I knew exactly what you were going for Tom but I refuse to bite at your attempts at labeling and stacking people into these discrete little packages.

I of course don't have links or quotes but I can bet, based upon your response history, that if the "left" was using Batiste's quotes back then to poke holes in our foreign policy, you were in full out offensive mode trying to discredit him.

It all seems to be about convenience for you. This guy says something you agree with this one week and he's an authoritative source of truthful information. If the next week he deviates from the party line, he's been bought off by the left. It's never about the information. It's about how you can spin it. There are those on the other side that do that same thing but you are a master of it. (That's not an admirable thing by the way.)

Batiste is a career military man with all the traits that go along with the profession, a mix of bravado, macho, patriotism, bullying, deceptiveness (those last two I'm speaking strategically) and, ultimately a sense of duty to the system. It's not surprising to me when strong-willed men get a hair up their butts and lash out from time to time at their superiors when something really hits them as being out of place as he probably did early on in the Iraq conflict. The fact that the anti-war crowd perked up their ears when he did that doesn't make him a hero in their eyes. It simply gave them some ammunition at a time when the odds were stacked heavily against them. For Batiste to now fall back in line with the system fits entirely in the big picture and takes away nothing from his earlier pronouncements or the ultimate truth.

You're really stretching lately for gotchas there Tom. This one is pretty much laughable.

Art