One of my pet peeves is when people try to demonize others for lacking any sort of restraint or tolerance even as they count on their opponent's restraint and tolerance to be able to say what they say.

For example, one of the cries I hear coming out of Europe these days, particularly from France, is that the "Bush's" United States is the greatest threat mankind has faced. There are many variations on this charge some equally melodramatic, others more specific. Another example is the charge that we're "losing all our freedoms" or the outright statement "We're practically living in a police state".

Such statements are absurd because the people making these assertions must be consciously aware that if their charges were real that they wouldn't be able to make them with impunity. After all, if John Ashcroft or some other boogeyman were out to "stifle dissent" they could realistically accomplish it.  Saddam Hussein, after all, received 100% of the vote in his last election. That is what stifling dissent is about.

The same thing regularly occurs on-line too in the mini-cosmos of net communities. I run a lot of net communities and I regularly get charged with being tyrannical and unwilling to tolerate any sort of dissent. One poster today, having called me "dumb", went on to tell me how fragile my ego must be and how childish I am. Yet at some level he is relying on the fact that my ego isn't fragile and that I'm not childish since someone with either trait would not put up with abuse if they had the power to prevent the abuse which any admin does. The admins on WinCustomize.com face that as well as they get abused by users accusing them of all kinds of problems all the while counting on the very tolerance that they claim the admins lack to be able to make their charges.

When I see people demonize Bush or Blair or some other figure who has the obvious ability to fully demonstrate to the protester the real meaning of loss of freedom or whatever, they weaken their case.  The same is true of US opponents who accuse the United States of waging a war of "genocide" in the middle east all the while knowing that if the US really wanted to, they could commit genocide with relative impunity. Opponents of the United States, including Al Qaeda, count on the United States having the very humanity and restraint that they accuse it of lacking.

Probably the most overt example of this is in Israel where people are regularly claiming how brutal Israel is to the Palestinians when in fact Israel would probably have an easier time of things if the simply rounded up all the Palestinians and ejected them into Lebanon and shot any who tried to re-enter. Who would stop them? Yet Israel's critics rely on the very restraint and tolerance that they claim Israel lacks.

When people make charges that literally require that the charge to be untrue in order for the charge to be made in the first place, they only damage their credibility. People recognize melodrama and tend to make a note of it - remembering that the person making such charges needs to have their statements taken with a grain of salt in the future.  At best,  the person making the charge sounds like a pampered provincial, inexperienced with the real world. At worst, they sound like a cynical manipulator of facts.