First of all, I want to say that, in general, I have an enormous amount of respect for Bricker. Despite his being on the other side of the political spectrum from me, and despite the generally divisive tone of the country and the board these days, I am totally confident in saying:
-Bricker is a patriot
-Bricker is a caring and decent human being who genuinely wants what is best for the country
-Bricker is intelligent and knowledgeable
-Bricker is not a racist, a homophobe, or any of a number of nasty slurs that often get tossed at conservatives in general
And, more specifically to his conduct on this board:
-Bricker has actually publicly had his mind changed about a contentious and hot-button issue (gay marriage) due to logical arguments presented by his opponents, an event sadly close to unique in the history of the SDMB
-Bricker has on many occasions said things “against his side”, including many positive things about Obama and many negative things about Sarah Palin
That said, he has two distinct (but related) debating habits that I find pitworthy, so here goes:
(1) He goes into a thread where people are talking heatedly about an issue that they are passionate about, and takes an opposing viewpoint. Which is fine. Except that he’s not really taking an opposing viewpoint. Rather, his disagreements are about semantic issues of some sort, not the meat of the issue, BUT he doesn’t go out of his way to make this clear. Best recent example is this thread. As far as I can tell, Bricker is basically arguing that the police action was not ILLEGAL. Which might well be true. But pretty much everyone else is enraged about what they see about an innocent person being shot, and while people are tossing around some hastily phrased (and in some cases clearly factually incorrect) statements, the main thrust of the thread is not “police officer X should be charged with the follow crimes and here is legalistic arguments why that is valid”, it’s “this is totally outrageous”.
In other words, the “consensus opinion” of most people in that thread is something like “this was a tragedy, the police should have acted differently, we should examine police procedures and stuff, the poor guy basically did nothing wrong, and the cop should be charged with (some crime)”. And as far as we know, Bricker’s opinion might well be “his was a tragedy, the police should have acted differently, we should examine police procedures and stuff, the poor guy basically did nothing wrong, but legally I claim the cop was not guilty of any crime”. (Granted, it might not be, but of course part of the issue here is that Bricker is merely taking specific things that other people have said and pointing out (accurately, as far as I know) that they’re false, not actually ever laying out his position on the topic as a whole… it’s always easier to snipe and criticize than it is to actually state one’s own case…)
If Bricker had entered the thread by saying “I certainly agree that events were tragic, and that the police acted incorrectly in many ways, I believe that, according to the letter of the law, no actual criminality on the part of the police occurred because…”, I, at least, wouldn’t have been irritated.
I think that at some level Bricker knows that, because he’s both very smart and an actual lawyer, he can soundly defeat 98% of the board population in a purely legalistic debate. And he likes winning arguments with liberals. (As do we all, replacing “liberals” with the appropriate term). So he picks situations where he can enter debates and presumptively frame them in legalistic ways even when that’s really not the argument anyone else wants to have, and he doesn’t even add a nice “the whole event was a tragedy, yada yada yada” disclaimer; and presto, instant clusterfuck of a thread.
(Another similar example was a thread about a nun who had recommended an abortion in some very extreme circumstances to save the life of the mother, and there was a legalistic argument about exactly what the word “excommunicate” means in precise Catholic legalese that Bricker jumped into with both feet, again causing him to be apparently squarely opposed to the general tenor of everyone else in the thread, even though he was just talking about a particular technicality.)
Of course, part of Bricker being a smart guy is that he really oughtn’t to have been surprised by the reaction he got in both those threads…
(2) Someone complains about something that some public conservative did. Bricker then jumps in and says “but would you complain if (some public liberal) did a similar thing? huh? would you? are you a hypocrite? c’mon, huh?”. Look at this thread, post 21:
The really irritating thing here is that the OP of that thread (Blalron) actually goes out of his way to be far more civil and understanding than most posters, by basically saying “I acknowledge that these republicans honestly believe that they are acting in the country’s best interests by trying to repeal this bill”, which already puts his OP way off on the right side of the bell curve as far as decency of discourse is concerned.
But Bricker’s response is just plain silly. The debate is not that the practice of misleading bill titles is bad, nor did the OP make any blanket statement about Republicans as a group at all. The OP very clearly says “this title of this bill is stupid”. That’s a totally legitimate thing to say. (And, a true one, I’d say, as I’m sure Bricker would agree).
Now, there are a bunch of reasonable other discussions one could have with this as a jumping off point:
-what is and is not acceptable in bill titles
-have Dems or Repubs crossed the line more often (I mean, that thread would obviously go nowhere, but it’s a discussion one can imagine having)
-What is Blalron’s opinion about [insert some specific Dem-titled bill], and is that a sign of a double standard?
BUT, none of those are what that thread is about. It has to be OK to start a thread about an actual thing that actually happened without the OP being able to prove in triplicate that he or she isn’t a hypocrite on that issue… because otherwise we’ll never discuss anything at all.
Another example: a thread about the ACORN pimp guy which Bricker hijacked into a massive digression about Michael Moore.