I watched the season debut of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO this evening. If you'd like to see actor Ron Silver and the Reverend Al Sharpton mud-wrestling, you might want to catch one of the many replays during the week. It's probably more enjoyable if you think of it as theater rather than as an actual exchange of political ideas.
Silver served up one argument (against a point by Maher) that's making the rounds and which strikes me as a real Red Herring cheapshot. Maher was complaining that the Iraq War was predicated on a lie and Silver asked, "Would you be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power?" To me, that's the new variation on "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Obviously, it's possible to believe that the regime change was good for humanitarian reasons but that there were many things wrong with how it was done. I'm not even going to argue here what some of them might have been. I just think it's disingenuous to try and misrepresent your opponent's position into something like that. Liberals have been known to do much the same thing with the race card, branding an opposing position as racist. It's a crummy trick, no matter who does it.