It appears increasingly likely that the administration thought (quite correctly) that Mr. Tillman was some sort of special person who’s death could be exploited towards a political end.
If someone you loved was killed, you would probably take umbrage if someone dangled their corpse and yelled “Look at the shiny thing!” in an attempt to divert attention away from something that was making them uncomfortable.
Having a truth that’s so close to you warped into a by-the-numbers Straussian neo-con “Noble Lie” is something that’s going to be hard to take for anyone.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but if my brother died I would be upset about that and not give a shit about anything else, that’s just me.
And what the admin did was wrong, but understandable- if you owned the fledgling Yugo company and found out that Bill Clinton drove one, would you not try and drum up support for your company by flaunting this fact? Now if he quit driving one, would you maybe still run the print ads?
My nan dies tomorrow, someone on the SDMB starts a thread calling her a dead dicksucking whore, I don’t care, because I have her death to deal with and not what anyone I don’t know says or writes or whatever.
The SMDB is a pretty obscure venue. How about if they ran stories about her on the national TV news every night? So your friends would come up to you and say “Hey, I saw your dead grandma on TV last night. Man, what a huge whore!”
Would that bother you? Or would you just shrug and say “whatever”.
Except, it seems they were never really pro-war Dubya-ites, except to the extent that most Americans are and were for the war with Afghanistan. You keep trying to bring Iraq into this for some reason…that’s the controversial war, that’s the war that has over 3000 American troops dead.
Usually I do, but this one seemed too obvious to merit it. There is no inherent or logical connection between religious faith and patriotism. It’s that simple. Lack of religion is hardly a bar to being patriotic. I know atheists who bleed red, white, and blue. And I can’t think of a reason why their atheism should interfere with their patriotism.
Still don’t care, but for the sake of argument let’s say I do. The lie on him was not a negative- it wasn’t ‘he was abducted by a group of Afghani schoolgirls armed with compasses and died pissing and shitting himself while pleading for his life’, which would be the equivalent to the cocksucking whore bit.
It was a positive lie, albeit for political gain. Wrong but not harmful- not slander.
Another problem I have, is if the family was still pro-war, pro-Bush, and the war ended in Afghanistan and never made it to Iraq, would they be upset?
So, just to be clear, you’re all up in arms about what someone you don’t know (Kevin Tillman) said about something that doesn’t affect you at all, but you would casually shrug off someone calling a dead loved one a dicksucking whore and not feel the need to respond?
What if his parents and his brother actually hated him and thought he was a huge prick? Then they might have been **happy ** that he was killed!
Seriously, what is the point of these hypotheticals? Without knowing the family personally who can even begin to guess how they would react under different circumstances?
Well where I am, its God and Country. Most athiests I know, if they are smart enough to be athiests, are also smart enough to not be patriots. Liking where you live, being glad you live there is one thing- being proud of it is going a bit too far, and I don’t even think fits the definition of pride.
As should be obvious by the calm, sober title of this thread. Why just this morning my wife asked me if I wanted extra butter on my toast. “Fuck you, no!” I said … just expressing my opinion you see … .
To me its like (another hypothetical) a girl dumps you, and you’re hurt and tell your friends she’s a cooze (whatever that is) and ask for all your trivial stuff back- stapler, colander, etc. You do this cause your mad. Whereas if you dumped her, you wouldn’t talk bad about her and would let her keep all that crap.
In a perverse sense, I think I’m beginning to understand his philosophy: the only thing that angers Wee Bairn, apparently, is people who become angry when they are wronged.
So, saying his dear departed granny was a cock-gobbling jizz mop: perfectly acceptable.
You get angry when someone calls your dead grandmother a cock-gobbling jizz mop? Fuck you and your righteous anger! What about all the other grandchildren of alleged cock-gobbling jizz mops? When do they get THEIR day in court? What makes YOU so special? And why waste time even denying that she gobbled cocks! Whoever spread that rumor is bound to do it again to someone else! And who cares whether she was really a sweet old lady who never harmed anyone, and someone Photoshopped her face into the video “Cock Gobbling Jizz Mops #27” and sold it on eBay! She’s dead either way, right?
I’m an atheist and a patriot, but I admit, I’m not very smart. Most of the atheists I know are patriots, too though. I guess we hang out with different kinds of atheists.
But what if she had your 1955 Fender Stratocaster? Would you let her keep THAT? And what if you found out that she **hadn’t ** dumped you but actually it was her twin sister carrying out an elaborate revenge scheme over imaginary childhood wrongs? And what if she wasn’t a girl, but a llama?
More like there are important battles worth fighting, and those that aren’t, and a smart person should be able to tell the difference. I know people who will go to jail fighting someone who says “yo mama” to them- literally. Is this a worthy battle? No. Taking on GWB, an idiot, is still a no win battle, You will not get him or his admin to “admit” anything they don’t want to.