[Ramona_A_Stone]

There's not one single solitary scrap of an intent to blame anyone for any event in the known world in my above post. I even rather implicitly suggested that I do not blame George for a failure to act on this document. The fact that you could read it and think, "oh, Ramona's blaming George for 911," seems completely absurd to me.

But I realize it's not absurd in your minds if it enables you to completely sidestep the actual point, a point which would be much harder for you to excuse if you weren't so like George and could actually admit the point existed.

The man said that the memo did not indicate a terrorist threat.

That's not semantics. That's not poor sentence structure. It's a contradiction of evidence which, if we were in a court of law, could be called perjury. It's a contradiction of evidence which, if we were in the funny papers--and it seems sometimes we are--would get Dennis The Menace sentenced to sit in the corner to think about what he'd done.

Of course poor Dennis didn't realize he had chocolate on his face when he denied getting into the cookie jar, but if he watched video playback of his denial and still insisted on denying it, his mother might consider reform school or drug therapy instead of a simple time out.

Agreeing with George, as I do, that the blame for any given terrorist act can really only be assigned to the people that perpetrated it, I have to ask who is "playing the Blame Game" here?

I'm not sure of the rules, but I'd assume the Blame Game would entail something like standing around in a circle and tossing the Blame Ball around and trying not to be the one holding it when the Blame Bell rings. I'd imagine the people who are really good at the game would be those skilled at one or more of a few different conceivable methods of play, involving either somehow getting their opponents to hold the ball most often or successfully deflecting the ball from themselves most often. Perhaps simply refusing to catch the ball or getting control of the bell might be options too.

I'd guess someone who would bring up the Clinton administration (under which this document was produced) in a thread about catching George Bush having a blatant prime-time Dennis The Menace moment might be playing the Blame Game far more skillfully than I ever could.

Still, carry on. I'm not one to bicker about holding to a topic. We can't control that the points we mean to make often remind people of something entirely different.