Plain Dealer Insight of the Day: "Call me paranoid. But the enemy is starting to look like us."

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Tue, 03/16/2010 - 07:19.

For some reason I decided to check-in on Cleveland.com this morning and was lured into Phillip Morris' odd head by his catchy headline "It's not the fat woman we need to watch, she's only a decoy", which ends:

Call me paranoid. But the enemy is starting to look like us. They are home grown. They wear our military uniforms; they go to our schools; they are "radicalized" at computers purchased at the same neighborhood electronics store.

It's time to take our eyes off the exploding fat woman. She's a national security threat alright. But she's only a decoy.

I can't for the life of me imagine what goes on in this writer's head, but it frightens me as much as imagining what goes on in Plain Dealer Editor Kevin O'Brien' head, which makes me ill.

Can anyone explain to me what Phillip Morris is trying to tell Clevelanders in this column, because this makes absolutely no sense to me - I won't bother reprinting his garbage here so visit him at Cleveland.com... they seem to be going insane.

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Phillip Morris circles

 I read the story.  I think that Phillip is having a "bad woman" day. It is so bad that it is kind of funny.

The guy is a cretin

The term cretin describes a person so affected, but, like words such as spastic and lunatic, also is a word of abuse. Cretin became a medical term in the 18th century, from an Alpine French dialect prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common (see below); it saw wide medical use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then spread more widely in popular English as a markedly derogatory term for a person who behaves stupidly. Because of its pejorative connotations in popular speech, health-care workers have mostly abandoned cretin.[citation needed]

The etymology of cretin is uncertain. Several hypotheses exist. The most common derivation provided in English dictionaries is from the Alpine French dialect pronunciation of the word Chrétien ("(a) Christian"), which was a greeting there. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the translation of the French term into "human creature" implies that the label "Christian" is a reminder of the humanity of the afflicted, in contrast to brute beasts.[1] Other sources suggest that Christian describes the person's "Christ-like" inability to sin, stemming, in such cases, from an incapacity to distinguish right from wrong.[2]

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