencken’s observation that, “no one ever went broke underestimating the taste [read: intelligence] of the American public.”

Another paragraph of name-calling, nonsense and non sequiturs later and still not a hint of an argument. But let’s be sure to enjoy that fragrant splash of anti-American sentiment. Of course, one doesn’t need to provide any evidence or give any citation showing anyone or anything to be “thoroughly discredited,” another theme he carries over from the last column — one merely needs to state that this is so in the Aussenberg school of argumentation.

One of the ways these wingnuts (including my friend, Fishkite) maintain their euphoric state of oblivion is to do what any petulant child has learned to do: close their eyes, put their fingers in their ears and then scream at the top of their lungs so they can avoid what they don’t want to see or hear. That’s what Fishkite has done in his attempt to counter the criticism I leveled at two congressmen who are, like him, obviously out of touch with reality. ( [sic]

Of course, in my post I linked to or cited more than 20 different sources to back up my criticism and fillet his column. Four paragraphs in and we’ve yet to see even one fact, citation or link from Aussenberg.

But since Aussenberg has introduced the courtroom theme here, allow me to call a character witness to the stand. I call one Jackson Baker, a senior editor of The Memphis Flyer and a contributing editor of Memphis Magazine, a fellow Cordovan. In reviewing this blog for his “Best Of Memphis” feature last fall, Baker wrote that Fishkite “eschews propaganda in favor of exploring the seams and testing its hypotheses… Fishkite seems to make a real effort to round up fresh material, whether or not it corresponds with some pre-ordained point of view.”

My pal Mike Hollihan runs a blog named after Baker called Half-Bakered. I’m starting to think there should be a blog called Half-Aussed, because that seems to be about what we’re dealing with here.

There are some things in the real world which most of us occupy that aren’t subject to alternative interpretation. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west; gravity pulls all objects towards the center of the earth; and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Yet in the wingnuttia world, all of those principles are subject to contradiction if you strain hard enough (i.e., gravity is just a “theory,” and astronomy is anathema to “intelligent design”), but especially if and when those principles are advanced by the avowed enemy of all wingnuts: progressives (a/k/a liberals). Science, logic and a thousand years of human history are all swept aside by the likes of Fishkite when espoused by a progressive.

Aussenberg claims these things are not “subject to alternative interpretation,” but even there he is woefully mistaken. From the perspective of outer-space, the sun neither rises nor sets — how’s that for an alternative interpretation? Here’s another: gravity does not pull all objects towards the center of the earth, but rather all objects have a gravitational pull against each other. I don’t know, maybe you do have to be a member of “wingnuttia” to understand these basic principles of science and astronomy. Good try, though. He’s getting ever closer to making an actual argument.

So it isn’t surprising that he would try to contradict two of the main points of my piece, namely that Iraq had, and still has, no WMD’s (as that term was used to buffalo us into a war of choice) and that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Quaeda. It doesn’t matter that the current administration has long since given up the ghost on both of these points, despite the political damage it has done to their principal proponents. There is no argument or position a wingnut can use, no matter how thoroughly discredited, that they can’t resuscitate to support their theories.

I have given my sources for these facts, which show Aussenberg’s contentions to be false. Iraq did indeed have ongoing WMD programs, including parts of a nuclear program buried in the backyard of scientist Mahdi Obeidi, biological weapons materials (including a strain of botulinum bacteria hidden by an Iraqi scientist and reported by weapons inspector David Kay), and hundreds of chemical weapons and chemical weapons shells — all of these undeclared by the Hussein regime and in violation of the UN Security Council’s resolutions. These facts are true regardless of what the administration or the media choose to make of it in the aftermath. Aussenberg again implies that these facts are “discredited” without giving even one source, one citation or one reason why he believes this is so. We’re six paragraphs in, and Aussenberg hasn’t come up with a single argument, nor has he directly dealt with any of mine.

Instead, he skips past this debate entirely and finds something juicy in the Fishkite archives:

Perhaps the best illustration of the kind of fish effluent Fishkite and his ilk summon in support of their state of denial is the episode involving Dick Cheney’s denial about what he said concerning the Saddam/al Qaeda connection back when he was the administration’s main cheerleader in the runup to the war. Take a look at this clip: In it you see Cheney denying, in an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger, that he ever said it had been “pretty well confirmed” that a meeting took place between Mohamad Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, and Iraqi intelligence officials in Czheckoslovakia. You will also see the excerpt from Cheney’s earlier appearance on “Meet the Press” where he made precisely the statement he tried to deny making in the interview with Borger. So, it’s not bad enough Cheney carried the administration’s water in making the phony case for a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda; he had to try (and not very cleverly either) to lie about making it.

As I said more than two years ago when I wrote that post, Cheney’s critics in this case are 180 degrees off — “Cheney was… explaining why he doesn’t believe Iraq was involved in planning 9-11.” All you have to do is visit my post to see the context this quote was ripped from and determine that the critics, including Aussenberg, come up empty.

In attempting to argue that I’m somehow guilty of lying or carrying water for the Bush administration, Aussenberg fails to observe that I’ve been a noted critic of Vice President Cheney for quite some time.

But, again, none of this has anything to do with the matter at hand. This Cheney detour is nothing more than a diversion and an ineffectual one at that. Seven paragraphs, but not one real argument to be found.

So does Fishkite concede the gravity, straight line, sun rises and sets facts about this episode of Cheney revisionism? Of course not. Instead, he chooses, once again, to engage in ideological sophistry. It wasn’t a Cheney lie, it was a Cheney “gaffe.” In other words, don’t believe what your eyes and ears tell you; they are, after all, only senses, and senses can be fooled. Senses may even be part of a liberal conspiracy. Believe what Fishkite, with his eyes shut and his fingers planted firmly in his ears, tells you is the truth. The other thing he does is to distort the 9/11 Commission’s report. He mischaracterizes its findings as being that there were no “high level” contacts, when, in fact, what the Commission found was that there was “no collaborative relationship” (emphasis mine) between Iraq and al Qaeda. I’m sure he thinks that’s just a slight difference in degree, and not, as it is (an inconvenient truth), a significant difference in kind.

Overlooking that first bit about astronomy again… for once, Aussenberg has a somewhat valid complaint. I should have looked back through my notes before putting high level contacts in quotes. It was not my intention for that to be a direct quote, as I didn’t link it to a source like I normally would. I do think it probably carries much of the same meaning as “collaborative relationship,” and my overall, unrefuted point remains: the 9/11 Commission “didn’t conclude there were no contacts or connections whatsoever. And even that conclusion has been shown to be incomplete and/or wrong, in light of new facts and developing information.”

In fact, if I had spent more time on that one, I would have remembered that the 9/11 Commission did indeed report that there actually were high level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Indeed, I would have quoted this from a Washington Post article in 2004: “‘If you go back and look at what the September 11th commission said, they talked about how there had been high-level contacts between the regime in Iraq and al Qaeda,’ the spokesman said. Noting that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had told the United Nations about such contacts, McClellan added: ‘That is perfectly consistent with what the September 11th commission talked about in their report yesterday.’”

So I suppose I should thank Aussenberg on this point for making my argument even stronger.

With that standard in mind, I suggest you have all the information you need to judge the merit of Fishkite’s criticism of my piece on Zach Wamp’s disconnect from reality.

That’s right, dear reader, you don’t need any actual arguments, facts, citations or reasoning. All you need is a heap of ad hominem attacks, distractions, non sequiturs and race-baiting delivered by a highly-seasoned lawyer preaching nonsense from the pulpit of the liberal alternative newsweekly.

What remains of his column is a tribute to and a quote from Tom Petty.

You can often tell more from what a person doesn’t say than from what he does say. Anyone with a background in formal debate will tell you that an argument you fail to address and refute is a de facto point for the opposition. Aussenberg hasn’t dealt directly with any of the facts or arguments I presented. Thus, by omission, Aussenberg has ceded every point I made.

Among them:

• That we’ve found WMD and WMD programs in Iraq over a period of several years
• That these facts are backed up my numerous sources and aren’t the result of one man’s testimony
• That Fox News was by no means the only source reporting these facts
• That the found chemical shells, though perhaps aging weapons, remain dangerous
• That there were connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaida terrorists
• That the army has continued to meet and surpass its recruiting goals

All of these points were sourced and linked, and they contradict the entirety of Aussenberg’s original column. Now that’s what I would call being “thoroughly discredited.”

With that, I bid “the Mad Hatter of Boilerplate” adieu.

UPDATE: We’d better make room here in the 51st state, because half of America is moving in.