Email debates can be fun if the people with whom you debate actually understand you and your position. However, sometimes people show you that they really don't understand you at all.

I try to be a civil debater, but so long as people are not profane, I don't mind if they insult me for my beliefs. I just ask that their insults come close to the mark. Here is dialogue from a lefty email friend from the UK.

Next time you're railroaded into war, look back at people like GG [George Galloway] and remember what happens to people who stand up for principles. Or you can be a sheep like the rest (including me I must admit). Everything you see on Fox is true, eh? (Have you watched "Outfoxed" yet? Oh no I forgot, it's by people who don't agree with you so it must be untrue.)

Here is my reply.

If you are going to insult me, you should at least know me better so you can aim in the right direction. I haven't wasted my time watching television news since news was easily found on the internet (about 1995). TV news is for people who 1) have much more free time than I have and/or 2) don't want to have a dinner discussion with their family so they turn the TV on.

I go to the Fox site when people send me links or I see an interesting title on a newsreader (such as Google News). On average, I end up at Fox about as often as I end up at CNN or the BBC. I'm not overly impressed by any of the three, but at least Fox admits their biases.

As for being railroaded into war - this is where I don't know if you just misunderstand American laws and culture or are just ignorant of how things work with a written constitution. By our constitution, the president needs the approval of the Senate to go to war. Many past presidents have ignored this and railroaded us into "police actions". President Bush stated his intentions, his many reasons (included the WMD reason which is the ONLY reason his distracters remember), and asked the Senate to vote on this in accordance with our Constitution. The Senate voted authorization for this and President Bush then ordered the liberation of Iraq. While I understand this may not be the way your country operates, the US was certainly not railroaded into war by any stretch of the imagination.

Nor did your charge of sheepish behavior strike home. I was one of many, many Americans writing our legislators, posting on blogs, on otherwise persuading people to support liberating Iraqis from their tyrant. One of the many reasons I despise our poor fiscal ways is that we cannot afford to depose all tyrants. If we had no national debt, I would be advocating that we topple a dictator every year and start building democratic forms of government left and right. Given our fiscal problems, I'm happy we still manage to do this a few times a decade.

So if you want to insult me, you could accurately attack my support of military violence to change the world. Or you could belittle my naive belief that some cultures are better than other cultures. But charges of wasting my time watching TV news or sheepish behavior just won't cut it. I expect better insults from you in the future :-)

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