This debate appears to have started because I called the politician a halfwit - which one poster found unacceptable - while the villain of the piece was a loony (which IMO is possible but relatively unlikely - punching someone is not the sole diagnostic criterion for being a loony). Opinions are usually some combination of surmise and fact - we fill in the blanks between what we perceive to be the facts, and come to a conclusion. We can fill in the blanks with other facts, or with stuff we made up. We might also ignore certain facts in order to reinforce our preferred worldview. So perhaps opinions can have greater or lesser validity depending on what someone has used to plug the gaps, and what facts have been discarded.