Are you trying to discourage conservatives from staying at SDMB?

The BBQ Pit
321

[QUOTE=Shodan]
Is it possible that the statement “some liberal will always show up to prove it” is meaningful and true without being “literally, precisely, didactically true”?
[/QUOTE]
Absolutely. Just as someone could substitute “right-winger” or “conservative” in a similar statement and be just as accurate.

That however, makes both statements truisms rather than an expression of Truth and renders each of them meaningless except to identify their authors as among the various peripheral posters who contribute only such lame assertions (on both sides).

322

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Absolutely. Just as someone could substitute “right-winger” or “conservative” in a similar statement and be just as accurate.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, I don’t believe it would be just as accurate, at least on the SDMB. We have far fewer knee-jerk conservatives than we do knee-jerks of the other sort.

I believe this would be stipulated as part of the “both sides have assholes, the SDMB is a liberal board, thus most of our assholes are liberals” line that several have agreed to.

Regards,
Shodan

323

[QUOTE=Shodan]
There isn’t much goading involved - certain types of threads trigger it almost automatically, and some of the Usual Suspects don’t have much else to say.

[/QUOTE]
But let’s not forget… they are merely the Usual Suspects and therefore are presumed to be innocent unless and until they are convicted, at which point they would become the Usual Guilty Dudes. :smiley:

324

[QUOTE=Shodan]
Actually, I don’t believe it would be just as accurate, at least on the SDMB.
[/quote]
Sure it would and you are just trying to move the goalposts.

The original claim was that if one made a hostile comment about some political faction, some member(s) of that faction would show up to demonstrate the comment. That remark does not change whether it is two right-wingers or six left-wingers. I am willing to stipulate that there are more lefty wingnuts than righty wingnuts by number. I have seen no evidence that there are proportionally more lefty wingnuts than righty wingnuts. (If 2% of the lefties are wingnuts, I suspect that 2% of the righties are wingnuts.)

325

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
Of course it is ok for the impeachment process to charge a violation of the law. But that is not what happened in this case.
[/QUOTE]

Yes. Yes, that is what happened in this case. The articles of impeachment charged him with perjury, a violation of federal law. He may not have been guilty of it. The Senate found him not guilty. I don’t wish to argue whether he was guilty or not. I don’t even have any strong feelings on the matter. But he was accused of it in the articles.

The tenor of this disuccsion seems to be:

Everyone else: Clinton was impeached on a charge of perjury.
You: No, he wasn’t, because he didn’t commit perjury.

:confused:

326

[QUOTE=I Love Me, Vol. I]

Can those of you making such criticism point me towards a better message board where I can find intelligent debate that is more balanced between conservatives and liberals?
[/QUOTE]

This is good as it gets.

327

Cool. Depressing, but cool.

328

No, no, no.

The impeachment process was about whether the present facts were sufficient to merit an impeachment.

That process has nothing to say about whether Clinton was guilty of perjury. Impeachment is not about guilt or innocence. Only courts do that. No-one else. Courts only.

Now, it is rather wordy to say: Clinton is to be impeached because he was finally badgered into saying something that wasn’t true in a fishing-expedition with powers to compel testimony under oath. But you know, that would not have gone down too well. Instead, the articles of impeachment characterised what he said as ‘perjury’, when they could just as meaningfully have called it champerty or murder. Again, they don’t get to make it ‘perjury’ by saying so.

So, what I’ve been saying is that the decision to call it ‘perjury’ was to trick up the impeachment to make it look like they’d caught Clinton, bona fide, in a real and legit’, regular crime. Weren’t so.

329

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
I have seen no evidence that there are proportionally more lefty wingnuts than righty wingnuts. (If 2% of the lefties are wingnuts, I suspect that 2% of the righties are wingnuts.)
[/QUOTE]

Test this hypothesis, if you will. Look at this and the previous page of this thread (for a sample) and count up the unique posters who are clearly liberals versus clearly conservatives. Having done so, identify which ones are wingnuts of each stripe and get a ratio.

By “wingnuts” I don’t just mean strongly partisan people. I mean people who are partisan to such an extreme that they will argue that “Bush sux” is an empirical fact versus an opinion, or that the Articles of Impeachment specified “blowjob,” and things of that nature.

I think you will find a marked disparity.

Of course, I don’t count myself as a wingnut, but I’m reminded of that old poker adage: If you sit down at the poker table and try to figure out who the sucker is, and cant… then it’s you.

My personal opinion is that you are probably right as far as the general public is concerned. There are roughly the same proportion of wingnuts on either side. I don’t beleive that holds true for the Dope though.

This is a very unfriendly place for a right wingnut. They have about the life expectancy of a Pop Tart at a fat farm. The left wingnut, on the other hand has a very comfortable existance here as they are only challenged by a small minority.

Still doubt me? Take another test. Make a mental list of Left wingnuts currently posting versus righties.

330

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
No, no, no.

The impeachment process was about whether the present facts were sufficient to merit an impeachment.

That process has nothing to say about whether Clinton was guilty of perjury. Impeachment is not about guilt or innocence. Only courts do that. No-one else. Courts only.

Now, it is rather wordy to say: Clinton is to be impeached because he was finally badgered into saying something that wasn’t true in a fishing-expedition with powers to compel testimony under oath. But you know, that would not have gone down too well. Instead, the articles of impeachment characterised what he said as ‘perjury’, when they could just as meaningfully have called it champerty or murder. Again, they don’t get to make it ‘perjury’ by saying so.

So, what I’ve been saying is that the decision to call it ‘perjury’ was to trick up the impeachment to make it look like they’d caught Clinton, bona fide, in a real and legit’, regular crime. Weren’t so.
[/QUOTE]

Question: if the facts surrounding Clinton’s conduct were submitted to a jury at a trial, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty, would that verdict be sustainable on appeal? In other words, were there sufficient facts alleged that, if believed by a jury, establish the crime of perjury?

Answer: Yes.

331

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Question: if the facts surrounding Clinton’s conduct were submitted to a jury at a trial, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty, would that verdict be sustainable on appeal? In other words, were there sufficient facts alleged that, if believed by a jury, establish the crime of perjury?

Answer: Yes.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for your opinion. My own differs but the question will never be tested appropriately. Why might that be?

Shall we discuss prosecutorial discretion? No? Instead let’s look to the purpose of the ‘materiality’ requirement and also the requirement of relevance in questioning. To my mind the purposes are to prevent the very facts you suggest would sustain a charge of perjury. To wit ‘the fishing expedition’ or examination for the main purpose of obtaining testimony to sustain a perjury charge dependent on the witness’ conduct during that examination. It’s as plain an abuse of process as can be imagined.

332

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
Thank you for your opinion. My own differs but the question will never be tested appropriately. Why might that be?

Shall we discuss prosecutorial discretion? No? Instead let’s look to the purpose of the ‘materiality’ requirement and also the requirement of relevance in questioning. To my mind the purposes are to prevent the very facts you suggest would sustain a charge of perjury. To wit ‘the fishing expedition’ or examination for the main purpose of obtaining testimony to sustain a perjury charge dependent on the witness’ conduct during that examination. It’s as plain an abuse of process as can be imagined.
[/QUOTE]

Discovery’s standards are typically much looser. Questions in discovery need not typically be directly relevant, but simply be reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.

If you wish to discuss prosecutorial discretion, you’d be wise: I doubt that many prosecutors would file on these facts. But that’s not really the issue I raised. A prosecutor would recognize the politically-motivated reasons that led to the crime. But that doesn’t change the fact that on the record, a crime was committed.

333

We’ll have to disagree then.

334

[QUOTE=Scylla]
Test this hypothesis, if you will. Look at this and the previous page of this thread (for a sample) and count up the unique posters who are clearly liberals versus clearly conservatives. Having done so, identify which ones are wingnuts of each stripe and get a ratio.
[/quote]
This proposition assumes that the people posting in this particular thread are representative of the Board as a whole.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
By “wingnuts” I don’t just mean strongly partisan people. I mean people who are partisan to such an extreme that they will argue that “Bush sux” is an empirical fact versus an opinion, or that the Articles of Impeachment specified “blowjob,” and things of that nature.
[/quote]
I notice you don’t tell us what separates a regular conservative from a right wing nut. Too close to home?

You also fail to note the large middle ground, where one can hold the opinion that “Bush sux,” and can back up that opinion by pointing to empirical facts about the stupid or venal or self-serving or dishonest things he has done.

I guess maybe that’s how we tell a right wing nut: someone who thinks that, no matter how much empirical evidence is gathered, any contrary opinion about Bush still remains completely invalid.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
I think you will find a marked disparity.
[/quote]
Actually, in this thread, i think “too close to call” is probably more like it.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
Of course, I don’t count myself as a wingnut, but I’m reminded of that old poker adage: If you sit down at the poker table and try to figure out who the sucker is, and cant… then it’s you.
[/quote]
Well, based on my own little criterion for identifying a right wing nut, outlined above, i think there have been times when you qualify eminently. YMMV.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
My personal opinion is that you are probably right as far as the general public is concerned. There are roughly the same proportion of wingnuts on either side. I don’t believe that holds true for the Dope though.
[/quote]
Maybe, maybe not.

But if there are proportionally more left wingnuts on this Board (a proposition that i’m not accepting just because you claim it to be so), i submit that there are also a greater proportion of leftists/liberals who are willing to criticize the wingnuts on their own side than ever occurs on the right.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
This is a very unfriendly place for a right wingnut. They have about the life expectancy of a Pop Tart at a fat farm. The left wingnut, on the other hand has a very comfortable existence here as they are only challenged by a small minority.
[/quote]
That is, quite frankly, bullshit. If you truly believe that, i submit that you haven’t actually been reading this Board for the past few years.
[QUOTE=Scylla]
Still doubt me? Take another test. Make a mental list of Left wingnuts currently posting versus righties.
[/QUOTE]
Of course, this brings us right back where we started: the question of proportion versus absolute numbers. You claim that left wingnuts are in higher proportion than right wingnuts here, but you take this as an article of faith and simply expect everyone to agree with you.

It’s interesting, as a cultural phenomenon, that this Board has garnered its own little conservative truisms. The idea that poor old conservatives are set upon by evil left wingnuts has become this Board’s equivalent of the “liberal media” trope that pervades conservative discourse in the outside world: something that is only infrequently and partially true at best, and at worst is a mirage that disguises a truth that is quite the opposite.

335

[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Actually **Scylla ** is correct, Clinton was impeached for perjuring himself, of course it was about a blow job that he perjured himself.

Jim
[/QUOTE]

But sometimes, you know, facts aren’t the whole story. And sometimes common sense is required to make decisions about how to spend one’s tax dollars for the greater good. Yes, Clinton was impeached because he perjured himself. However, the inquiry during which he perjured himself about having sex with Lewinsky had nothing to do with that. It had to do with Whitewater. I personally do not feel that Clinton’s sex life had anything whatsoever to do with Whitewater, and that the question should never have been asked. Perhaps he should have answered truthfully, but I expect he felt the same as I do…that the question had to do with his personal life and that the only people to whom he should have to answer that question honestly were his wife and child.

It appeared to me, and I still perceive it this way, that when they couldn’t come up with anything in the original inquiry to impeach him with…or charge him with…they seized on the perjury charge as a way to get rid of him or discredit him.

If a person was brought in for questioning on a murder charge and during the questioning the police asked him if he had ever cheated on his wife and he lied about it and the police found out that he HAD cheated on his wife, and it had nothing to do with the investigation into the murder, would that have anything to do with him being guilty or not of murder? If it didn’t, would we spend tax dollars to prosecute him for committing perjury about committing adultery? (Assuming he was in a state where adultery was a crime, that is.) Would he be prosecuted for perjury if he lied about it? If he was, would that be a good use of limited resources?

I don’t think so. And I would consider it a bad use of my tax dollars if they WERE to prosecute him. That would be my opinion.

I have read all kinds of stuff about whether or not Clinton actually committed perjury, whether the legal definition of what he was asked included getting a blow job. But for my purposes, let’s let all of that slide. I am willing to say that he lied under oath. I just don’t think that impeaching him for lying when he answered THAT PARTICULAR question was a reasonable thing to do. From my perspective, we spent millions of dollars attempting to impeach Clinton because nothing else could be found to charge him with. And I find that to be beyond stupid. Again, that is my opinion.

And JFTR, if the same scenario was repeated with Bush, I’d feel exactly the same way.

336

Rather than add to the pointless debate about just how left the board is, or who is better behaved, let me just note some of the things that make it hard to be a conservative around here. Note that I’m not complaining about it - I’m free to go elsewhere if I don’t like it. But it’s useful to point out some of this stuff if for no other reason than as a point of reference:

  1. Cites are not treated fairly on both sides. A cite from The Nation, Media Matters, or any number of left wing periodicals or think-tanks are treated as gospel. Cites from The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Instittute, or other right-wing periodicals and think-tanks are treated as inherently flawed and not worth responding to.

  2. The axioms on each side are different, mostly due to pure partisanship, as are the perceptions of the severity of actions on the left vs the right. Contrast, for example, the debate about the Valerie Plame matter and the debate over the Sandy Berger document theft. The way I see it, the Plame affair was all about a guy with too big a mouth (Richard Armitage) giving the name of someone he shouldn’t have. But this person was not an active field agent, her occupation was already an open secret, and it really wasn’t that big a deal. Also, there was intentional effort to undermine the intelligence capability of the U.S. But you’d never know that from the howls of outrage on this board.

On the other hand, we have a former Clinton official actually stealing classified material that was actively being sought by a commission trying to shed some light on the most diffficult issue of our day - terrorism. Perhaps hiding evidence damning to his administration or to himself personally. Stuffing material down his pants and sneaking out with it. Yet on this board, it was treated with a yawn and a ‘who cares?’ Furthermore, we’re treated to arguments like, ‘You can’t prove he took anything original, so it doesn’t matter.’ Would an argument that weak EVER fly around here if it had been a Republican operative? Is there anyone who doubts that if Berger had been a Republican politician stealing documents in a similar manner, and Plame had been outed by a Clinton official, those opinions would be reversed? It’s pure partisanship, but anyone who tries to present the opposite case generally gets ridiculed and shot down.

  1. Sheer numbers. Nothing you can do about this now. But it is extremely difficult to hold a debate when you are one against ten. I can post a message and go to work, and when I come home I’ll find that I’ve been rebutted, three people have joined the chorus on the rebuttal, a couple of high-fives have been shared, and the issue declared closed and my argument defeated. And often, when you try to respond, you get something like, “Are you STILL on about that? Posters X, Y, and Z already tore that argument to shreds, so I’m not even going to talk about it anymore.”

It can be difficult even getting through the noise. Another effect is that five people will each take little nitpicking shots at different parts of your post, and these will be interspersed with drive-bys from the usual suspects. If you try to respond to every little nitpick, each one of those will in turn trigger multiple responses from people. And if you ignore even one of them, then no matter how good your other arguments were you’ll get, “I see you didn’t have an answer to poster so-and-so. You lose.” It just gets tiring.

  1. Posters bail on the discussion with impugnity and fade back into the crowd. This one annoys me to no end. You can post a devastating rebuttal to one of the gang’s arguments, and that person wil simply fade away. The rest ignore it and continue on other things. But since I’m the only one on the other side, I can’t afford to ignore anything, lest I be accused of trying to dodge an argument.

  2. There is far more tolerance for idiocy and abrasiveness from the left - not by mods, but by other posters. So in the course of trying to have a civilized debate, I have to put up with drive-by sniping from the likes of rjung or ElvisL1ves, and they never seem to catch any grief for it. Certainly nowhere near as much as that leveled at, say, Shodan, who isn’t even in their league in terms of boorish behaviour.

That said, the board is what it is. I think the moderators do a great job. As far as I’m concerned, this is the best discussion board on the internet, and I’ve tried a lot of them. Do I wish there were more Libertarians/Conservatives here to provide balance? Sure. But even without them, this is still the place to be. And what’s the difference? The quality of the moderation. It’s simply the best there is. And Tomndebb is one of the best mods. So there.

337

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
Perjury is a bit like that. There is no way Clinton’s conduct came within a slow mile of actual perjury.
[/quote]

Is that a fact?
Bill Clinton claimed that he did not have “sexual relations” or a “sexual affair” with Monica Lewinsky while being deposed under oath by Paula Jones’ lawyers during her sexual harassment suit.

In actuality, his ejaculate ended up on Lewinsky’s dress after oral sex, he inserted a cigar in her vagina, to name two of the more famous incidents in their series of tristes.

Bill Clinton surrended his license to practice law as a result of this nonperjury.

I don’t know by what means you consider this not to be perjury: Do you have any legal cites that back up your stance?

Here’s the perjury statute:

“whoever having taken an oath … in any case in which a law of the United States authorizes an oath to be administered” and “willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true … is guilty of perjury….”

The most common answer to that is that this was a civil case, but in fact that doesn’t matter. Perjury in a civil case can and has resulted in prison, and the statute legally applies.

Then too, are the articles concerning suborning perjury and obstruction of justice. Neither of those is provable in my opinion, but I honestly don’t see how an informed person can beleive that Clinton did not perjure himself.

338

[QUOTE=Scotticher]
Yes, Clinton was impeached because he perjured himself. However, the inquiry during which he perjured himself about having sex with Lewinsky had nothing to do with that. It had to do with Whitewater.
[/quote]

I beleive you’re mistaken. The alleged perjury occured during a deposition in a sexual harassment suit by Paula Jones. It was completely seperate and had nothing to do with Whitewater.

It was not. Your confusion may be founded on Ken Starr’s shifting the focus of his investigation from Whitewater to the Jones case.

Generally, I would agree with you. In this case a woman was claiming she had been sexually harassed by Bill Clinton. In that context, whether or not a pattern could be shown that he was pursuing sexual relationships with subordinates was highly germaine and deserved an honest answer.

And that way to me as well. Whitewater was nothing more than a fruitless fishing expedition.

Again, the context of the perjury was in a sexual harassment case, not Whitewater.

Had that question been asked under the context of Whitewater, I think I would agree with you. Now that you know it was asked under the context of a sexual harassment case is your opinion different?

339

[QUOTE=Scylla]
I think you will find a marked disparity.
[/QUOTE]
What you guys lack in numbers, you make up for in volume. Have a look at the posting rates of the right versus the left. You guys out-post us two to one.

340

We have to. See my point #3 above.