Seriously. I didn’t know it was offensive never to have heard of the Hoose of Burgesses. It was a colonial legislature. Big deal. Washington was the equivalent of a state representative. I get it. So what? That still gave him less significant experience in elected office than Sonny Bono’s wife before he was elected President.
Oh, and one more thing…FUCK the House of Burgesess. The House of Burgesess can kiss my poxy arse. Yeah, I said it.
You are a very strange person. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Dio, really, 11 years is more than 15? Is this that ‘new math’?
I have no idea what you’re referring to.
ETA, if you’re talking about my comparison of George Washington to Mary Bono, I was not counting years, but the level of office. Mary Bono is in the U.S. House of Representatives, while Washington was only in the equivalent of the Virginia State House.
I myself look forward to reacting in similar mock horror the next time I manage to work the House of Burgesses into the conversation and get blank looks from, well, from almost anyone I know except for professors of American History. I will now practice shaking my head in disbelief/disgust. I’ll mutter something about that Raleigh Tavern, as well. Good material.
Which misses the point quite spectacularly. It’s not Diogenes’ ignorance of the House of Burgesses, I don’t know a lot about it myself. It’s his airy dismissal of it when he does know what it is as piddling and unimportant and Washington’s 16 years there as being ‘next to no’ political experience.
He can back-pedal as much as he likes. The fact was that he made an unequivocal assertion about Washington’s political experience when in fact he knew nothing about it at all.
It does give one to wonder how many of his assertive statements on other subjects are based on a profound lack of knowledge.
Bosstone, you’re just never going to grasp to what the problem really is, are you? You’re just going to continue evading the point as fervently as Shayna always has. cricetus, you’re never even going to try, are you? Denunciation is just ever so much more fun, right? Now here’s a cookie and glass of milk, run along to bed now, kiddies. (PS: Did Ann Coulter ever publicly state a desire to actually suck Dubya’s cock?)
Now, to the topic at hand: I had thought every kid in the Eastern and Central Time Zones had been dragged through Colonial Williamsburg on a family car vacation at least once, and had actually sat in the House of Burgesses and had his picture taken in the stocks at the Old Gaol. Maybe some have missed that pleasure somehow.
But it’s still been entertaining, in a way, to see this discussion between two equally hardened partisans about whether Washington was either always a pol or almost never a pol. 
The man had quite a few more facets to him, or so I’ve always thought.
But the statements we’ve seen along those lines are the kind hardened partisans make - any question or difference of view causes the shields to be raised and the self-protective denunciations to begin. We saw the same thing constantly during election season whenever the suggestion was raised that Obama might not actually be either the Messiah or the Antichrist. We see them now, for that matter.
And Letterman hasn’t been all that funny anyway since Sirajul and Mujibur left the show.
Good grief, that’s almost Diogenes’ entire stock-in-trade: advance an argument, offer ridiculously overblown and sweeping generalizations in support of that argument, and then fervently defend his exaggerations, determined to never surrender an inch of ground in battle. He is not a complete ignoramus, but his near-absolute unwillingness to concede error combined with his penchant for exaggerating to make his points makes him the next worst creature in line.
Actually, he was more or less in the equivalent of the senate. The House of Burgesses, by the end of the status of Virginia as a colony, was the entire legislative body of the colony. Not merely the ‘lower house’.
Admittedly, it was only a colony senate, as there was the British over them.
It’s a shame Washington never held any higher seats before his presidency.
Oh. Wait. What about the Continental Congress, both first and second? I seem to remember pointing out his status as a delegate to that, as well.
Is there some higher political office he could have held? I seem to recall something about ‘without representation’ meaning that he couldn’t have run for the House of Commons.
Since it was his (and the other Founders’) position that Parliament only had power over the UK, and that they answered solely to the king, then it’s not really possible that he would have. As far as the people who founded this country were concerned, The House fo Burgesses was the highest legislature in Virginia.
Ok, fuck George Washington. Bad example. What about Eisenhower. He had fuck-all to do with political office before he was President, right?
The point was that bean counting a candidate’s prior years in elected office is not an accurate way to measure their qualifications, and it’s a specious way to measure dicks between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. His credentials outside elected office are far more meanigful and extensive than hers are. Even the assertion that being a Governor of a state is a better credential for POTUS than being a US Senator is lawyered and reaching and superficial. While governing a state might be more analogous to being a President than being a legislator, it’s really shallow and tendentious to say that therefore all governors (regardless of time in office) are automatically better qualified than all US Senators.
Finally, something I agree with you on. Governors don’t have any foreign policy experience, and that is by far the most important aspect of being President.
Translation: “If you don’t know what the bug up my ass is, I’m not going to tell you.”
I think the House of Burgesses deserves an apology.
I *did *tell you. More than once. You refuse to fucking read. :rolleyes:
Kinda hard to start a country if everyone has have experience doing it first.
If you don’t think there was any high-level international diplomacy, or executive management of a large government organization, involved in being the Allied Supreme Commander, maybe.
That’s exactly my point. Elected office doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.
Raleigh Tavern, Fraunces Tavern - you’d think that the American founders were a bunch of boozy beggars, or something. Not at all like fine, upstanding* John A. MacDonald.
*Maybe a bit wobbly.