Perhaps next time I’ll try your “debating tactics” of making claims I can’t back up, making increasingly incoherent statements to support those claims, and then call my opponent a jerk when he points out that I’m not making any sense. Up until that point it was a polite, if pointed, disagreement. You decided to cross that line and become rude, not me.

Ed, either you are being incredibly sloppy in paraphrasing my arguments or you are the one guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

Or possibility number three, which I think I have shown pretty conclusively to be true by quoting voluminously from your various and contradictory attempts at staking out a consistent position: that the fault lies with the inconsistent and incoherent nature of your answers. You’ve even admitted at least twice that you can’t seem to put into words what you mean, which is a pretty good sign that you just don’t have any clear idea what you’re talking about. Eric, the bottom line here is that you just don’t understand this issue very well. You threw around some loose rhetoric, got called on it, backtracked a couple of times and finally ended up with just a mishmash of contradictory notions laying there with no semblance of a coherent position. The way to avoid that, of course, is not to go off making bold claims on subjects you aren’t well informed about. If you’re going to take a series of incoherent positions on a subject, it’s hardly reasonable to call someone a jerk for pointing out that incoherency. For crying out loud, you can’t even accurately paraphrase your own position, much less criticize someone else for not paraphrasing it accurately. There are many areas in which I’m sure I would sound just as bad if I tried to make bold claims about them; hence, I don’t make such claims.

Liberals deny that judicial activism is a problem on the one hand because they know that, on the whole, it serves their agenda right now. But on the other hand, they fight tooth-and-nail against Bush’s nominees for fear that the judiciary might swing in a conservative direction.

This of course ignores the fact that judicial activism does not necessarily serve the “liberal agenda” right now, and I gave several examples of conservative judicial activism. Your argument all along has been that Republicans are against judicial activism (which is false) and that liberals are for it, but deny that it exists because it serves their agenda (also false). What’s going on here is that you’re now pretending to have taken an entirely different position than you really took all along. Not once in any of your previous statements before these last few did you ever even admit that there was such a thing as judicial activism on the part of ostensibly conservative judges. When I brought up numerous examples of such, you ignored them and just kept repeating this “I know it when I see it” mantra. My point all along has been that “judicial activism” is nothing more than a rhetorical catchphrase that is never applied consistently or coherently in the real world. After denying that for the last 3 weeks, you’re now erroneously claiming to have been agreeing with that but that your use of the term, despite your shifting and incoherent definitions of it, somehow isn’t just empty rhetoric.

Nor is it collegial to build the kind of straw-man argument I’ve called you on multiple times and you’ve yet to retract–your claim that I think only Democrats want judicial activism and Republicans only want princiled jurisprudence. I never said that.

You certainly did. You have repeatedly said that the Republicans oppose judges because they’re “judicial activists” (whatever that is), while the Democrats only oppose the Republicans over judges because they want “judicial activists” (whatever that is) because “judicial activism” (whatever that is) leads to results they like. Yet you have ignored the numerous counter-examples I’ve given of how, using the same fleeting definitions of judicial activism offered by conservatives, they have often pushed for MORE “judicial activism” and are at this very moment trying to push through a judge who is a judicial activist even under the most minimal definition of the term. That disproves your first premise; the fact that the Democrats oppose that activist judge disproves your second premise. And that leads us right back to the argument I’ve been making all along, and you’ve been futilely trying to dispute while inadvertantly supporting – that the phrase “judicial activism” only means whatever the speaker wants it to mean at any given time when they oppose a judge’s ruling. It’s even been used over and over again by the very people that you claim are opposed to it on principle to mean the opposite of what they claim it means. So your entire premise has been disproven time and again.

As far as your claim not to have offered multiple definitions of the term is concerned…all I can say is that I’m baffled that someone can see their own words in black and white and then claim not to have said them. This is cognitive dissonance of the highest rank, clearly. Your first definition was that any ruling based upon “penumbral reasoning” was “judicial activism”. Then you agreed that penumbral reasoning was acceptable and even necessary so your new definition was that it was when judges put their own opinions into it. Upon realizing that that definition can never be proven because you can’t possibly know a judge’s motives, you fell back on a combination of that AND penumbral reasoning. Then you said that penumbral reasoning is just a “red flag” but it doesn’t necessarily indicate activism. And then you went back to the “judges putting their opinions in” definition again. This is completely incoherent and contradictory and anyone who has been watching you thrash around and tie yourself into logical knots trying to come up with something even minimally coherent and consistent in these exchanges can see that quite clearly. All you have proven in these exchanges is your utter lack of intellectual honesty and your inability to admit that you really have no idea what you’re talking about.