I had it on good authority that the left-wingers who give this board its well-known liberal bias would embrace any plausible excuse to malign prominent republicans at the merest whiff of suspicion, that they were no better than the Richard Scaifes and Ann Coulters and all their fans, and would behave the same way were the shoe on the other foot. So as soon as the democratic party is on top, I go to the trouble of providing a rumor, a good rumor with an easy target, about a widely-despised republican and involving a widely admired democrat.
And no traction. Can’t get the pot boiling at all. Phooey. Foiled again.
They can’t run in the fields, chasing after butterflies anymore. Gotta go with the next best thing : crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentations of their women.
Come to think about it, Cheney would make a *mean *Thulsa Doom.
The King of Soup, it’s pretty much impossible to read this as anything other than an admission of trolling and thus against the board rules. Official warning.
Not impossible, just difficult. Actually, only the photo of Cheney (maybe) standing gives me much doubt as to whether I was right in the OP, and I hadn’t seen it prior to starting the thread (I swear), and I’m not sure it’s a fatal flaw even now. When I started the thread I meant it sincerely, and I still think it was a reasonable conclusion, but I never pretended there were any facts or sources behind it other than my own interpretation. It did surprise me that I didn’t ring a bell with more posters (i.e., some), and after some thought about that I decided that that was probably a credit to the board’s liberals as a whole. I thought that it said something positive about them that, sure as I was, and as plausible a case and easy a target as were presented, even the posters who hated Cheney weren’t on my side. And I said so, sarcastically worded to make the point that vicious rumors against democrats, even obviously untrue ones, are so often defended with the lame justification that everyone is guilty, which is apparently not so to a fault. It was a point worth making, but it wasn’t my original point.
As for trolling, someone once called it: “…the posting of inflammatory comments for the sole purpose of getting a rise out of people.” I meant to make people mad, sure, but mad along with me at a specific person for specific actions. I think, having looked over the Pit, that that’s allowed. The post you object to, by contrast, is one of me taking what small satisfaction I could in the fact that I didn’t succeed. Almost every Pit thread results in some some minor name-calling, as this one did, but it’s hard for me to see the sore spot I was poking at just to hurt anybody, rather than the common enthusiasm of posters who get to insult somebody for free, or at least cheaply.
I’ll cheerfully accept the warning – as you said, it would have been hard to interpret my post otherwise. Since we got a moderator’s attention, though, what’s the deal with “guests” with thousands of posts on the board?
I did consider the possibility that you were just being sarcastic, but given how you worded it I decided I kind of had to treat it as trolling. I appreciate the follow-up clarification, though, and think we can file this one under “minor tone issue”. You’ll just have to be a little less subtle in future such posts for those of us too jaded to see anything but the blackness in people’s hearts.
As for the guests with thousands of posts thing, I think now that we’ve gone free to post, anyone who doesn’t pay to not see ads is now a guest, regardless of join date.