Please tell me I did not do that.
I wonder if that post can be put to the Grinch song’s music.
Of course I don’t defend Trumpists or supporters of the Repugnantican Party, but even liberals who are slightly off-tune get booed down by the hive mind here. And of course it’s not just politics: Five centuries ago, the SDMB would have been vigorously defending the Ptolemaic geocentric model.
To avoid hijacking this thread, I’ll just spend a paragraph or two on one example.
“Crap”, “conspiracy theory”, “failure or critical thinking.” 
How many books have you read on the Authorship controversy, BigT? What’s your take on the Sonnets’ dedication? Or the enigmatic preface to the 1609 Troilus and Cressida? “Indecipherable private joke” — that’s the hive party line right?
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens did not believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did not believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did not believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun did not believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell did not believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
All crackpots incapable of critical thinking, right? (Good thing we finally got some real intellectuals like Kavanaugh and Alito on the Court, hunh?)
(The hive responded: “None of those Justices have Literature PhD’s, whine. ALL Literature experts agree with the hive.” I provide a list of a dozen Shakespeare-specializing PhDs who support an Oxford authorship. “ALL means MOST — don’t you even understand English, whine?”)
I’ll await your essay on the Sonnets’ dedication. Or are you just a BigTalker ?
ETA: I’ve had 2 or 3 PMs from Dopers supporting my Oxfordian stance. Dopers too smart to say so publicly.
Shakespeare was five hundred years ago. Republicans are killing people today.
Look at those goalposts go!
I like how you just go straight to “smart people agree with me,” and skip the whole, “multiple posters shred my arguments like cheap newsprint” part of the conversation.
Now I look and I see all the errors. Yikes. For example, Trump claimed Hillary started Birtherism. This came at the end of a half hour press conference at Trump’s hotel/post office/no-doubt-gilded thingduring which Trump advertised the fucking hotel thing. Then, during the last four minutes or so, he said, “Hillary Clinton started theaaaaahhhh berthaaaaaaathaaaaaa controversy,” at 34.40 or so. Trump’s hatred and jealousy of Obama led him to demand Obama’s birth certificate and school transcripts, even though Trump himself has gone to great lengths to conceal his.
At Trump’s end of May 2016 press conference, he had Al Baldasaro on stage with him. Baldasaro has said he’d like to put Hillary before a firing squad. He apologized, but GOP apologies are worthless. That press conference itself followed this chain of events.
1.Megan Kelly asked Trump hard questions at the latest debate.
2. Trump sneered at her afterward, as he does at any woman or girl who stands up to him, saying, “She was bleeding out of her eyes, her eyes, her…wherever”…as a result of his (what he obviously felt) was his masterful debate performance.
3. He skipped the next debate. Kelly was the moderator.
4. Trump said he would hold an event for “veterans” instead of attending the debate, despite the fact that he himself dodged the draft 5 times, associates with Ted Nugent (another draft-dodging molester of teenaged girls), his attacks on John McCain (even after death), his later attacks on Robert Mueller (a retired Marine who rescued a fellow Marine under heavy fire with a bullet wound in his thigh), his attack on the widow of LaDavid Johnson, and his attack on the parents of Captain Humayun Khan, who put himself between his troops and an IED.
5. He claimed the debate raised six million dollars for vets. Trump has repeatedly booted homeless vets from sheltering near Trump Tower.
6. Trump has always claimed he donated big money to charity. Now, however, we know otherwise. In reality, he used his “charity” like a personal checkbook.
7. People began to ask questions.
8. And Trump exploded at being questioned. After reporters began asking questions----this whole sequence started in January) some of the charities received checks----right before this press conference.
He pulled the WaPo’s press credentials, but TACC gets access to the Oval Office, not American press.
See how detailed you have to get? With Trump there’s layers of fuckery and whininess and sheer cowardice. The man is craven.
Cite? Last time — in a thread I didn’t start and didn’t want to participate in except I was named in OP — the alleged “Big Win” for the home team was that Dr. John Hall’s writings were in a “journal” rather than “letters.” :smack:
A dismaying amount of the hive team’s “argument shredding” had the form “The book is called Shakespeare’s Sonnets. If Oxford wrote it it would be Oxford’s Sonnets. Duu-uuh.”
Fuck, can one if the mods correct the fourth quote in post 120? I didn’t close the quote and so my comment on the quote AND the quote itself got melded.
Seriously? Y’all are using a thread bemoaning the lack of worthy Trump defenders to argue about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?
Trumpers know he can’t be defended.
Don’t be fooled.
I had to respond to BigT’s grievous insult. I thought of starting a new thread but wasn’t so masochistic as to go down that rabbit-hole again.
It is relevant however. The SDMB hive mind does get ridiculous. Mention that high-tech agriculture methods can disrupt ecology … and be accused of wanting to starve billions of babies. Mention that sickle-cell anemia has non-zero correlation with skin color … and be accused of right-wing bigotry.
There’s no excuse for present-day Republicans of course, but even ex-Gopsters who now vote blue out of desperation likely feel unwelcome here.
Honestly, septimus, I got that you were using the Shakespeare controversy as evidence of the hive mind at the Dope.
I think, however, that using that particular issue as evidence is flawed, because relatively few people really care one way or another. Perhaps you just hit a statistical cluster, perhaps many are happy to accept the conventional wisdom simply because it doesn’t materially affect their lives the way politics (in general) does.
Now, if you want to say that the Board leans left, I’d certainly agree. Still, within even that group, there’s a great deal of variation, differing opinions on what is important, what should be done, who to support and why. Not really the hallmark of a hive mind. YMMV.
I tried very hard to make such a defense. The only argument I could conjure was so nuanced and unlikely to be unsalvageable at this point - it seemed a little more realistic back when we were only a couple days into the Ukraine scandal.
Basically you 1) assume a strong executive theory, then 2) assume that the President/executive had probable cause both to investigate Hunter Biden and to suspect a server machine in Ukraine shed light on 2016 election interference, then 3) assume the President/executive needed cooperation from Ukraine to pursue those investigations, then 4) assume the Ukrainians had a history of not complying with MLAT requests due to corruption, and finally 5) assume the impoundment of funds itself is not, in this case, an impeachable offense.
Admit all five of these points and you have a defense case that narrowly shifts all the blame off the President. The President was presented with a situation where we are about to provide military aid to a corrupt country who by coincidence we need to assist us with a couple investigations. He is advised that if we make Ukraine publicly announce the start of the investigation, they will be forced to commit (or lose face and admit that the new Ukrainian administration is also corrupt). Sounds like we can make a deal!
The decision could in this narrow circumstance be made with U.S. interests at heart.
But we have a major problem: if there is an exculpatory story, why did the President stonewall the House? I’m having trouble reconciling that with my elaborate and narrow defense. I do think the House was unfair to the minority party as compared to previous impeachment proceedings, but they aren’t required to be fair.
There was a flimsy legal argument about the involved committees not having jurisdiction over impeachment, and therefore the subpoenas were without effect, therefore the President did not need to comply. I don’t think this argument ever made it before a court, and it became moot once the House officially resolved to start the impeachment inquiry.
There is a flimsier yet legal argument, which I have not seen anybody actually make, but must assume, that the resolution itself is invalid because instead of actually starting an impeachment inquiry it authorizes committees to continue the existing inquiry - the argument is that there was no existing inquiry, therefore there was nothing to continue, therefore the whole thing authorizes nothing, so the committees still have no jurisdiction.
A second line of argument assumes that there is some foreign policy or national security basis for claims of executive privilege. The foreign policy basis privilege claim is stronger than saying the explicit House resolution was meaningless, but it’s crippled by the fact that the President impounded funds.
And there you have it, the best defense I can conjure. I don’t think this defense meets the threshold of being so likely as to inspire a reasonable doubt. A few days or weeks into October, it might be a stretch. By now, there’s no way.
~Max
My profile lists my interests as including invective and vituperation; in that spirit, your post struck me as a majestic example of the craft. I wish for you all the caffeine you could desire, surcease from any torments your inner demons may have in store for you, and access to effective and affordable treatment for any and all of your physical ailments.
For me, I wish to never make myself a target of your mad verbal abuse skills.
P. S. AFAIAC, you can say “free reign” if you want.
nm
Yes. Sorry, galen ubal.
Trump is absolutely indefensible of course. To the point where Board R-voters have to pretend they voted for Nitwit Johnson.
Can we expand the topic to include GOP defenders more generally?
I allied not far from the Rockefeller-Javits Gopsters in the 1960’s. Spend money to save Wall Street? Of coursesup[/sup]. Let states design their own abortion laws? That’s my plansup[/sup]. If truth be known there are many liberal issues where I might be one dragging his feet. I suppose this makes me more of an Obama- or Clinton-Democrat than a Warren-Democrat.
But at this point it’s fatuously silly to call Biden “Republican Light.” Maybe he’s moderate in the sense of Rockefeller-Javits, but at this date, “moderate” among Republicans refers to … John Kasich!!
As others point out, “better Trump defender” is an oxymoron, an impossibility. It’s a simple result of Boolean logic that Trump defenders are hypocrites and/or liars and/or stupid and/or sinful and bigoted. I want to see if anyone here can even defend “Republicanssup[/sup]” more generally.
So let’s stop with the fatuous {Biden == GOP Light}, ok?
Notes:
- Of course the bail-out was designed to placate America’s richest, and not to help homeowners, taxpayers, and the general public. That was shameful. (Part of the problem was the same as Naomi Klein points out … but let’s avoid another rabbit-hole. – Unless some laudable Doper can do it without snark.)
- Could a Mississippi woman who flies to Nevada for her abortion be arrested when she returns to the Magnolia State? I’ll let SCOTUS work it out if necessary. First expanding it to 15 or 17 seats, mind you.
- I use “Republican Party” to denote “Republican Party circa 2020.” Start another thread please to brag about how Lincoln freed the slaves.
I’m sure that I could come up with something, but I have no interest in supplying fodder for Team Trump to possibly get their hands on, however unlikely that might be.
I appreciate your write-up though.
I’m usually too hurried to write something and then edit it back into something readable. Nice to see a cogent and logical review of things.
Jeez, I cannot believe I screwed that up!! :o
OK, in my lame defense, UV may also be a bad actor. You may remember him from such posts as…
Yes, you know what, this completely slipped my mind. I remember that, and remember you debating fairly and addressing the points of people who replied to you (I think you took days, sometimes, but you got to them).
So, I think that’s the answer to my thread. Early on, it may have been possible to put up a honest defensive case regarding the impeachment inquiry, but in light of all the further evidence, it’s no longer possible. So, any Republicans with integrity will no longer try to do so (I wish the prominent ones would issue a full-throated call for his removal, of course, but that’s asking a lot, I guess). All that are left are the ones without integrity throwing out distractions (Subpoena Biden! Remove Schiff! Carter Page didn’t do anything wrong!) in order to distract and confuse the voters.
Apologies to you, Max S. – you’re not even a Trump supporter (I think?) and you gave it a go.
That is why I call him Trumprostrates, among other names. It is supposed to be an allusion to Herostrates, the arsonist, but it does not work reliably. Actually, it is one of the most educated names I call him.