Scylla, I’ve enjoyed your posts in this thread. You did indeed capture the moral high ground. It’s a shame that so many understand the dynamics of dominance in a debate forum, yet so few understand that the real goal of any debate should be to change people’s minds. Dominance (such as directing inventive insults at your opponent) only assures that you will never change your opponents mind, and is therefore self defeating. It is a tactic which should never be employed by any serious debater.
I think there is something important about the actual topic at hand that you are missing, however:
[QUOTE=Scylla]
I’ll answer this sincerely, and honestly for you. Because it’s an irrelevant and stupid thread, and the people that are making a huge deal about this and going on about what it proves and demonstrates are engaging in elablorate fantasy. It was not worthy of what would, on the face of it be a reasoned response. You can’t reason with people engaging in fantasy. So, I showed the other side of it. You all say it makes him out to be an idiot. I say it makes him out to be a genius. You cannot find the one extreme unreasonable without finding the other one unreasonable.
Again, I felt that this was pretty obvious. Certainly, it was caught by some. So in fact I did make a reasoned and substantive response. You simply didn’t get it. To do so is to inherently recognize the absurdity of the converse.
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I agree with you, it is stupid. I’m more here for the amusement than anything substantive, yet there is an important point here. You come close to it when you remarked:
[QUOTE=Scylla]
What does the women in question have to say about the incident? Ultimately, it is her opinion that matters.
[/QUOTE]
That would be true if the woman in question were at a barbecue or watching a foosball tournament, but in this case Merkel was acting in an official capacity representing the country of Germany. It therefore wasn’t Merkel whose shoulders he was groping, it was, from a diplomatic perspective, the country of Germany. The question is, how do the Germans feel about it? If the links in this thread are any indication, they’re furious. And while Bush may have apologized to Merkel, he apparently did it off camera, in which case he still owes an apology to Germany.
Still, I agree that this incident is minutiae in the overall picture. I’m for raising its profile and broadcasting it widely, however, using it as a typical example of the number of small but significant faux pas our President commits every day. It see it as an important, if trivial, example.
As a supporter of the Republican party, I expect that trivial examples are something you understand. The Republicans collect trivial examples of the behavior of their opponents. They have become the zen masters of collecting trivial examples. When Gore used poorly chosen words to describe how he’d helped the proliferation of the Internet, the Republicans were there. When Kerry attempted to explain why he changed positions on the Iraq war and again chose his words poorly, the Republicans were there again. When Clinton asked for an explanation of the context of the word “is” the Republicans collectors were crowing with delight. For years the country has been subjected to a constant litany of repetition of these statements over and over and over again. Shall I mention the video clips Limbaugh would show every single day on his show? They were the same video clips in every episode, but he played them repeatedly to drive the images into his subject’s brain.
Those of us outside the folds of the Republican base have learned from those of you who are. We have learned a hard lesson from you not to let go of small incidents like this. We have lost too many elections because the Republicans were better collectors than we.
If you truly want us to let this go, then I encourage you to once again seek the moral high ground. The next time you hear someone say “Al Gore invented the Internet”, or “Kerry was with it before he was against it” or any of the millions of chants about Bill Clinton, I challenge you to step forward and say “We shouldn’t be repeating this, because they were social gaffes, they were minor misstatements which were not exemplary of the actual position the candidate held.” I challenge you to change the Republican tactics. Encourage your brethren on the right to campaign entirely on their issues and ideas, to refrain from insults or out-of-context sound and video bites. I’ll encourage those on my side of the aisle to use less insults and more ideas. Maybe between the two of us, and people like us, we can restore the national dialog and return this country to a great land of differing ideas.
But in the meantime, since we need to get these twits out of congress and that dipstick out of the Whitehouse, I’ll be blasting this video clip across the net to every person I can, as well as any other bumbling, moronic gaffe I see President Bush committing. After all, we learned this from you guys. Maybe when McCain wins in two years things will be better.
You mean guys actually don’t… :eek:
