A serious question, if ultimately a rhetorical one…
Since this has been Dio’s M.O. for many years, can any of you please explain why you (all seemingly intelligent and reasonable, at least in most aspects that I can determine) keep engaging/debating/feeding him when you all obviously know who and what he is?
He seems to be able to play so many Dopers like a priceless Stradivarius, and with the same shopworn tune, over and over again, on any subject that he engages in.
When is enough going to be enough, and when will he finally be shunned, ignored, marginalized and then ultimately forced to go somewhere else to enable his pathological attention addiction?
One is that there are still people who can say this to Diogenes:
He won’t be shunned and marginalized until this population is reduced, as it was in the post above. At least Absolute has had his eyes opened. One at a time…
The second reason is similar to why many on the left view Sarah Palin as a godsend, and many on the right wish she’d go away.
But it’s desirable to me that your “my post is my cite” practice of making absolute statements and refusing to cite them be shunned and marginalized, since this practice is destructive to reasoned debate.
Eh. I don’t usually engage him. If this isn’t the first time I’ve addressed a post specifically to him, then it’s been years since. It’s the first time I’ve seen him unequivocally admit that he’s taking a partisan view. Usually he leaves a minor loophole to attempt to squirm through.
I never said I was taking a partisan view. What are you talking about? A partisan view would mean that I’d view things any differently if it was a Republican. I wouldn’t, and I haven’t.
I view sex scandals the same way, whether they’re Democrat or Republican. I think they’re irrelevant. Check my posting history. I’ve said exactly the same thing about several Republicans. Show the evidence for me reacting differently to a Republican sex scandal than to a Democratic one.
I will come to Dio’s defense here. He has been very consistent on this point. He thinks sex scandals are irrelevant and not worthy of the press’s time.
However, I do think that Weiner’s mistake here was not the on-line flirting and sending of questionable pics of himself to women across the country. It’s not like he tried real hard to hide his own identity from them.
His mistake was the cover-up. If he would cover-up something as benign as this, what would he cover-up if his ass was really on the line? This is the point of the ethics investigation. This is the real point of the criticism against Weiner. He has lost credibility with his other representatives and his own constituents. A Yellow dog could run against him in 2012 and beat him in his own district. A few years from now, he’ll just be the answer to a trivia question about political scandals. That’s the impact he’s had on our governmental process. Weiner best of luck!
How is this partisan? I have repeately said the same thing when it was Republicans. There is no inconsistency here. My standing philosphy is that personal sex lives are irrelevant no matter what the party. You have not demonstrated a partsian double standard, since I also don’t care when a Republican does it, and have said so. I’ve defended several Republicans in the same kinds of circumstances.
Here is your defense of Mark Foley, just as spirited as your defense of Weiner:
(You said “Tom Foley,” but the thread was about Mark Foley and the recent revelation that he had sent sexually suggestive e-mails to former pages (over 18 years old).
That’s the absolute best you can do? I made a joke about Mark Foley.
Mark Foley was sexually harrassing underaged boys, Bricker. Give me a fucking break. If you read my posts on the matter, I clearly say that sex scandals don’t matter as long as it involves consenting adults. Foley’s victims were neither.
Did you bother to search for what I said about cases like Larry Craig or Mark Sanford? This is fucking pathetic that you’re actually trying to present a joke about a pedophile as an example of hypocrisy. This is beneath you.
Not the point. NOW you know that. At the time you posted that message (09-30-2006, 01:53 AM), we didn’t know he had had any kind of sexual contact with anyone under 18. All we knew was that he had sent a series of e-mails that contained nothing overtly sexual at all to a 16 year old page. And in fact, he denied that there was anything additional matertial to find.
Why didn’t you take him at his word, for the sake of decency?
Take him at his word about what? he didn’t claim to have been the victim of a crime, and he wasn’t denying the emails. Furthermore, I didn’t call for his resignation, I just made a joke. So fucking what? You’re grasping at straws here, dude. I know you must have found my posts defending other Republicans against having to resign over sex scandals, and you’re ignoring them on purpose. I have never thought sex scandals (barring actual criminality) were relevant or newsworthy. You don’t have a gotcha. You haven’t found a double standard on this. You don’t have shit. I have consistently never cared about sex scandals no matter what the party. That doesn’t mean I can’t have a laugh or two, or draw the line at children.
By making that joke, you clearly didn’t believe him. You didn’t take him at his word that there was nothing inappropriate about his contact with the pages, and you couldn’t have just been relying on the e-mails we knew about on September 30th at 1:53 AM. There were just four e-mails, with the worst offense being one that said, “How are you weathering the hurricane…are you safe… send me a pic of you as well…” He defended himself, saying that his office’s policy is to keep pictures of former interns so they can remember them in order to supply anyone who may ask for a recommendation, and that the e-mail exchange began when the former page asked for such a recommendation.
He claimed to be the victim of a smear campaign, with someone taking innocent e-mails and trying to suggest there was something lurid behind them.
Obviously, in light of the additional information that was released, that was a crock of shit… but so, too, are Weiner’s denials a crock of shit in light of the new information we now know. But you vigorously defended Weiner and clearly had no such inclination towards Foley.
Sucks when the Board has such a long memory and time stamps, doesn’t it? Really hard to re-write the past.
He didn’t claim to have been the victim of a crime, which was the only circumstance under which I said I would provisionally take an accused politico at his word, and you’re trying to change the argument anyway. I never said I always believe what an accused politician says. I said if it involves (non-criminal) sex, I don’t care. I don’t even care if they lie about it. You’re moving the goal posts. Find an example of me saying a Republican should resign over a sex scandal. Don’t rebut claims I never made.
Florida Congressman Foley claimed to be the victim of a smear campaign, where false information was being used to libel him. Of course, the information wasn’t false, but he said it was. He was claiming to be the victim of a crime; in Florida, libel is a criminal offense:
Shall we drop the fiction that “victim of a crime” was the only reason you heaped joking scorn on Foley and defended Weiner tooth and nail now?
I’m sure you didn’t.
The accusation is not that you said anyone should, or should not, resign. The accusation is that you strongly, vehemently, defended the conduct of Weiner, and rejected accusations he was lying. You didn’t do any such thing when Foley’s case was discussed.
I didn’t defend the conduct of Weiner. I said I didn’t care. Foley didn’t claim to be the victim of a crime (nice try, though), and you can’t compare Foley’s behavior with Weiner’s in any case. This is one of your more pathetic efforts, I have to say.