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"Keep the guvmint out of my medicare!": Insurance Lobby Organizes Elderly Hecklers

Discussion in 'Serious' started by Prestidigitweeze, 11 Aug 2009.

  1. cyrilthefish

    cyrilthefish What's a Dremel?

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    Must admit this caught my eye, as laRouche is pretty much equated with rabid ultra-rightwing craziness on the internet...

    Apon visiting the main page for the second site, i'm immediately greeted with two different banners displaying:

    "STOP OBAMAS NAZI HEALTH PLAN'
    Nazi's? Really?
    *epic facepalm*

    "OUR CAMPAIGN AGAINST GREEN FASCISM"
    Fascism? wait, what?

    I do appreciate you trying to debate the issue, but linking to such craziness really isn't helping :confused:
     
  2. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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    this is the way my pops sees it.. he says the unions are responsible for the high costs in healthcare today- like when he was a kid, his father (my grandad) paid out of pocket for doctor visits.. you could do that back then because doctor fees were reasonable..

    like a tooth was 3 bucks to pull (he told me that lol I dunno), and if he got sick or grandma got sick.. his dad just paid for it.. then the unions came in and required employers to tack on health insurance, and that's when the prices started to climb.. soon as people start getting things for free (health insurance) they can't help but use it, prices go up.. think the analogy given was, he said it's like being at a state park, the electricity for your camper is free.. so you hook up that bad boy and use it 24/7- if you had to pay for it, you'd be taking a swim instead of a hot shower

    the republican's plan is require everyone to pay into health insurance, and the healthy offset the overbuttsecks.. I like obamas plan even though I can see what people are talking about, over the long run when he's gone it will go corrupt and what are you going to do then.. I think over the short haul it will work great least to bring down insurance costs

    my pops totally disagrees with me.. but I still love him =] he says hawaii already tried it and they fell so far into debt because, even though they had the same rosy outlook, everyone ended up on the government option and was unable to sustain itself.. if this government plan can sustain itself without dipping into the deficit, I'm totally down with it- from what I heard, that seems to be what they're planning at least
     
  3. Elton

    Elton Officially a Whisky Nerd

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    Well Hippoz inflation might also affect this.
     
  4. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Interesting: You didn't comment on the olive branch I offered by pointing out that a liberal economist was partly responsible for the recession. You also felt it necessary to state that Fogel and Friedman were as reasonable as Krugman, when that was exactly the point I tried to make by recommending Krugman to you, mentioning Friedman in that context, and thanking you for citing Fogel instead of the Heritage Foundation. I also note that your response to my request for better sources wasn't nearly as polite as the request itself. This suggests you're being honest about your animosity, if nothing else.

    Beyond suspecting you of some quixotic compulsion to disrupt and pummel any conversation that threatens to allow three leftists and a liberal to exchange ideas without meeting their baroque ends in Final Destination V (kidding), let me see if I understand you correctly:

    You have (1) "moderated more threads" than I "will ever read" (though you've managed to read through them yourself, which seems to indicate they could be read fairly easily) and (2) no, of course you weren't "making a threat" by mentioning your (3) "major shareholder" status (at a site on which I have the temerity to request that you (a) resist the urge to repeatedly interrupt the conversation with hectic dispatches from right-wing blogs and think tanks, (b) make a habit of citing sources as credible as your last (which I was glad to see) and (c) regard the thread as a conversation rather than a group of victims to hector with sources and pronouncements that benefit neither the conversation nor their understanding). No, that would have amounted to Rhetorical Fallacy 3278(h) -- Argument by Authority -- and we know you're better than that. Nor would you, as a conscientious American, assert that money = the right to speak.

    No, I haven't enjoyed our conversations either, but that's not because you're a conservative. Conservative friends of mine (here and elsewhere) voice their opinions candidly, too (and said opinions are at least as objectionable to me as yours). But they don't begin by accusing me of being a snob in an ivory tower and an intellectually lazy TV-addicted couch potato and then slip pamphlets from the Heritage Foundation into my briefcase every five minutes while subsequently ignoring every argument I make and question I ask. You've done all three things. I take offense at that behavior. Therein lies the tussle.

    T.S. Eliot was a conservative. Ezra Pound was a conservative. Wyndham Lewis was a conservative. F.R. Leavis was a conservative. Stravinsky was conservative. My girlfriend's mother is a college-level art professor, a prolific and gifted painter who studied with a famous American abstract expressionist and an omnivorous reader who makes her opinions known. She, too, is a conservative. The list of brilliant and interesting conservatives is as endless as the lattice of human achievement. The problems between us issue from a different source. Call it dueling concepts of polite discussion, mutual boundaries and general respect.

    You mention that others have attacked you, and that I've said nothing about it. I'm very aware of that fact. Ordinarily, I'd be sympathetic to your situation and would have spoken up. Unfortunately, you began by attacking me in two posts, which has left you open to the same sort of personal attack until you either renounce your earlier methods or retaliate so viciously than none dare try again (not advisable on a public forum). A bit of research will show that I've responded directly in the past to Rum&Coke's habit of calling people variations on the word stupid despite his frequently excellent points. 

    I've been up for two days working and am literally so tired I've nodded off twice while typing the above paragraph. Thus, I'm going to paste a partial response to your list of links tonight and finish with the rest tomorrow.

    Now on to the inevitable fisking of your post.

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    Actually, you've cherry-picked links from completely unrelated threads and neglected to add other links from the very thread we're discussing, such as the ones in the post to which you've just responded. The result is jaw-droppingly dishonest: you've furtively skewered the ratio of hype to credible news in my true list of links -- and the ratio of swill to useful sources, light o' my life, is precisely my complaint about your previous posts.

    By cherry-picking links from many of my other threads, you've created three problems that make discussion impossible:

    (1) Your charge falls apart because you haven't listed the chronological link and number of every post I've ever made on bit-tech (and who can blame you?) and so can't attest to the context and credibility ratio of the links cited.

    (2) Refuting you would involve my doing exactly that, since it would be the only way to review the context, content and accuracy of your citing of my links, and to correct the sweeping lack of inclusiveness of your list. Expecting me to do so would not be reasonable or relevant to this thread. We're engaged in a discussion about politics, not a time-devouring post-for-post survey of my 266 posts on bit-tech.

    (3) A polite discussion involves charges and points that can be reasonably addressed. I could easily go through twelve posts of yours on multiple threads, cherry-pick what I felt were the worst links, toss in a few of my own to see whether you noticed, and then leave it to you to slog through each of your 4,690 posts to list, confirm and explain the relevance of each of your sources. Doing so would be so unfair and ridiculous that anyone who read the request would be howling. If a charge is worth making (and a request for evidence respectable), it is worth thinking through.

    Besides which, you seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the term source when used in an editorial, journalistic and/or legal context. If a book is available on Google Books, the source is the book and the original publisher, not the hosting site (unless that's the only place it has ever been published).

    Let's have an unbiased and uninvested look at all of my actual links from this particular thread:

    Nobel-Prizewinning Economist Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times
    The text of Robert Fogel's book, Time on the Cross, published by W.W. Norton (which, by the way, I didn't mention to discredit you or him -- the book's considered a classic of economic history by many academics)
    A favorable review of Fogel's book from Santa Clara University's Economic History Archive
    Slavery and the Numbers Game, Herbert Gutman's response to Fogel (University of Illinois Press) (Gutman was a Professor of History at the City College of New York)
    An item reported by AP (Associated Press), which may be verified instantly by watching Obama's recent and nationally televised speech on Health Care (McCain gives him a visible thumbs-up)

    Now let's look at my initial post on this thread (the one that kicked off the proceedings):

    Link to a phony activist site set up by an insurance-lobbyist-hired PR firm, with a calendar of astroturfed demonstrations
    Link to actual footage of illiterate protesters outside Rep. Rick Larsen's Town Hall Meeting (albeit with irksome music and annoying commentary): Though hosted by Youtube, the footage was produced and edited by the conservative blog, Sound Politics, which, while itself suspect, seemed to authentically reproduce protesters' images and speech (I'd thought that conservative members might notice that the source was itself conservative and consider giving it credence). If I were writing a column for the New York Press, I'd either make sure the footage was authenticated, available from another source that did so or would refer to it in a casual and non-definitive way to avoid any possible legal issues. But since we're on a public forum, and since the footage is extremely unlikely to have been faked, I deemed it acceptable. Had I cited a written description or interpretation of the events, it would have been a different matter and I'd have linked from a verifiable source or not used the information at all.

    And by the way: Contrary to your earlier assertion, LaRouche is anything but a democrat. Apparently, his Wiki page has been edited by LaRouchians. If it hadn't, it would out him as an eccentric libertarian, an economic conservative in many respects, and an insane conspiracy theorist obsessed with a battle between the "neo-Platonists" and the "Aristotelians." He vilified Bill Clinton regularly during his presidency (despite eventually objecting to Starr's use of Lewinsky's testimony) just as he now claims Obama is a "racist" who is "two branches away from being descended from monkeys" because, according to LaRouche, Obama's mother went to Africa and had sex with everyone there. New York has been flooded with LaRouche pamphlets for the past fifteen years at least and I've been wading through them ever since (note odd visual result of combining two cliché metaphors involving water).

    A clip from an NBC News Broadcast
    This was an actual clip from MSNBC News. Like much copyrighted content on YouTube, it has since been removed.

    No matter. The reporting was from a legitimate news program. It contained commentary that might be construed as biased, but it was hardly a blog entry from a biased web site or organization.

    That is the extent of my links on this, the only pertinent thread, Your attributed links to me as they pertain to this thread are as unrepresentative as your use of unattributed quotes from sites you'd prefer not to name.

    Of course, I know from memory that you've omitted mentioning my frequent links to scholarly publications and credible sources, which I generally provide in posts like this (to use the most recent).

    One last thing: you've mentioned democracynow.org. The associated cable news program, Democracy Now, is one of the most useful alternative news sources I've yet to find. Its host, Amy Goodman, is not particularly supportive of Obama; she and her reporters are in fact sharply and relentlessly critical of his presidency. But though the journalists are primarily leftists, their sources are carefully researched and documented, and she covers stories and international events you won't see anywhere else. It has proved a very useful site for certain conservative groups to monitor, since one strategy of the right is to hang liberals out to dry using the charges and evidence of the left. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm mentioning this because the strategy often works and Goodman is conscientious enough to be useful.

    The bias is evident in terms of which story, event or individual Goodman chooses to cover, not her commentary or affect.

    Though the site is called Democracy Now, Goodman, et al., do not associate the Democratic Party with democracy itself in any way.

    That's it; I'm officially unable to sit up in my chair, let alone, finish this post. Talk to you tomorrow.
     
    Last edited: 18 Sep 2009
  5. Rum&Coke

    Rum&Coke What's a Dremel?

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    BS. You couldn't care less about facts, logic,analysis or empathy for your fellow man. You've already said in all seriousness that America's 10%-32% income tax brackets represent progressive taxation. I decided early on not to get involved in this debate because you clearly have no interest in whats the right thing to do, just that ideologically the country follows your stupid little minded healthcare system.

    Please stay there for every election or debate of importance, you're not useful to the political process.
     
  6. Hardware150

    Hardware150 Minimodder

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    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8252939.stm

    This group seems to pop up more and more when i read this thread, like them or not they seem effective.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8250803.stm

    The last line in this:
    I didn't realize the quote was used in something like this.

    I can see why some people protest, with people who aren't citizens of there country getting treatment when so many are uninsured, but a lot of it just seems to be people with guns who worry that obama is going to take them away and he is some sort of impossible nazi/marxist/socialist.

    Obama keeps saying he's up to constructive changes and proposals to his health care bill, but all they seem to want to do is defeat him, and the threat of violence and potential civil war is just outrageous, he was voted in by majority, i didn't see anyone threatening bush with civil war and violence when he was in power (marginally voted in), infact if you didn't support him you were supposedly unpatriotic no?

    :sigh:
     
  7. Scirocco

    Scirocco Boobs, I have them, you lose.

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    Freedomworks is run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey and other Washington Republican insiders. They are behind the "Tea Party" protests that have been happening around the country. The organization is considered to be a conservative advocacy organization whose efforts are termed "astroturfing" as they are merely designed to look like grassroots efforts. Freedomworks has been pursuing an aggressive strategy to create the image of mass public opposition to health care at the congressional recess town-hall meetings seen in August on the news. There are also questions concerning their tax exempt charity status due to some corporate contributions and subsequent endorsement of that company's business.

    I will agree with you though, they are professional and have been somewhat effective. These are knowledgeable and well-trained people who have the money and means to make things happen.
     
  8. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Hardware150:

    Yes, I watched a bit of that conspicuous rally in this AP Footage hosted by Youtube. Note the prominent thank-you to Fox News and right-wing talk radio at 0:42: That sign could have been held by the insurance lobbyists themselves.

    And yes, of course the aim of Freedomworks is to take down an elected President and his administration less than a year into his Presidency while stopping health care from being reformed at all.

    This New York Times opinion column by the strangely prurient-looking Maureen Dowd contains interesting thoughts from South Carolina U. political science professor and former DNC National Chairman, Don Fowler, on racism and the groundswell against Obama in the South. I've also quoted a few homely observations from South Carolina Representative, Democrat Jim Clyburn:


    Astroturfing and major media coverage of corporate-funded pseudo-activism have augmented post-election republican power strategies and right-wing media organizations' constant vilification of the President to push those numbers considerably. Obama has limited time to get the bill passed before the effects of political deals, bitter legal battles, scandal manufacture, careful rezoning and simple bad luck take away the democratic majority that could make the passing of H.R.2300 possible (see link for the actual text of Obama's health care plan).

    Often, we look back and gasp at the barbaric examples of prejudice we find in 19th-century newspapers: Depictions of African-Americans as monkeys, Irishmen as bankrupt leprechauns, Jewish leaders as greasy, shifty-eyed rats. We'll look back on this period, this reaction to a landside-elected administration, with the same sense of shame. Ironic, that the attempt to kill a health bill that would benefit nearly everyone, including the private sector, would become the motivation to reverse the spread of the anti-racist tone in America -- which led to the landmark election of Obama to the highest office in the country -- by targeting the President himself as the Ultimate Other. One wonders how Condaleeza Rice and Colon Powell would have been treated by the Right had they, too, been elected democrats.

    Scirocco: Thanks for the cogent summary of the history and activities of Dick Armey and FreedomWorks. Succinctly stated and nicely put.
     
    Last edited: 13 Sep 2009
  9. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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  10. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Anti-Obama health care protests, racist and xenophobic? How can socialists like former President Carter even suggest such things?:

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    And speaking of unreliable sources:

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    Last edited: 17 Sep 2009
  11. Rkiver

    Rkiver Cybernetic Spine

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    They seem to be completely forgetting who got their economy into the mess it's in. Their beloved republican politicians....
     
  12. supermonkey

    supermonkey Deal with it

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    In all fairness, that's not quite true. An equally valid argument can be made that the many causes of the global financial breakdown span multiple presidents, and multiple congresses. Both parties share enough of the blame, as do the "everyman" citizens that supposedly know better. After all, nobody forced us to buy houses we couldn't afford, or to run up cosmic credit card debts.

    Pinning the blame on Bush; on Republicans; is no more correct than blaming Obama for the mess we're in.

    Although Clinton inherited a debt and left with a surplus, his administration oversaw some of the deregulation that ultimately allowed the mega-banks and mortgage firms to engage in the questionable lending practices that contributed so much to the economic crises. Yes, Bush II didn't do anything to help matters (indeed, you might say he made things considerably worse), but he isn't entirely at fault.

    Truth be told, it is human greed that is to blame, rather than a particular human.

    -monkey
     
  13. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Actually, blaming both sides equally is more incorrect than blaming republicans exclusively -- the disparity in the ratio of blame is rather high. Unless you're counting complicit and impotent votes in congress, the responsibility rests clearly with Reagan, Greenspan (during the past four presidencies, including Clinton's) and Bushes II and III.

    For market speculators to create price increases, they must offer incentives to people who manufacture or own actual goods not to release them, and increases can rise improbably when speculators and producers become Machiavellian about profits. Said increases can deflate rapidly when faced at last with the limits of long-term demand, which is one reason that regulation is crucial to a country's long-term economic survival. In modern times, liberal and centrist dems are far more likely than repubs to favor increased regulation and ensure the continuance of current regulation. They have effected needed legislation when possible and when they themselves are not self-identified blue dogs.

    I assume you're aware that Bill Clinton left office having overseen our first balanced budget -- with a surplus! -- in decades and are thinking beyond that obvious fact toward specific policy decisions with later impact. Perhaps you're thinking of NAFTA (which I dislike because it further weakens American citizens' prospects for jobs and benefits, but not because it has had an immediate effect on our economic health) and the fruition of his collaboration with a recalcitrant republican congress, which resulted in further (but not nearly as much as under Reagan and the Bushes) erosion of the Rooseveltian regulation that might have saved us.

    Compare his uneasy compromises with the massive deregulation (resulting in unchecked speculative bubblings and subsequent burstings), and the arranged marriage of wild military extravagance and budget-starving, under Bush III. All of it looks positively calculated to bankrupt the government, which he was looking into (with regard to social security) toward the end of his Presidency.

    Bush III's tax cuts for the wealthy resulted in a loss of $1.8 trillion in revenue; his father's and Cheney's company outing, the War in Iraq, cost $700 billion (a conservative estimate), more than was spent on the similarly wasteful War in Vietnam. Without those two completely avoidable expenses, we'd be approaching the recession with our debt decreased by $2.8 trillion. Instead, we carry an increase of 20% in overall debt.

    Strangely, no one complained about budgetary concerns back then. People imagine the Bush Admin's aim was to make America free of Big Government, when the actual effect was to allow particular groups of interests and financial partners to make lewd amounts of money in the name of war and get out in time, leaving us to cover their expenses.

    The irony of others (not you) revering repubs as the gods of local patriotism is that, during their reign, key members of the last Bush Admin became completely independent of North America financially. They took from us without giving anything back, and they now have enough foreign land and resources to allow them to leave this site of financial wreckage instantly and utterly, without ever looking back. They're less invested in staying than Brad Pitt.

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    People forget that, when Clinton took office, he, too, was facing a crisis caused by deregulation, starved taxation and unchecked speculation. (Check them rhymes, yo: For the consciousness of the nation, the sound of the Asian Dub Foundation!) Perhaps, too, he didn't help to allay the slow murder of meaningful production in America. But before he balanced the budget, he had to deal with an unbalanced economy, and the concerns expressed in his July 16, 1992 acceptance speech mirror those in Obama's first inaugural address:

    (On the nether hind, one could argue that, at its loftiest and most generalized, the rhetoric of presidents can sound eerily similar regardless of which one happens to be talking.)

    Even so:

    Disproportionate as they might be, there are other causes of our current crisis besides Reagan, Bush II, Greenspan and the excesses of Bush III. I've mentioned before that, in the 70s, two economists at University of Rochester (one of whom was liberal) were responsible for the idea of making CEOs shareholders in their own companies. Their naive theory was that CEOs would behave more ethically (rather than flying to Haiti in Lear jets and billing the cost to their companies as a business meeting expense) if the future profitability of their investments coincided with their company's economic health. It didn't occur to those economists that the same sort of unethical self-indulgence that bills vanity vacations as work would cause people to artificially and temporarily increase the value of stocks, and withhold information from other shareholders, just before selling, which is part of the reason we're in this state in the States. I believe I read about this originally in the print version of the New Yorker (The New York Observer has had good coverage of this as well); I'm currently trying to locate the article so that other bit-tech members may read it, too.
     
    Last edited: 18 Sep 2009
  14. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Found it! Here's the 2002 article in question:

    "The Greed Cycle: How the financial system encouraged corporations to go crazy," by John Cassidy, The New Yorker (Sep't 23, 2002). I've spoken to corporate associates who were given this article to study by their professors at Berkeley and Harvard. Blame-wise, it casts a rather wide net for the crisis Clinton faced in 2002, which in turn pertains to the current crisis.

    For a pdf of the original magazine pages, click here. For a scan in Word, click here.

    Here's the pertinent bit:

     
    Last edited: 17 Sep 2009
  15. supermonkey

    supermonkey Deal with it

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    That is a very good article, Prestidigitweeze, and I believe that it helps to illustrate my point. I wasn't trying to say that Democrats and Republicans share an equal amount of blame, though I assume you understood that. Am I correct in thinking your rebuttal was more general, and not necessarily directed to me?

    I was offering a counter-argument to Rkiver's suggestion that the Republicans broke the economy. That is why I said that the problems span multiple presidencies, and extend further than just politics.

    -monkey
     
  16. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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    sucks they pulled funding to acorn because of those journalists
     
  17. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Gee willikers, Monk, we used to have such a scintillating rapport! What's happened to the synchronicity, the spark, the hep palaver?

    Well, Presti D, it all comes down to the stars. A certain neohippie I'm plagued with knowing would insist it's because "Mercury is in retrograde" (in other words, Hermes is moonwalking backwards, which is something to see, because the minute wings on his cap and ankles flutter the wrong way, simultaneously fanning L'il "Cupid" Eros and giving him some action).

    We agree so much of the time that points of disagreement should be seen as welcome novelties.

    In fact, it was quoted to give fair play to your point, as was the text following "Even so" in the previous post.

    Think of it as a negotiation rather than a rebuttal:

    Rikiver feels the recession is all the repubs' fault. You feel that Rkiver's opinion is "no more correct" than that of the anti-Obama demonstrators shown directly above his post. (No, you didn't say that specifically, but you did infer it logically, since those protesters occupy the antipodal position.) I simply pointed out that both historically and rationally, rkiver's position is more correct than theirs.

    I then went on to concede that you had a point in the general non-rkivers sense, which I illustrated with an article I'd been thinking about tracking down for days.

    A bit of disclosure: I'm the son of a music and English teacher and have taught both subjects -- however briefly -- in the past. Teaching the disadvantaged can play hell with one's conscience and sense of guilt. For some reason, I've never been able to stand watching people get chastened for expressing innocent thoughts, and even though that wasn't your intention, I still worry about discouraging sincere people from engaging in a discussion. Hence my concern about you as well (even though you're an adult and don't need my concern).

    The irony is that I have a stinging way of putting others in their place from time to time, a bad habit I learned from growing up with friends and Mensan siblings who used to enjoy engaging me in games of insult chess. It's a trait of which I'm not proud and which I repress except in cases in which I feel someone's being stunningly rude or immoral, or consciously unjust.

    Got it. I was agreeing in part, but also suggesting that rkiver's opinion was valid.
     
  18. Prestidigitweeze

    Prestidigitweeze "Oblivion ha-ha" to you, too.

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    Yes, it does suck desiccated mallard pizzles that Acorn has been de-seeded. Anyone who wonders what thehippoz is talking about should have a look at this, this and this.

    Still, it's time for social-reform-driven activists to absorb the lessons of the Clinton witch hunt and realize that sexual misconduct is always going to be used by the Right no matter how many prostitutes and mistresses might be engaged by the very people who rage obsessively about promiscuity and adultery. This isn't the time to be indulging one's fetishes or abusing one's personal power. Others are watching and they'll castigate opponents even when they do nothing wrong. Giving repubs a real reason is not only naive during a pseudo-culture war but an abdication of political responsibility.

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    Ah, the sheer hypocrisy of adulterous repub congressmen castigating Clinton during the impeachment proceedings. It takes me back even further -- to the period before Clinton was president -- which highlights the disparity between reported infidelity during a repub's and a dem's presidency.

    Long before Clinton ever ran against him, Bush II was having an ongoing affair with a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, just as Neil Bush was implicated in the S&L scandal but, unlike fellow perps on the democratic side, didn't appear in photos in the newspapers: according to a reporter I spoke to from Der Spiegel, his father, Bush II, had had an arrangement with the press not to focus on such things. (I'll bet Clinton wished he had the power, family connections and CIA history to make a similar arrangement.)

    Which reminds me of the story of Dan Hyman, a reporter for the Texas Monthly and AP, who was on an assignment taping the campaign speeches of a mid-presidential George Bush II. Said reporter had grown tired of the Right's faux-moral outrage directed at Clinton's rumored peccadilloes and had also researched Bush II's private life to level the field. During Bush II's Q&A, Hyman asked, "Is it true that you still have a mistress?"

    Bush's initial response was, "I'm not going to dignify that with an answer." (Startled, he replied in his most natural and characteristic accent: a mixture of cowboy and aristocrat that makes one think of a lisping John Wayne.) But a few minutes later, Bush walked over to Hyman and asked, "What kind of American are you? Where's your patriotism?" He then looked at Hyman's press badge and added, "Associated Press? You'll never . . ."

    The president stormed off without finishing his sentence, but Hyman soon learned that he himself was finished for a long time. He went back to his hotel and found his bags deposited outside his former room. His company credit line had been revoked and he was personally unwelcome.

    Hyman then learned he'd been fired from both press jobs. He was subsequently unable to find work as a journalist for the next seven years.
     
    Last edited: 18 Sep 2009
  19. Rkiver

    Rkiver Cybernetic Spine

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    He's an honest American who clearly has more patriotism then ANYONE in the Bush camp have had, or will ever have.
     
  20. supermonkey

    supermonkey Deal with it

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    That's fair enough, and I'm inclined to agree - to a point. I might give more of the blame to the left than you, but I do see your point.

    On the other hand, one of my great character flaws (if we're sharing) is a tendency to misconstrue sharp conversation as a direct, personal attack. If I took your response the wrong way, then I apologize. Group hug?

    I once read an interesting take on the whole Clinton sex "scandal." A psychologist wrote about how political leaders, bathing in power, tend to stray from their marital commitments. The psychologist made the observation that the thing that set Clinton apart wasn't that he had an affair, it was that he got caught. It seems to me that (not unlike the financial problems) sex scandals occur on both sides of the aisle. And, in Larry Craig's case, both sides of sexual preference.

    -monkey
     

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