Putz: Paul Campos is an ignorant clown!

Wow, check out Putz's totally unhinged reply to Paul Campos in the Rocky Mountain News.

Your false dilemma! ("I'm just sayin'--isn't it really more reasonable to kill a few scientists and mullahs than nuke the whole country?"):

Campos chose to devote an entire column (“The right’s Ward Churchill,” Feb. 20) to a blog entry of mine from last week, in which I wondered why the Bush administration wasn’t acting covertly to kill radical mullahs and atomic scientists, rather than preparing a major attack on Iran. (Silly me, I thought this was advocating a less warlike approach).

Your apples-to-oranges comparison! ("Heads of state and terrorists" = "scientists and religious leaders"):

History first: There’s nothing beyond the pale about suggesting assassination and covert action as an alternative to warfare. In 1998, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked the government to look into assassination as a means of dealing with terrorists; Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Va., suggested assassinating Saddam Hussein the same year. On Jan. 3, 2001, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced legislation to facilitate the assassination of terrorists.

And finally, your bogus WWII analogy! ("Just look at what we did to those Nazis when our nation was at war with them!"):

“Similarly, the September 1944 Allied bombing raids on the German rocket sites at Peenemunde regarded the death of scientists involved in research and development of that facility to have been as important as destruction of the missiles themselves. Attack of these individuals would not constitute assassination.”

Putz goes on to accuse Campos of being "thuggish." Yikes.

I think Putz is going to regret this for a while.

UPDATE

Putz has unsurprisingly declared himself the winner of this exchange with Campos.

I see that at least one commenter at the RMN is calling for Campos to be fired. That rather misses the point of my column. Yes, he wrote a silly, uninformed, hysterical, and rather thuggish column. But the solution to bad speech is more speech, not suppression. That Campos hasn't learned that reflects poorly on him, but I don't think firing is the solution.

Again, wow. Projection much? Campos is the one who is "uninformed," "hysterical," and "thuggish" after Putz calls for the murder of Iranian civilians, then makes a series of bogus arguments defending it (Dave Barry?), and then launches a bizarre counterattack on Campos as an ignorant clown.

Stop digging, Putz.