We all know what it means when someone goes Godwin in a discussion. Unfortunately, it has happened a lot here as of late...especially with the NSA and Syria discussions.
We are pretty good at calling out those who go "Godwin", but I really feel that now we might need to police ourselves and make sure we are not going "Giuliani" in these discussions. That is when we bring up 9/11 or Al Qaeda in any non-germane discussion to support our side or denigrate the other side.
(Why am I calling this going Giuliani? Because he was the noun, verb, 9/11 guy if you recall...)
We see politicians doing this lately with the Syria debate. Now Assad is using it to try to influence our politics. This discussion should be about the use of chemical weapons,
I am not denying that Al Qaeda is a consideration in some of these discussions, but sometimes they are brought up as a distraction to the larger picture. Yes, there is an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria Al-Nusra Front that has about 7,000 members. However, this is a relatively small part of the estimated 85K-120K members of the opposition forces in Syria.
(Wikipedia has a fairly detailed account of the Syrian Civil War.)
So can we stop going Giuliani, please?