Brad Wardell's Blog


Don't antagonize the admin part 2

Published on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Internet

If you go onto a website, or more specifically an Internet community and you find the admins to be evil and obnoxious or whatever, your best bet is to turn around and go away.  Believe me, I've learned this lesson the hard way over the years.

I've been on websites where the admins were just incredibly obnoxious and were in constant power trip mode. I am sure I must seem that way to some people too. Though I would describe myself more as apathetic than anything else. Which gets to my point:

There's no claims to being fair here. Joeuser is both a blog site and a community site.  If you just hang out on your own blog and write articles, you're pretty safe.  You can use the tools on JoeUser to keep people who bother you from even commenting on your articles.

But once you move off the reservation into the forums or other people's blogs, then you're fair game like everyone else (including me).  That said, we make no bones about fairness. The admins don't have to be fair. We don't claim to be fair. I've seen people seemingly go out of their way to antagonize me or Karmagirl or other admins on the site.  That's insane. We've only banned 4 people so far but we have been able to implement new features that allow us to take less drastic action.

Today's new access group is visitor.  Here's the situation: Someone has spent months building up their blog but on the forums they're obnoxious (and just so we're clear: obnoxious is defined as being obnoxious to an admin and admins do not have to justify what the term means).  Admins can set a user to have visitor access.  Visitor access isn't banning. But it confines them to their own blog. They can still write articles and comment on their own articles, but they can't comment on other people's articles (and be aware, when someone comments anonymously, on an admin screen it displays which user(s) have that IP or in that IP range with a couple more clicks).  This way, if we feel someone is a toxic user who is making the forums unpleasant we can remove them without them having to lose their blog and such. 

And of course, there is always the ability for someone to come back. A visitor can get put back to citizen and beyond. So it's not like being exiled. It's more like being confined to cool off a bit (though we anticipate most people who get put into visitor access will lose their tempers and just delete their blogs in a huff which is a fine solution as we then it's their decision not ours).

So hopefully this will help resolve some of the problems users have been complaining to us about.

Upcoming JoeUser features with Blog Navigator

Published on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Blogging

As JoeUser.com heads towards being officially launched (probably in late August) I wanted to give you a preview of what's going on:

  • Blog Navigator and Blog Navigator Pro.  We're going to make Blog Navigator Freeware and then create a Blog Navigator Pro (anyone who bought the regular one will automatically get the Pro version). 
  • Blog Navigator Pro. This program has all the features of Blog Navigator plus some extras (more search capabilities for example) along with the ability to post your own blogs. This is, IMO, a killer feature. I was playing with that in a beta last night. It makes it as easy (and fast) to write your own blog as it is to write it up in say Microsoft Word and press the save button.  Formatting and all that good stuff is built in.
  • Premium Accounts. Premium accounts will cost $19.95 plus $2.99 per month (as you'll get Blog Navigator Pro with it).  This will give you 10MB of disk space, blog backup features (i.e. easily download your blog for archiving or for sending it out to other people via email and such). Another side issue is that additional options become available for admins which I'll talk about below.
  • Isolate Feature. Right now, if someone is really antagonizing one of the admins, our options are limited.  We're not willing to have to deal with someone who's being obnoxious to us on a personal levle but we don't want to kick them off the site.  If they're a premium user, the isolate feature comes up which would contain that user to their own blog.  We don't expect to use that much (we've only banned 4 users in the entire time JoeUser.com has existed so far) but it's still comforting.
  • Suppress User. If your'e a premium user, we'll eventually have the option for you to able to make a user go away. I.e. if User X is really getting on your nerves, you will be add them to a suppress list and you simply won't see their stuff anymore.  We can't add this in the free version as it takes considerable CPU bandwidth to actually do this so we wouldn't want millions of users having this unless we had millions of dollars to pay for additonal machines!
  • More Templates. Once we have WinCustomize.com's v4 done, we hope to apply some of the technology here to have a lot more choices for how your blog looks and feels.
  • .NET updates.  We hope to upgrade key parts of JoeUser to .NET where we can make use of its hypercaching which should greatly improve apparent speed.
  • Referral Leaderboard. We hope to soon have a feature that will show which bloggers have the most sites linking into them. One measure of general public awareness is how many sites link to your site as a source of information. The more sites that do that, the more widely read your site is.

Stay tuned! Have fun!

Bill Gates: DVDs doomed in less than 10 years..

Published on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years at the latest, Microsoft boss and founder Bill Gates predicted. Asked what home entertainment would like in the future, Gates said that DVD technology would be "obsolete in 10 years at the latest. If you consider that nowadays we have to carry around film and music on little silver discs and stick them in the computer, it's ridiculous," Gates said in comments reproduced in German in the mass-circulation daily Bild. "These things can scratch or simply get lost."

 

BootSkin alert!

Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize Talk
Just so you know, there's going to be some pain when Windows XP SP2 comes out.

For some reason, reasons we don't know, the FIRST time you reboot XP SP2 when it comes out BootSkin will likely cause a blue screen of death. The SECOND time you restart (after the blue screen) it should be fine. We're looking into the cause, it's pretty bizarre that it would do that (i.e. why one time but recover on its own after that?). But some people will be affected by it.



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ObjectDock Plus and Pizza

Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 By Brad Wardell In OS Customization

I've been having a ball with ObjectDock Plus. I've got 4 different docks going on my desktop but you can barely tell because I have itty bitty tabs  on 3 of them.  The 4th dock I don't have docked to an edge but instead I have it activate when I put my mouse to the very bottom. The biggest glitch I've run into with it is that I can't drag and drop links to a dock (well I can but they don't work).  What I want to do is have my "favorite" websites as a series of tiny tabs over on the left edge of my screen.  I mostly use Keyboard LaunchPad for getting around my sites (Ctrl-Alt-1 for WinCustomize, 2 for Joeuser.com, 3 for Stardock, 4 for Neowin, and so forth).  But what I want to use the docks for is more "temporary" favorite websites. Ones that I want to check out later when I have more time but know I'll forget but don't want to have permanently in my "favorites" list.

BTW, if you've got a particularly clever ObjectDock Plus setup, take a screenshot and upload it and I'll try to feature some of them in my next WC blog. 

One thing that ObjectDock Plus's availability has brought forward is an issue that affects most shareware developers and that is pricing.  Go to a shareware conference or just hang out with other shareware authors and the topic is sure to come up: Why does the same guy who happily pays $8 to watch "White Chicks" and spend $4 on pop corn or $18 on two pizzas turn around and bitch about paying $15 to $20 for a software product that took an immense amount of effort to create that they'll be able to make use of for years?

What bugged me the most was the idea that because we have had ObjectDock (freeware) available that we somehow have no right to make a plus version.  That somehow we're the greedy ones for wanting to be compensated for years of effort.  Rather than being thankful that we make a free program like ObjectDock used by hundreds of thousands of people, one that we continue to update for free, we get guff for putting out a Plus version.

There were also the people who felt ObjectDock should be part of Object Desktop. I could at least, philosophically, understand where they were coming from. I'm not sure at what point Object Desktop came to equal "All of Stardock's stuff in a single package for $50".  But my view is, anyone who's paid us $50 for Object Desktop is a customer and we're going to listen to their view point a lot more seriously than the kid who's never contributed anything back but feels entitled to call us greedy for making ObjectDock Plus. 

The reason ObjectDock Plus isn't part of Object Desktop is very straight forward: Economics.   Object Desktop has something like a dozen and a half programs in it. For $50. And most of these programs are really quite powerful.. I could go on for hours about how DesktopX should be a $100 product on its own given the things it can do for corporations but we target power users and consumers instead so we have to price it appropriately.  The bottom line is that Object Desktop is a really really good deal.  And it's such a good deal that it's very tough to sustain it even as is at the price it is. 

Personally, and correct me if I'm mistaken, I think half the coolness of Object Desktop is that many of the components get very frequent updates.  If you bought Object Desktop in say 1999, the main components in it have continually been updated in it year after year after year with more components being added over time.  I don't want to name specific products but I suggest checking out other desktop enhancement programs that have come out during that time and note how often they've been updated (or heck, when the last time they were updated).  Meanwhile, we've been cranking on DesktopX, WindowBlinds, WindowFX, IconPackager, and other pieces on a regular basis year after year after year. Heck, wait till you see ObjectBar 2.  And we're working on some other cool new things too. Point being, this coolness is only possible as long as Object Desktop is economically viable. It's not like we're driving around in Porsches or something. Things that don't remain viable end up fading away.

I think at the end of the day the question is simply are people glad we made ObjectDock Plus? Based on the reaction we're seeing, we think yes. If it hadn't been released the way it is, it would never have been made.

Speaking of new stuff, later this Fall we hope to finally come out with the beta of ThinkDesk. This is an entirely new suite of products. Where Object Desktop is about extending your desktop, ThinkDesk is about managing your information.  Pricing will be the same as Object Desktop (though unlike Object Desktop the price will probably go up once it leaves beta). It'll be XP only and we'll be focusing a lot of energy on .NET features.

Meanwhile in Italy, UK, and US where the distributed DesktopX team works, version 2.2 is nearly done.  I think a new beta of it showed up on Object Desktop tonight along with IconX which is now separate (but if you have both installed, the IconX tab will show up in DesktopX). We learned from that WinCustomize poll that lots of people had no idea what IconX was. That needs to change as it's (in my biased opinion) one of the coolest programs on Windows.

So that's all for now. Gotta re-setup my crashed laptop. It's running plain Luna right now! Eeew!

Why Bush may not get my vote

Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Republican

I am what you would call an undecided voter.  But it's really more complicated than that since the choice for me isn't whether I would vote for Bush or Kerry but rather will I vote for Bush or not.  There is no way I'll vote for Kerry.  But that doesn't mean I'm willing to vote for Bush.  Unlike many neophyte ideologues, I don't imagine the end of the world coming simply because the "other guy" gets elected. Therefore, the side I tend to be more sympathetic to doesn't automatically get my vote.

I've read on-line where people think I'm some sort of Bush supporter simply because I support the war in Iraq/Afghanistan.  That's not the case.  I do find a great deal of amusement seeing the way Bush somehow turns his left-wing opponents into raving lunatics. Never in my lifetime have I seen the opposing party of someone become so hysterical. Most Americans are fairly ignorant on US history, what makes the left unique is that they try to claim an intellectual high ground even as they demonstrate their complete ignorance.  To history buffs, the spazzing about whether we should have gone into Iraq or not comes across as bizarre.  Just to recap, here is a link to a list of wars the US has been in and why we went in.

My two favorites have to be the Mexican American war, where we conquered Mexico (culminating with the capture of Mexico City) on the justification that we really really wanted their land. At least things were more straight forward back then. But the best one of all has to be the US war against Spain in 1898 where we declared war on Spain because one of our ships in Havana harbor blew up (turned out it was due to an accident on the ship).  That's it. That was the justification. Over 2,000 Americans died in that "war" and that was over a century ago when the US population was much smaller. No hysteria then. No anti-war protesters. No calls for impeachment. No international condemnation.

So seeing melodramatic articles about Bush and "casualties in Iraq" asserting that Bush is the worst President in US history or that he should be impeached or whatever just strike me as evidence that George W. Bush has a super power: He makes left wingers look nuts.

But like I said, having a low opinion of hysterical left wing rantings doesn't automatically make me a Bush fan. So let me tell you the problems I have with Bush:

1) Economic irresponsibility.  I really don't like deficit spending. I can live with it as long as I feel like the government is taking its spending seriously. But the pork has been record breaking.  Huge farm subsidies, huge increases in spending for both the EPA and dept of health and human services show that a) He doesn't take spending seriously and He's politically naive. Even at the time I was shaking my head knowing that even with these increases he wouldn't gain anything since Republicans automatically get tarred for being anti-poor and anti-environment regardless of the facts.

2) Incredibly inarticulate.  Every time he holds a press conference I cringe. I keep waiting for him to say something stupid. "Given the choice between trusting a mad man or defending America I will choose to defend America every single time!"  Ack. Who writes this stuff? You may not like Clinton but his intelligence was apparent and he really understood many of these issues even if he didn't do what I would have liked him to do.  Is it really asking so much to have a President who behaves as if he has a clue? Look at Tony Blair, regardless of what you think about him, he comes across as supremely knowledgeable.

3) Messing with the constitution. If the choice boils down to accepting gay marriage or messing with the constitution I'll choose to accept gay marriage. It makes me think that Bush is the same kind of fanatic who would have pushed through the prohibition amendments.  The constitution isn't a political toy. It's the closest thing I have to a secular religion. Don't screw with it over something pidly like this.  And yes, I'm aware of the full faith and service clause.

4) Crazy Projects.  What the hell was the whole Mission to Mars thing about? Here we're running record deficits and he's talking about going to Mars? Meanwhile, he proposes killing the Hubble Space telescope. Hello?

5) Afraid of leveling with us.  All the spastic left wingers who are, to some degree of success, able to retroactively claim that we went into Iraq to confiscate stockpiles of WMD would never be able to make that case if Bush had been more clear about why we went in.  We went in because a) We believed (correctly) that Saddam had WMD PROGRAMS (not stockpiles). That he was a declared enemy of the US in a region where we could no longer tolerate one and c) After 9/11, there was no way we were going to let Saddam stay in place to wait out the sanctions.  But Bush made a great deal of noise about nerve gas and other things. Nobody who supported the war gave a crap about chemical weapons.  We wanted Saddam gone because after 9/11 we could imagine very plausible scenarios where 5 to 10 years down the line in a post-sanctions Iraq that Saddam would either be practicing nuclear blackmail or covertly supplying terrorists with WMDs.  I didn't want my children having to deal with that.  But Bush, because of issue #2, couldn't manage to coherently put that together leaving a gaping hole for the leftbots to spew their latest reason for being against the war (because, you know, they would have been totally for going in if we had found mustard gas stockpiles in Iraq...NOT).

6) Totally incompetent post-war handling in Iraq. I don't care if it was Bremer's decision to decommission Iraq's army. It was still incredibly foolish. How does someone with such a basic management failing get into that position in the first place? If you walk into a corporation that needs to be rebuilt, you don't fire everyone and rehire from scratch. You reorganize it. This isn't complicated stuff.

The whole occupation was poorly run from start to finish. From a PR point of view, US troops should have totally secured Baghdad even if the hinterlands were less secure.  Want proof? Do you think Afghanistan is some sort of cosmopolitan land of peace now? Of course not. But the occupation has seemed a lot more successful because Kabul, where all the press are, is reasonably secure.  If you listen to the news, you'd think Iraq was some bloody quagmire.  As of June 21, we've lost 619 soldiers due to combat.  That includes the actual war and the subsequent year + occupation. In that time, nearly as many people in Washington D.C. have been murdered.  That doesn't make things any less tragic but Iraq isn't particularly bloody. 

But because reporters have seen so much violence because the Bush administration hasn't locked down Baghdad this perception has been allowed to grow. Sorry but if you can't control elementary perception, you're too inept to be President.

7) I'm not sure where he's hoping to go next.  What's the plan? War on terror? What next? Domestic policy? Whatcha gonna do?

So there's 7 reasons off the top of my head that Bush needs to deal with before I'll vote for him.  If he doesn't make a good on some of these, he won't get my vote.  I'll either vote for a minor candidate or not at all.  I know quite a few people in that boat with me and the result has been Kerry's gradual lead as mixed ideologists such as me, who are generally more sympathetic to Republicans than Democrats, migrate off the reservation.

Next: Why Kerry won't get my vote.

Blog: ObjectDock, pizza, and DesktopX 2.2

Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

I've been having a ball with ObjectDock Plus. I've got 4 different docks going on my desktop but you can barely tell because I have itty bitty tabs  on 3 of them.  The 4th dock I don't have docked to an edge but instead I have it activate when I put my mouse to the very bottom. The biggest glitch I've run into with it is that I can't drag and drop links to a dock (well I can but they don't work).  What I want to do is have my "favorite" websites as a series of tiny tabs over on the left edge of my screen.  I mostly use Keyboard LaunchPad for getting around my sites (Ctrl-Alt-1 for WinCustomize, 2 for Joeuser.com, 3 for Stardock, 4 for Neowin, and so forth).  But what I want to use the docks for is more "temporary" favorite websites. Ones that I want to check out later when I have more time but know I'll forget but don't want to have permanently in my "favorites" list.

BTW, if you've got a particularly clever ObjectDock Plus setup, take a screenshot and upload it and I'll try to feature some of them in my next WC blog. 

One thing that ObjectDock Plus's availability has brought forward is an issue that affects most shareware developers and that is pricing.  Go to a shareware conference or just hang out with other shareware authors and the topic is sure to come up: Why does the same guy who happily pays $8 to watch "White Chicks" and spend $4 on pop corn or $18 on two pizzas turn around and bitch about paying $15 to $20 for a software product that took an immense amount of effort to create that they'll be able to make use of for years?

What bugged me the most was the idea that because we have had ObjectDock (freeware) available that we somehow have no right to make a plus version.  That somehow we're the greedy ones for wanting to be compensated for years of effort.  Rather than being thankful that we make a free program like ObjectDock used by hundreds of thousands of people, one that we continue to update for free, we get guff for putting out a Plus version.

There were also the people who felt ObjectDock should be part of Object Desktop. I could at least, philosophically, understand where they were coming from. I'm not sure at what point Object Desktop came to equal "All of Stardock's stuff in a single package for $50".  But my view is, anyone who's paid us $50 for Object Desktop is a customer and we're going to listen to their view point a lot more seriously than the kid who's never contributed anything back but feels entitled to call us greedy for making ObjectDock Plus. 

The reason ObjectDock Plus isn't part of Object Desktop is very straight forward: Economics.   Object Desktop has something like a dozen and a half programs in it. For $50. And most of these programs are really quite powerful.. I could go on for hours about how DesktopX should be a $100 product on its own given the things it can do for corporations but we target power users and consumers instead so we have to price it appropriately.  The bottom line is that Object Desktop is a really really good deal.  And it's such a good deal that it's very tough to sustain it even as is at the price it is. 

Personally, and correct me if I'm mistaken, I think half the coolness of Object Desktop is that many of the components get very frequent updates.  If you bought Object Desktop in say 1999, the main components in it have continually been updated in it year after year after year with more components being added over time.  I don't want to name specific products but I suggest checking out other desktop enhancement programs that have come out during that time and note how often they've been updated (or heck, when the last time they were updated).  Meanwhile, we've been cranking on DesktopX, WindowBlinds, WindowFX, IconPackager, and other pieces on a regular basis year after year after year. Heck, wait till you see ObjectBar 2.  And we're working on some other cool new things too. Point being, this coolness is only possible as long as Object Desktop is economically viable. It's not like we're driving around in Porsches or something. Things that don't remain viable end up fading away.

I think at the end of the day the question is simply are people glad we made ObjectDock Plus? Based on the reaction we're seeing, we think yes. If it hadn't been released the way it is, it would never have been made.

Speaking of new stuff, later this Fall we hope to finally come out with the beta of ThinkDesk. This is an entirely new suite of products. Where Object Desktop is about extending your desktop, ThinkDesk is about managing your information.  Pricing will be the same as Object Desktop (though unlike Object Desktop the price will probably go up once it leaves beta). It'll be XP only and we'll be focusing a lot of energy on .NET features.

Meanwhile in Italy, UK, and US where the distributed DesktopX team works, version 2.2 is nearly done.  I think a new beta of it showed up on Object Desktop tonight along with IconX which is now separate (but if you have both installed, the IconX tab will show up in DesktopX). We learned from that WinCustomize poll that lots of people had no idea what IconX was. That needs to change as it's (in my biased opinion) one of the coolest programs on Windows.

So that's all for now. Gotta re-setup my crashed laptop. It's running plain Luna right now! Eeew!

Social Security Propaganda

Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Republican

Got this in email today...

Subject: Social Security

When Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security

(FICA) Program. He promised:

1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary.

2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first

$1,400 of their annual incomes into the Program.

3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program

would be deductible from their income tax each year.

4.) That the money the participants put into the independent "Trust

Fund" rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would

only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other

Government program, and,

5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income. Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to "put away,"

you may be interested in the following:

Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent

"Trust" fund and put it into the General fund so that Congress could spend

it?

A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratically-controlled House and Senate.

Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for

Social Security (FICA) withholding?

A: The Democratic Party.

Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?

A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the "tie-breaking"

deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of

the U.S.

Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?

A: That's right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this county, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!

Then, after doing all this lying and thieving and violation of the Original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!

And the worst part about it is, uninformed citizens believe it!

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions during this 2004 election year!

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe good changes will evolve.

How many people can YOU send this to?

Keep this going clear up through the 2004 election!! We need to be heard.!!

The life cycle of a net community

Published on Sunday, July 11, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Websites

Net communities are fairly predictable.  They go through various stages during their life cycle.  JoeUser is a net community too and the same things I've seen on countless other communities I see here.  What is unique about JoeUser is that it's also a blog site.  Most blog sites are isolated from one another.  Being isolated from the other blogs on a blog community has its pros and cons.  On the pro side, you have much more control over how your site is promoted.  On the con side, unless you do a lot of promotion, odds are, no one is going to read what you write.  Here on JoeUser, even the most obscure bloggers get readers. That's probably why JoeUser has become so popular so fast.

So what are the stages of a net community?

Stage 1: Arrival of the core group.  When a net community starts, it will attract a small group of regulars. This number is usually fairly specific -- under 30 people who participate heavily.  Since the new site has little traffic, this group dominates the site.

Stage 2: Community Expansion. The website begins to grow exponentially towards its eventual "maximum size".  So lots of new people arrive. The regulars, typically friendly and social able, welcome these new people to the community. Some of the regulars try to hint that these newcomers need to respect the existing pecking order and other unwritten rules that the regulars have established.

Stage 3: Melodrama. Some of the regulars, now using terms like "Old guard" or "Founders" or "Old timers" or other terms to convey that they've been part of the community for longer than others, begin to write about the lack of manners, civility, decency, etc. of many of the newcomers.  Various melodramatic posts/articles are written about how everything is falling apart.

Stage 4: Exodus. Some of the "old guard" now begin to leave in a huff. This usually includes so long winded, melodramatic post talking about how the community has gone to hell in the hand basket and how they predict that other people (like themselves) will soon leave as well.  The implication being that the original regulars are more equal than newcomers and the loss of their presence will doom the site.

Stage 5: Stabilization.  The "old guard" that remains are the ones who can adapt to the community's growth and maturity. They are the ones who recognize that they are one member amongst many. The community will have lots of activity and interest but a lot less melodrama at this point.  Occasionally, an "old timer" will drop in and bemoan how much nicer things were in the "old days" when the community had a "specific character".  The most popular users at this point will form a new set of regulars.

Communities tend to grow in a quasi-step ladder type growth curve.  So this 5 stage cycle will repeat itself several times until the community reaches its maximum growth (based on the resources of the site, subject matter, marketing, whatever).

The American left changes gears in Iraq

Published on Sunday, July 11, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Politics

The American left who has opposed action in Iraq (and in many cases Afghanistan before that) has increasingly latched on to the myth that "Bush lied".  The theory is that Bush "sold" intervention in Iraq based on stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And since we've found no massively stockpiles (we have found some WMDs just not in large quantities) we therefore (they argue) went into Iraq based on a false premise. This is total nonsense. 

Besides the usual facts that everyone thought Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs (Clinton, Bush, Kerry, etc.) that wasn't why we went into Iraq.  It was one of the reasons. But it wasn't the primary reason.  The biggest reason was related to WMDs in the sense that we were concerned about Saddam as a long term threat, especially once sanctions got lifted (as France and Russia were pushing for).

The arrogance of the American left on this issue is immense. It is almost contemptuous of the intelligence of the average American.  Even today, most Americans support US action in Iraq.  The recent problems in Iraq have caused that support to dip slightly under 50% in some polls but that has nothing to do with WMD stockpiles, it has to do with frustration with US policies in the occupation.  But if the liberal premise that we went into Iraq for the WMD stockpiles were true, then American support for having gone in there would be at 10% with only the hard core "neo-cons" still in favor of it.  But it's not, the WMD stockpile issue was never a central premise for going in. 

It bears saying it again: If WMD stockpiles were the primary reason for going into Iraq, then the fact that we haven't found any would therefore lead one to conclude that nearly all Americans should believe we made a mistake going in there in the first place.  But that isn't the case. Therefore, other reasons must have taken precedence for their support.