The way it works, is that we don’t have to disprove your assertion, you have to prove yours.
But I’ll bite anyway. Who exactly are these mysterious very smart puppeteers pulling Bush’s strings? The Illuminati? Aliens? Big business? George Stefanopolous?
We will need names, and documented instances of manipulation. We will also need evidence that they are acting in concert, as well as evidence that they are actually very smart. You will also need to show if you beleive that Bush is a willing toadie, has been manipulated, blackmailed, subsumed, or otherwise coerced. You will of course need to justify your statements.
Without these, or other colloboratory evidence, your idea is… well about as worthless as it sounds.
Beer: I’d submit that there’s just a bit of a difference between minor spelling and grammatical errors as written on an Internet message board (especially since you picked an easy target; care to do me?) and convoluted, nonsensical sentence construction as spoken by the leader of the free world. Especially because Bush does it so damn consistently. I mean, come on: "Is our children learning???
It would trouble me, personally, if a politician whom I supported made a statement on behalf of one of his nominees which ended up accidentally insulting the man, as with the Ashcroft example below. It’s thoroughly disingenuous to call Bush’s malapropisms “silly errors of spelling and grammar.” You’re comparing apples and horse apples.
My money’s on Frank Oz. (Ever wonder why G. W. doesn’t change his expression much? Only so much you can do with felt, shoestrings and marbles.)
Seriously, can’t we all just agree the guy’s not a brilliant communicator and move on to some legitimate criticism of his actions? I mean, we godless commie pinko liberals had our say about his fitness for office before and during the election. Now that he’s in, wouldn’t it be prudent (at this juncture ) to pick apart his policies rather than his characteristics? Didn’t we justifiably deride the conservatives for their unreasoning hatred of Clinton the man, and didn’t we wish they’d fight fair and discuss policies on their own merit? Maybe we should provide the Bushies with the type of discourse we claimed to desire from the anti-Clintonites.
The act of asserting.
Something declared or stated positively, often with no support or attempt at proof. *
Were I presenting my opinion as a hard fact, you would of course be correct in your demands. However, you are hobbled by two things. First, the failure to prove a positive does not prove a negative. Second, the Secret Service would probably take a dim view of my attempts to sit in on the meetings where I believe Dubie is being rather heavily “advised”.
You don’t want to disprove my assertion? Fine. You’ve declined the invitation. It doesn’t prove anything either way.
I don’t have any hard proof - yet. I’m basing my hypothesis on two things: 1) that he has said that while there are things that he does not know, he has people who do, and will rely on them -
“I do need somebody to tell me where Kosovo is. I know how to ask.” [Manchester Guardian Weekly, 8/25/99]
and 2) there’s a lot of things he doesn’t know.
“The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas.”—To a Slovak journalist as quoted by Knight Ridder News Service, June 22, 1999. Bush’s meeting was with Janez Drnovsek, the prime minister of Slovenia.
The following is an assertion: I’m smarter than GW Bush. And neither of us is smart enough to be President.
Yeah, you’re right, Gadarene, there is quite a bit of difference, as I said earlier, between typing and contemporaneous speaking. It should be far easier to avoid errors when typing, than when speaking. And no, I don’t care to search for your errors. Simply because I think this is totally meaningless. And extremely time consuming.
Tourbot, I deny what I’ve presented is anecdotal. I merely did “find all posts by this user” for the first person in this thread, selected a returned link at random and analyzed it. I did not purposefully select a single post that contained a multitude of errors. The post I presented is just the first one I looked at. Unscientific? Sure. Anecdotal? Nope.
You are making this too easy. It’s spelled corollary.
Ya seem to have skipped right over the meat of my contention, Unc–Bush’s malapropisms aren’t “silly spelling and grammar errors,” and it’s thoroughly disingenuous to pretend that they are.
assertion n 1: a declaration that is made as if no supporting evidence were necessary [syn: averment, asseveration] 2: the act of affirming or asserting or stating something [syn: affirmation, statement]
“As if” being the operative words.
Gee, Scylla, that doesn’t look like my quote. Don’t you think that if you’re going to get semantic, and define the “operative words,” you should at least take the “operative words” out of the quote I used? Isn’t that kind of lame?
You see, friends, we seem to have two sides here: myself and some others whom I will not presume to name - just scroll upward, think that GW is dangerously low on mental octane for his present position. We have cited evidence from the horse’s mouth, upon the assumption that an intelligent man can speak in an intelligent manner.
The other side seems to feel differenly, but evidence is scant. They say that (I paraphrase) the inability of a man to express himself while keeping his oxfords out of his mouth is not indicative of a lack of aptitude for the office of POTUS.
I wonder (note: not presented as fact) if Bush’s supporters aren’t a little secretly embarrassed by his incessant gaffes, and that is the reason for their vehemence in his defense.
I would still like to have these people put to rest my anxiety concerning Bush’s apparent lack of mental prowess. So far, there have been not much more than tu quoque diversions.
Actually, Gadarene, I didn’t skip over your contention. Any reasonable interpretation of my post(s) would lead a person to conclude I simply disagree with you.
But how’s this? I disagree that Bush’s malapropisms are any indication of the man’s intelligence, or lack thereof.
Screwtape, you seem to have changed the argument in midstream. Your originally asserted George Bush is “a mouth-breathing, microencephalic dolt.” Now you are merely asserting that he’s not smart enough to be the president. I don’t care which assertion we aruge about, but please pick just one.
Actually, no I didn’t. I just asked to be convinced that he isn’t a mouth-breathing, microencephalic dolt. Such a request should be construed as a request for help to a conclusion, not a conclusion in itself.
From day one of the debates I KNEW that Dubya was gonna win it. We could never have a cool president like Nader or something. We’re stuck in a bipartisan system that’s getting us NOWHERE, and not only that the WORSE of the parties has control now. Yeech. In France, they have a better voting system. Everybody votes and the two people with the highest POPULAR vote (no electoral crap over there) tallies is advanced to the run-off election, i.e. a second election where the two remaining candidates are voted for. Had we done this in the last election, Bush and Gore would have gone into the run-off and the Nader factor would have been taken out (BTW, Nader did not screw it up for Gore any more than Gore did for Nader) and we would not have to bow down to King George II. But America is too afraid of change to reform the voting system. That’s why we still use Fahrenheit thermometers, the metric system, and we spell most words the way they were spelt in 1700 even if they look nothing like how they’re pronounced. There have been many ideas for voting system reform out there, including systems that allow you to rank candidates from the one you like the most and the one you hate the most. One interesting system is found at http://www.instantrunoff.com and you can find a whole lot of info if you search for “voting reform” in any search engine.
I thought maybe I was confused about what anecdotal meant, so I checked a couple of web dictionaries. Now I’m even more confused.
From Merriam-Webster: based on or consisting of reports or observations of usually unscientific observers.
From Random House Webster’s(through Allwords.com): based on personal observation, case study reports, or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation.
Oh well, back to the debate over the anecdotal evidence for GW’s lack of intelligence.
The fact that you have asserted something does not mean that your assertion is meaningful, useful, worthwhile or otherwise total bullshit.
Contrary to your thinking calling something an assertion doesn’t give free reign for drivel.
Here’s some other assertions
Al Gore is a midget.
Monkey’s are smarter than humans.
Jack Dean Tyler is correct.
The Center of the earth is made of Jellybean’s
Screwtape is offering worthwhile debate.
As you can see, all these assertions are demonstrably false. I might even ask you to disprove one or more of them as a challenge, and it would be technically impossible to disprove any of them.
This however, does not make them either correct, or worthy of consideration by intelligent and reasonable people.
Without evidence or reason your Bush assertion is bullshit.
You may offer evidence to support it, you may withdraw it, or you may continue to post worthless and unworthy bullshit under the false assumption that you’re fooling anybody. Take your pick.
And where did you go when you cut logic classes? “Take your pick…” forces the debater to assume an unproven, and generally faulty postulate, as a prerequisite to proof of unsupportability. You think you’re going to catch me in such an obvious trap? You’ll have to do better.
I will, however, award myself a grin for reducing you to profanity. Twice. You might take a lesson from UncleBeer. He and I may disagree, but he can be civil about it. When you start sputtering, you abandon credibility.
Sadly, I will have to resume this tomorrow. I have to go away for a while. Hopefully, on the morrow, someone will convince me that GW is more competent than I think he is.
Not that anyone cares, but I thought I’d throw some facts into this debate.
Based on his SAT scores of 1206, GW’s IQ is probably in the 125 to 130 range. Which, as all of you Mensa members are no doubt aware, is well above average.
By the way, here’s an interesting article on the subject, which may inspire even more debate (JFK with a 117 IQ!? The man must have hardly been able to feed himself!)
) to pick apart his policies rather than his characteristics? Didn’t we justifiably deride the conservatives for their unreasoning hatred of Clinton the man, and didn’t we wish they’d fight fair and discuss policies on their own merit? Maybe we should provide the Bushies with the type of discourse we claimed to desire from the anti-Clintonites.
You might take a lesson from UncleBeer. He and I may disagree, but he can be civil about it. When you start sputtering, you abandon credibility.