Tom Sipos - Mission Accomplished

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/libertarian-party-newsletter-california-freedom-peace-and-glasnost

Tom Sipos, how could there be a prior dare "in" an essay I wrote two years earlier for my blog?  The dare was included in my blog comment two years later: "I would love for Sipos to publish in CF my main essay on Iraq: http://knowinghumans.net/2007/04/defending-libervention-in-iraq.html.  Of course, if he does so, he's sure to allocate himself as much or more space for an attempted rebuttal.  I challenge him [not to use] the last-word advantage that an editor can always award to himself."

With the Barr LTE -- which actually WAS a "letter to the editor", and not a vintage essay -- the dare I included technically worked: "If by chance this letter to the editor is printed in full in CF, take note whether Sipos will once again allocate himself more space to answering a critical letter than he allocates for the letter itself."  You satisfied the letter of the dare, by just barely limiting your instant rebuttal to the length of my complaint.  Of course, if you don't count my postscript dare paragraph, then your rebuttal was in fact longer than the part of my letter that you rebutted.

You say you "rarely rebut LTEs".  What you need to try to say is "I rarely rebut LTEs I disagree with."  I stand by my statement: "Unlike any previous CF editor that I know of, you treat the letters to the editor section as an extension of your own (already-expanded) editorial page, reserving yourself arbitrary space to rebut nearly anything you disagree with."  I challenge you to name a previous CF editor who ever allocated himself equal space to rebut LTEs he disagrees with.  You gave a rebuttal to the only other critical LTE in that March issue.  You've issued same-page instant rebuttals to me, Scott Lieberman, Tim Crowley, and others. In one case you took twice as much space as the original letter, as you needed room to expound on your paranoid "suspicions" about the Reform Caucus planning expulsions and where its financing comes from. (The latter you even questioned twice in the same rambling rebuttal.  Great editing. Have you cracked the case of LRC financing yet?)

There was no need for me to write a new essay on libervention, because I stand by what I wrote in early 2007 -- as long as the word "now" in it is allowed to refer to 2007 instead of 2009.  You even went to the trouble of adding my hometown to make my essay look like a current LTE, instead of just honestly telling your readers when it was written.

You quote Bruce Cohen out of context.  Here's what Bruce said next: "So the liars who say Aaron or I are pro-war, are just, liars. And to [sic] those who say the paper was pro-war, are liars, too. In fact, just as I said to Ted Brown after Kookenaga’s election, they would turn it into an idealogical soapbox for their personal opinions."   What he obviously was trying to say in this sloppy blog comment was that  he did not print any articles supporting the war during his tenure.   The fact you still don't dare deny here is that I'd already listed for you -- with dates -- five anti-intervention pieces that ran during Bruce's tenure.  So now you've got a fair-minded Libertarian like Debra Dedmon saying "I did not agree with Bruce and Brian running 0 antiwar articles when they ran CF".  Congratulations, Tom, mission accomplished.