Memo to Dave Presuhn: YOU ARE THE VICTIM OF CIRCUMSTANCE. NO, REALLY.
In the interests of those who may feel that You Are Dumb Dot Net is nothing but a non-stop negative tirade against humanity, allow me to present the tragic story of Dave Presuhn.
At first glance, he appears to have written a letter to the editor. Such letters are a time-honored tradition. People write things about the world as best they understand it, send it to the local newspaper, and the local paper prints it, verbatim. Often, people will write letters to the editor about letters to the editor. The whole process basically exists to accomplish over the course of one week what an Internet message board accomplishes in ten minutes. YAY EFFICIENCY.
This rustic and quaint delay, unfortunately, adversely affected poor Dave Presuhn. Perhaps it was sometime last week that he penned his missive to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Perhaps it sat on a table in his foyer, next to his keys, for a couple of days after that, waiting for him to remember to bring it down to the mailbox. Perhaps the US Postal Service was less than completely sprightly in bringing it to the Star Tribune mailroom.
Perhaps an overworked Star Tribune mailroom staff took several days to work through the pile of incoming mail and get it typeset. Perhaps the letter was in longhand, requiring painstaking transposition by a team of handwriting experts. And perhaps all these delays conspired, in some kind of abstract collusion, to make Mr. Presuhn look like a COMPLETE FUCKING IDIOT. Because otherwise, we'd have to be negative, and that's not today's mission.
So I therefore posit that it may not be entirely his fault that yesterday, five days into the bloodiest uprising in the entire Iraqi occupation, Mr. Presuhn's letter appeared in the Star Tribune under the heading "A Better Place Today".
It's probably not his fault either that it was AFTER the deaths of about 30 soldiers and hundreds of civilians, the cordoning off of entire cities, the mutilation and display of four American mercenaries, and the other ugly events of the past few days that his question, "At what point will the left say, 'This was actually a good idea'?" got posed.
In fact, in my graciousness, I will even go so far as to say that perhaps it was a typographical error that led him to SEEM to be saying, in his very first sentence, "I have been hearing the left's drumbeat, 'When will so-and-so realize that the war in Iraq was a bad idea?'", since that's not actually a drumbeat. I'm also sure that such a blatant strawman argument would be beneath Mr. Presuhn's strict ethical standards, and that the lengthy section of his letter which details the people he's heard asking this question and their actual political affiliations and/or leanings were edited due to space constraints.
But that is not enough. I must stretch the very boundaries of tolerance and graciousness. I must subsume my natural pessimistic tendencies in a Herculean effort. I must create a benefit of the doubt so great that oil company CEO's wish they had it in their compensation package. I do this because it is the very MANDATE of this website to find people beset by tragic circumstance and help to set the record straight, once and for all, so that they can be publically exonerated for what seems, on the surface, to be damning evidence of their fondness for paint chips. Today.
In order to do this, I must discover the true reason that, after nearly a week of intense violence in Iraq that was, by most accounts, set off by the US occupying forces SHUTTING DOWN A NEWSPAPER, that Presuhn decided to include in his letter, as one of the great things about post-invasion Iraq, that "A free press is taking shape."
After careful consideration, speculation, extrapolation, and deduction, there are only two possible answers:
1) Aliens disguised as cows disguised as Montana militiamen ambushed Dave Presuhn outside his Columbia Heights home, hit him with some kind of outer space taser to knock him unconscious, dragged him into some bushes, took his keys, broke into his home, stole his stationary, and wrote a fake letter to the Star Tribune with the sole goal of discrediting him, because he was THIS CLOSE to blowing the whole lid off the space alien cow Montana militia in his new book: "The Montana Militia: Not Actually A Militia, But A Bunch Of Disguised Aliens In Cow Costumes And Camouflage Jackets".
2) "Dave Presuhn" is actually a pseudonym, and the letter was written by Ann Coulter, who, as we are all aware, is completely bugfuck.
We at You Are Dumb Dot Net hope you have enjoyed today's edifying look at the nature of extenuating circumstances. We would love to continue this bold experiment, but we've just gotten word that Colin Powell insinuated that Ted Kennedy was a traitor for calling Iraq "Bush's Vietnam". And since the Militia Cow Aliens were busy in Columbia Heights, that means the DUMB is still out there.