I beg you to have your dosages checked.
And no, it wasn’t OK when Clinton was a weasel. Clinton lost my vote in 1996 because of the SSM issue.
But hey NEWSFLASH, dumbass, this isn’t about Clinton. It’s not about Kerry, or Edwards, or Gus the Field Goal Kicking Mule. It’s about Cheney and his craven flip-flop. It’s about Cheney. Cheney. Dick Cheney. Try to keep that in mind.
Then he should have kept his fucking mouth shut during the amendment push.
Simple. Make a real stand on same-sex marriage and stick with it. Ideally, if he truly supported that it be left to individual states to decide, he would’ve protested his administration’s attempts to have a constitutional amendment banning it on the federal level. Just because you don’t have direct voting power over a measure doesn’t mean that you can’t influence it. What, is George not returning his phone calls or something?
The big issue, though, is what “we people” expect others to do. To start with, don’t praise Cheney as being pro-gay and taking a bold stand against his administration by speaking according to his conscience. Because that’s not what he’s doing. When the issue was being decided, he said openly that he supported the administration’s attempts to ban SSM. Now that the issue’s been voted on and that they’ve seen it doesn’t have as much political clout as they’d hoped, he’s going back and saying that he’s always left it for the states to decide.
And for some bizarre reason, people are eating it up. The so-called “Log Cabin Republicans” are praising him on their website as a promoter of gay rights. He’s simply not. At best, he’s being completely non-committal of it.
The reason people are dismissing it as a political ploy is because he made the speech to a campaign audience. So now people can point to it and say “fuck yeah!” and “see, not all Republicans are bigoted monsters!” To which I say, how is that good or deserving of praise? If he was so ineffectual at stopping the constitutional amendment from getting to the point of a vote in the first place, what is he going to do the next time Bush starts dropping in the polls and needs to use fear and homophobia to boost up his ratings with a “defense of marriage” ploy?
The only time I’ve seen Cheney “sincerely express his opinion” is when he was telling people to go to fuck themselves.
Your sig was just a convenient springboard for the point I was trying to make, no other implications there. The quote says that it’s easy to act with the wrong intentions; I was merely pointing out that you can also have the best of intentions and foil it through inaction, and that doesn’t deserve any praise.
What do you want us to do? Go out and say, “Fuck yeah! The vice president is a weasely politician!” We’re just pointing out that making Cheney out to be some hero of the gay rights movement is absurd.
What does that have to do with anything? If we’re 100% against Bush & Cheney on an issue, that means we’re automatically 100% for Kerry and Edwards? Kerry is anti-same sex marriage as well; his stance is almost identical to what Cheney is now claiming is his stand. And I’m not going to be praising Kerry as a champion of gay rights any more than I praise Cheney. Because he’s not.
Fortunately, though, there are plenty of more important or equally issues that I do agree with Kerry about, and Kerry is not directly threatening to set back gay rights with idiotic political power-play attempts to alter the Constitution.
When you have to decide between the guy who’s actively breaking into your house, and the guy who’s merely telling people that it would be fine with him if someone else broke into your house, you take the latter.
Or, actually it says exactly the opposite, but hey, whatever, I don’t want to damage your springboard.
How exactly is a VP directly contradicting the president and helping to bring the matter front and center to discussion inaction?
If that’s the case, then I’m sick of all those pinko liberals demonstrating and writing letters and changing votes and opionions and all that stuff becasue it’s really just and excuse for inaction. Couldn’t Cheney start a coup or do something along those lines? Really now.
What? It says “doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what’s right.” How is that “exactly the opposite” of “it’s easy to act with the wrong intentions?” I’ll admit that I can be dense at times, but I think I’m plenty capable of understanding the sage wisdom of LBJ, for Chrissakes.
And there you go. It’s a liberal vs. conservative issue. Fuck that. It’s an issue of what’s wrong vs. what’s right. I’ve already said that the “liberal hero” John Kerry is not a supporter of gay rights. What the hell?
Cheney had a chance to make his views known when this administration was acting to bring about an unfair constitutional amendment. He didn’t; he maintained that he supported the administration in whatever it did. That’s worse than inaction. That’s acting against your conscience. In other words, knowing what is right and still doing what’s wrong. Hence the quote.
So now, after it’s already been decided on the federal level (for now), and it helps the party to soften their edge so as not to be seen as too bigoted, he does a flip-flop during a campaign speech. And he’s to be praised for saying he was against the amendment all along? Really now.
I’m interested reading the nuanced level of debate here how many of you have law degrees. Are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kerry and Edwards all lawyers, incidentally?
I don’t have a law degree. I have a paralegal certificate.
Cheney has a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Wyoming. Rumsfeld has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton. Kerry has a bachelor’s from Yale and a law degree from Boston College. Edwards has a bachelor’s from North Carolina State University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina.
Not sure why you’re asking about Rumsfeld…
Thanks for the info. I mentioned Rumsfeld I always think of Rumsfeld/Cheney as a kind of double act, Don having taken Dick under his wing in his early days in Washington. The Ford era if I recall correctly.