Yeah, I bet I had everyone fooled, until you exposed my true political leanings!
Yer a card, Mr. M. Now when are you going to retract your bogus claims in posts 30 and 62, respectively, that you can’t seem to back up?
I refer, for the third time each, to these:
You really might want to do your research before you make up bullshit about people. Oh wait - that might get in the way, mightn’t it?
I know for a fact I’m not because I can point to many threads in which I have not argued a straight-line Conservative message.
I’ve even mentioned repeatedly that there are Democratic candidates I would vote for if they were nominated, although the ones I would vote for, I don’t think will be nominated. I’d vote for Al Gore or Bill Richardson over almost anyone the GOP will nominate, but I don’t think Richardson or Al Gore are going to be nominated (I don’t think Gore will even try to be.)
However, I imagine that there’s a better chance of a major asteroid striking the Earth before election 2008 than there is of RTFirefly or luci voting for anyone who isn’t a Dem for President.
That doesn’t make them bad people by any means. It does make them more partisan than me which isn’t a value judgment, in politics you have to vote for what you like, and some people aren’t moderates, or aren’t even capable of ever voting for someone from the other side of the aisle. I don’t classify myself as a moderate, but I’m someone who sometimes will vote for a Democrat. I voted for Mark Warner for governor, I voted for Bill Clinton in 1996. Sometimes I think someone who is going to be good for the country is where my vote is best spent, even if I have some significant ideological disagreements with them.
When someone is a partisan though, I just can’t imagine why I’d listen to them after a certain point. I’ve been posting here awhile now, and almost everyone of luci’s posts are the same. Some unfunny joke about how bad the Bush Administration is or how terrible Republicans in general are. Hey, I actually get comedy central. And I used to like the Daily Show, I quit watching it not because Jon Stewart is a die-hard Democrat, but because him repeatedly making the same general jokes over and over again got old. As a Republican, I started turning Jay Leno off and watching Conan O’Brien because Conan actually had new, interesting stuff on a regular basis. Jay on the other hand, pretty much spent the better part of the late 1990s making Monica Lewinski jokes, and the same thing over and over again is not only boring, it’s just something you get tired of being around, period. So when professional comics aren’t going to keep me interested with the same joke repeated for 7 years, I doubt some random poster on the internet is going to fare much better.
And when it comes to actually shaping my opinions on politicians, the last person I’m going to listen to is someone who spends a large portion of their life cooking up anti-GOP pit threads and constantly arguing against the GOP in other forums like RTFirefly.
I’d never say this stuff in Great Debates. When I decide to actually enter a debate, it’s because I want to argue something on its merits. A pit thread can go either way, sometimes I’ll want to debate something there too, but it being the pit sometimes I feel entirely justified in saying someone is a pointless partisan hack.
I think BrainGlutton is an even more irrelevant party hack than you, and worse, he’s one of those people who buys into every conspiracy theory that a schizophrenic street preacher can manage to make up in a given week. But when he posts in GD, I treat his posts with respect and argue on the merits.
In this case, I felt it instructive to point out that all you do is preach to the choir and attempt to drown out the other side by sheer volume (with these threads.) I’m not going to bother to refute shit I disagree with every five minutes when you put up a new pit thread bashing the GOP because in the grand scheme of things what some die-hard, partisan hack Democrat thinks about the GOP just isn’t that important. Sometimes you make some good contributions to GD, but in the pit you’re like the Rush Limbaugh of the left, and not worthy of serious consideration; even though I did respond to your posts in a generally neutral manner in this particular thread. Once I’d clearly established my point, and your only real counterpoint was “I disagree!” I didn’t exactly feel we were having a meaningful debate.
That’s precisely my point. I voted for Bush twice and I knew before the ISG was ever finished, that the only way its conclusions would ever be reflected in policy would be if its conclusions exactly mirrored his own feelings on how things would be done in Iraq.
And truth of the matter is, that’s sort of the way it should be. It isn’t the business of bi-partisan committees to manage America’s wars or military. Congress pretty much gets to say two things about our wars, when/if we start them, and when/how we’ll end them. Since they don’t have the political nerve to actually defund the war and end it (which they can certainly do), then they’re irrelevant til January, 2009.
You know, for a guy who really doesn’t care what I think, you sure spend a lot of time telling me about it.
I don’t really care what Fred Phelps thinks, that doesn’t preclude me from enjoying telling him off (if I had the chance.) There’s a difference between caring what someone thinks (ie, you value their opinion or what they have to say) and noticing the worthlessness of the general output of a given person and conveying said noticing of worthlessness to them in order to show displeasure.
I also don’t consider the few seconds it takes me to type one of these posts a lot of time, but YMMV on what you consider to be a “lot” of time.
Whatever.
Well, in fairness to **Martin **I did ask him about his partisanship so a comparison to you, as well as to RTF, in this thread seems appropriate.
Martin: OK, that was a good reply. Perhaps it was unfair of me to lump you into the same category as Mr. Moto. And as you say, it’s not a value judgement to call someone partisan, but Mr. Moto can reliably be counted on to toe the GOP party line the vast majority of the time. He and RTF are heavily invested in their respective parties. That’s OK with me, as long as I am aware of that. I disagree with all 3 of you quite often, but I still have learned stuff from each of you-- which is one of the main reasons I frequent this board.
I find myself unable to argue with this.
Now this, I would like to argue with, but as you correctly point out, Congress has ability to stop a war, if it has the balls to do so.
Bogus claims, my ass. Hell, right in your Post #11 you state:
So you heard all of those stories about John Edwards and his house, and his haircut, and his hedge fund, and you decided to support him anyway. Perfectly fair, as I have stated. Yet your criticisms of Giuliani here have explicitly mentioned money.
I wonder, too, that you have speculated in the past about Giuliani’s ugly divorces but never wondered at all about the ugly divorce of another recent Catholic presidential candidate. Now, that isn’t proof, mind, but it is an indicator to me.
There’s lots more, some of it about Edwards, some of it about other candidates. You tend to go hard on those you oppose, and are more forgiving of those on your side. There really is nothing wrong with this either - it is one reason we have sides, to keep the other one honest.
Just don’t claim that you don’t do it, when you certainly do. Even your friends here will call you on that.
As much as Rudy bites it, he is not recently Catholic, but always has been. Fair’s fair.
Assuming he’s talking about Kerry… did he have an “ugly divorce”? Tell, tell!! If not Kerry, then who? Enquiring minds want to know!
Certainly not Romney! Family values, all the way, marriage is sacred between a man and a woman, and another woman, maybe one more woman, depending…
Bloomberg? We talking about a very recent Catholic here?
Wow, I bet they also both used the word ‘and.’
Maybe you should explain what the house, and the haircut, and the hedge fund say about Edwards’ fitness to be President. Oh, wait. You guys tried that in other threads, and nothing much came of it, did it?
You might want to, again, link and quote so it would be clear to you, me, and anyone else who still cares, just what I said about Giuliani’s divorces, and what point I was trying to make.
Otherwise, I say you’re just throwing shit at the wall in this discussion, hoping something sticks.
Wow - apparently I’m human. :rolleyes:
Of course I do. The question is, is there some nontrivial inconsistency in the way I’m treating Giuliani and Edwards here on the Dope?
You’ve got nothing, other than pointing at some nonscandals about Edwards (big house! Money! Breck girl!) that haven’t undermined my support of him, because if you think for two nanoseconds about them, there’s no reason why they should.
You’re just full of shit, my friend.
You’re not my friend.* Who else here is calling me on it?
Yeah, I know: “My friend” in one line, then “You’re not my friend” in the next. Make a little birdhouse in your soul. 
I’m going with Kerry. Here’s the 
awful truth :D, from this 2004 story: John Kerry’s Unsealed Divorce Records Reveal He’s Always Been Arrogant, Boring
I now completely agree with Mr. Moto: it must be totally hypocritical of me to have supported John Kerry in 2004, given whatever Mr. M dimly recollects I may have said about Giuliani’s divorces. 
You miss my point completely.
It isn’t hypocrisy in the least, assuming you are supporting candidates for other reasons. Presumably you support Edwards because he advocates policies that line up with your preferences. This is just fine - certainly it is the best way to pick 'em.
Just don’t start these threads saying that someone is somehow disqualified for the office in your mind because of some action - especially if there was no way you’d ever consider voting for that person in the first place. That’s pretty self-serving, and you’ve been called on it. Now, if you want to just comment on how the news of the day is going, that would be a different matter. And we would even welcome your comments in the Pit. Just don’t play these silly games.
That’s doubly so if your preferred candidate suffers from the same character flaw you seem to criticize so deeply in others. As has been pointed out, and certainly not by just me (a perusal of media sources backs up this perception) John Edwards isn’t considered a foreign policy expert by most people.
You might also want to lay off the attacks on the character of people whose only crime is to support people whom you do not support. That gets tiresome fast.
Is this a sly reference to the conviction of Georgia Thompson?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you not start a thread or two about John Kerry and that he <gasp> threw his medals?
Sure. And I was clear at the outset that I wasn’t considering voting for Kerry, but thought he owed clearer answers on that controversy. And you might recall that during the thread I showed considerable respect for Kerry’s military heroism, far more than the OP here has shown Rudy Giuliani’s rather significant professional accomplishments, from what I can see.
So yeah, guilty as charged. But like I said, we can all discuss everything, just that pretending to be non-partisan in these discussions when your bias is clearly showing isn’t particularly smart.
There is a place for opinion commentary - there was even before we had this wonderful Internet, and the world of journalism and literature would be poorer if we barred Walter Lippmann or William F. Buckley from it, just because their biases showed so plainly. Same here, though I think we can agree that our contributions in this area are significantly smaller in nature.