Then she should be banned.
I don’t blame mainstream Democrats for disowning them both. But mainstream Republicans are disowning Coulter as well. These things have a way of taking care of themselves over time.
Sorry, I thought other combative personalities were being discussed right now, and Kos is a combative personality who has had some formal associations with prominent politicians.
Do you deny that he is combative, and at times very controversial? And yet it doesn’t seem to stop very prominent people from appearing in the same room as him, does it?
Why wouldn’t you think a similar calculation doesn’t get run over on the right?
Now, I don’t particularly like Ann Coulter, as I have said numerous times. But I wouldn’t necessarily boycott CPAC just because she happened to be there, especially if there were other people there that I did want to see. And I’m certain that most liberals here would approach conventions, group memberships, and associations with the same spirit.
As a conservative Democrat, I love Ann Coulter, I wish she were on TV every night saying the stuff she does, then having Republicans defend her. I want her to be the voice of the mainstream Republican, as she is more and more becoming. Along with AC, throw in Sean Hannity, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Phyllis Shlafly, etc.
As these people become the voices of conservatism, it brands the Republicans as the party of the moonbats, the wingnuts, the batshit loonies. Old style Republicans, the ones who run the banks and make the trains run on time, are horrified by these people and don’t want these types in power. See November 2006 for a demonstration of what happens when they either don’t vote or cross over Look at what has happened in Kansas with several prominent Republicans changing party affiliation.
Let the Ann Coulters of the world define the Republicans as homophobes and warmongers. It’s good for my side. The more moderate Republicans she offends, the better.
Long live Ann Coulter!
No, not at all. That is probably why he’s been as successful as he has. I’m sure there are a number of things that he has written that can be cut and pasted for occasions such as these. My point is that it is extremely disingenuous to post an “Oh yeah well” tu quoque and then also call for maturity, your eye batting about what was being “discussed” notwithstanding.
I don’t know what you mean.
I know. I think you think saying that you don’t particularly like her is “being tough” on her. It doesn’t really come across that way.
This is really where you wanted to go in bringing up the Kos bit - to try to establish a false equivalency. The thing is that Kos doesn’t call people “faggot” or engage in the vacuous kinds of rhetoric that lead to gross epithets of treason, or suggest that we should invade, convert and kill.
This is why your actions here are no more useful, mature or bipartisan than magellan01’s. They’re just more covert.
Maturity, like many things, probably begins at home.
But I didn’t bring it up out of nowhere. Liberal was making comparisons with Ward Churchill and Lynne Stewart, which I didn’t think was fair at all.
A comparison with Kos is fair though. Maybe not in degree, but certainly in kind. For while Kos might not call people “faggot”, he did say “Screw them,” when Americans were killed in a combat zone, which in my opinion is a hell of a lot worse. And while I am certainly glad that he apologized for the comment, typically people pay for things like that with more than an apology.
What have either Kos or Coulter suffered for their behavior, and what should they have suffered for it? I think in any sane world, Coulter’s books would all be remaindered and Kos’ meetings would be pathetic little lefty festivals shunned by any politician with sense.
The anger and partisanship we’re seeing now have ensured a market where both can thrive. Indeed, they need each other - Kos gives Coulter tons of raw material for her books, and without Coulter, the Kos blog would have less to talk about.
That last part- that’s the really sad truth that nobody is willing to address.
If you were being honest about it, you would make clear when you bring it up right here that he was talking about mercenaries, and was very upset about service members killed on that same day. Part of his anger was about the relative focus on the mercenaries instead of the service members.
However, since you’re looking to make political points, you describe them generically as “Americans.” Far from a mature, honest diaglog, you sculpt your words to have the most partisan impact. This is deceitful, deceptive and dishonest.
Quit pretending to be interested in truth. You’re nothing but a right-wing apologist pretending to something more in order to score points on a message board. Your last post is a perfect example of that.
And he wasn’t looking to make political points by describing them as mercenaries?
Were they mercs, or not?
The ones Kos got so indignant about were killed and mutilated by insurgents in Fallujah while delivering food in a convoy.
How would you describe them, Squink?
It should be pretty fucking straightforward for you to say whether or not they were members of the American military. Kos did, and he apologized later for flying off the handle about it. He even acknowledged that he lied when he said he had no feelings about the matter.
You can’t even be straight up about it.
They started disowning her what, Saturday?
Sure took long enough. In the long run, we’re all dead.
Not a member of the military does not equal mercenary. I work with the military every day, and I’ve never even seen a copy of Soldier of Fortune.
These guys were defense contractors.
Thanks for acknowledging it - your shucking and jiving was embarrassing. Why you couldn’t just be straight about this from the first can only be explained by your desire not to be honest and mature, but to color the discussion and try to establish partisan points.
Well, Blackwater USA looks like a mercenary outfit to me, although, Blackwater at Wikipedia, they seem to contract for other services as well.
The families involved in the lawsuit against the company over these deaths certainly seem to think their relatives were involved in a mercenary type operation:
So I have no problem calling the dead men mercenaries. Mercenary is not always a pejorative term, you know. Sometimes it’s just the facts.
Because I thought only a wacko would describe them as mercenaries, frankly. Maybe that’s just because I deal with issues like this a lot.
Well, if kos had called them Janissaries, I’d think he spent too much time reading Pournelle, but mercenary is a pretty common word that seems an apt substitute for ‘contractors involved in military operations’ here.
We may have a language problem here, where the meaning shifts depending on your background.
Except that that word is usually spat out only by people who have nothing but contempt for those people (like, say, yourself), which is why those of us in the military contracting business don’t tend to use it much.
Why can’t you and he just say contractors, like the Washington Post does?
Is it, perhaps, because you want to cause a reaction with your choice of words? Much like a certain tall blonde I’ve heard about?
That’s all irrelevant to the point that you wanted to try to make it look like Kos was saying “screw them” about American service members, so you intentionally left your phrasing vague. Jesus Christ, you’re an awful partisan hack.
Go sell your “but golly gosh, can’t we be mature about this” bullshit to someone who’s buying, or just start living it first.
No, the fucking point is WHY DIDN’T YOU say “contractors”? The reason is that you wanted it to look as bad as you could make it.
By the same token, the Hessians, in the Revolutionary War, were ‘defense contractors’ for the British Crown.