Well I accidentally deleted the original blog post instead of my last post (I wanted to revise it). Here's my revised last post. I'm sorry to the other class mates that had posted in the thread.

To JMC (cont.)
Yes, I think if Plato is writing a sarcastic Socrates then he needs to be read differently. The question becomes if Socrates doesn't believe in what he's saying what difference does it make (noble lie?)? Belief is a tricky concept and I think Socrates realizes that believing and acting like you believe (or perhaps better put- "half-believing") can still achieve the same results. That's what makes his criticism of Gorgias and rhetoric so ironic.
If you were to ask Socrates how to be ethical he would give you his rational answer. That his answer is lacking in a human quality or seems unassailable yet incomplete tells the reader quite a bit about their own views of ethics. What's great about the socratic dialogues is what they leave out and it's in these spaces that perhaps the most work is done on the reader- or at least for me it is.It's not that I think Socrates is answering in a dishonest manner, just that when he answers he frequently does so with a subtle wink. If a child asked what the right thing to do in a situation was you would give them an honest but different answer than if a peer came to you with the same question. Socrates seems to be giving us a deceptively simple answer in order to provide us with a tool for answering seemingly unanswerable questions- and at least this is a start. I think Socrates sometimes acts sarcastic because he knows he has given you an answer that is unsatifactory- whether it's unsatisfactory because he knew he had to leave out many of the (ineffible?) details or whether it's only unsatisfactory because you've yet to fully understand it fully is constantly up for debate.
My ideas regarding Socrates' ethics and my own, however, are incomplete and rather nebulous and I'm having a bit of trouble putting them into words.