Bricker, You're a Jackass Extraordinaire

[septimus]

Bricker is by far the most intelligent right-winger on the Board. I’ve no idea who’s in second place, but it would be a distant second. It’s easy to put a clinical moron like Shodan on Ignore, but Bricker’s behavior and ignorances attract interest! For example, consider one of the bizarre ignorances that provoked this zombie to be bumped:

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Right. They [N.Y. Times] are less biased [than FoxNews], but I don’t agree the difference is significant.

[/QUOTE]

Is there any other sentient humanoid that would make this claim? There’s no way to cope with such nonsense outside the Pit. To assert such a thing is to be awash with right-wing blather, but to debate Bricker on his own terms would be legalistic masturbation. Bricker would alternate among (1) complaining about comma placement and other minutiae, (2) pseudo-Socratic sophistry, (3) a never-ending string of Tu Quoque’s. MaxTheVool summed up some of Bricker’s asinine style in this post:

@MaxTheVool

… Instead he did something more subtle, which is that he asked if the OPer would be equally outraged if a Democrat proposed such a bill. This does several clever things:
(a) it strongly implies that Democrats do and have proposed such bills without having to actually outright state such (which would of course open him up to being called on it)
(b) it puts the OPer on the defensive… now for your thread to continue you have to prove that you’re not a hypocrite. Which is very hard to do
(c) it tends to totally derail the thread entirely, until the original complaint is lost and forgotten

Especially sad is that such an intelligent man is incapable of learning anything new. I still recall vividly a thread I started, in which OP documented, with citations, some of the malicious, probably-criminal, shenanigans of the GOP top fraudster Karl Rove. Bricker entered the thread defending Karl Rove. I was confused and kept quiet — was Bricker playing some semantic trick? Was it just the legal truism that nobody is “criminal” unless convicted of a “crime”? But eventually it came out that Bricker knew nothing whatsoever about Karl Rove and had just dropped into the thread like a Pavlov’s dog eager to salivate for one of the GOP stars, without even bothering to read the OP. Before that I had thought of him as an intelligent right-winger — as rare as a four-leaf clover and capable of benefit to the SDMB. I was stunned to find out that, whatever his expertise on legal issues unrelated to politics, once U.S. partisan politics were involved he was as willfully ignorant as any Yahoo blogger.

AFAIK, Bricker has never deigned to educate himself on Karl Rove’s record and continues to venerate him as a key Republican icon.

No matter what the facts, Bricker is always ready to jump in with a Tu Quoque, whether factual or imagined. In one recent thread he insisted we Google Joanna Broderick or such. Heavens. Dennis Hastert (once 2 heartbeats away from the Presidency) is in federal prison right now for charges related to molesting an underage boy, while Clinton has never been convicted of a crime. Can you imagine Bricker’s squealing were the party alignments reversed here?

I offered an opinion earlier in this thread which still synopsizes why I find Bricker’s rhetoric hypocritical.

@septimus

There are two modes by which we might view any issue:
[ul][li] (1) A way which combines morality, common-sense and reason to reach a correct answer, the “whole truth.”[/li][li] (2) A hyper-legalistic way which might work against a judge or jury, especially if a witness is particularly stupid.[/li][/ul]

If Bricker consistently adopted mode (2), he would have a function. We could turn to him when we wanted a legalistic view, e.g. if a health or environment advocate were preparing a court case.

The problem is that Bricker cheerfully bounces between modes 1 and 2, depending on whichever suits his obnoxious right-wing views in the issue at hand. The one constant is his holier-than-thou attitude, condemning mode 2 when he’s temporarily in mode 1, and vice versa.

A sad thing is that one often detects a glimmer of rationality and candor in his posts. For example, he is not wrong when he blathers “How about if it costs 17 trillion dollars to save a citizen’s life. … should he still get free care? Hunh? Hunh? Hunh?” But the obnoxious holier-than-thou attitude is constant, making it hard to like him even when he’s right. I’d put him on ignore but, frankly, he’s become one of the more amusing animals in the zoo for me.

@Skywatcher

Any Republican who didn’t vote for Trump can’t be all bad.

Recall that Trump used to be a moderate, and it was partly on this basis that Bricker declined to support him. Now that he has populated his cabinet and inner circle with right-wing scum and anti-government incompetents like Steve Bannon, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, etc. Bricker is as delighted with Trump as a pig wallowing in shit.