“It’s not true, but it’s mostly true”? 
To be fair, R. Daneel Bricker is but one of several modes into which he can morph, as suits the rhetorical convenience of the moment.
But it’s not so hard to fucking believe that a person can be psychotically amoral to his core, unable to understand that there even is such a concept as justice at all, much less that it’s distinct from the law.
No, you mischaracterize my Bigfoot early warning system. I’m not proposing to put it in place by fiat, because I am “emergency leader”.
I rather propose to lie about the prevalence of Bigfoot sightings, to whip up hysteria using the media, and to convince enough voters (using bogus statistics and misdirection) that Bigfoot is a risk to their families. Then I will pour money into lobbying efforts to get representatives to “listen to their constituents” and pass laws that will mandate the purchasing of Bigfoot early warning systems. Of course, my system is the best one - I will make sure they’re aware of that.
It will be the law, passed by legislators, at the request of worried constituents. So therefore, it will be the right thing to do, and the best use of tax dollars.
Not just an early warning system but also a preemptive war Against Saudia Arabia because [del]of oil[/del] uh, umm, … they have biologists (yeah, that’s the ticket) and so might someday be able to clone bigfoots, and because we have umm… blurry photographs of something…
When it comes to who has access to the franchise, you don’t leave that up to the democratic process. Otherwise the majority can disenfranchise the minority. Everything is different when youa re talking about voting rights, it is such a fundamental building block of every ssumption we have about how our system works that you can’t fuck with it unless you have a good reason and an imaginary threat is simply not a good reason.
But its not imaginary! It can be as high as .004% of the electorate. And those are real numbers, not imaginary numbers! You can quibble over the significance of those numbers, but they are real numbers, therefore the threat is a real threat! So don’t go around saying its “imaginary”, because it isn’t! In fact, your false representation here obviates your entire argument, so I win. Again!
It’s funny actually, since I’d always assumed that Conservatives would have an internal attribution, at least for others (susceptible to the fundamental attribution error). Party of personal responsibility and all that.
and then pointing to polls showing people disapprove of paper cuts to show that treating the paper cuts are more important. Not to mention, accusing those pointing out the gaping disparity of relying on paper cuts to sell their homeopathic medicine or something.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m really not sure what that means when the original statement is “Because conservatives think liberals have bad ideas, and liberals think conservatives are bad people.”. If the original statement is contrasting two groups, then how can it be true “amonst the hard-left crowd”? However, that’s a bit of a distraction…
I like this bigfoot analogy that Euphonious Polemic has proposed. So, to quote him:
If something like that happened, would you be happy about the way democracy was functioning? Would you consider changes in some legislative or regulatory process to prevent such situations in the future?
(Obviously there’s one key difference in the analogy… in his analogy, the person whipping up the anti-bigfoot hysteria, and thus using dishonest tactics to get a large number of voters to support needless legislation is doing it for purely financial gain, which is bad. In the voter ID situation, they’re doing it for political gain and to put a thumb on the very scales of democracy itself, which is much worse.)
No. But, no.
By that I mean that while I wouldn’t be happy, I would also be less than sanguine about trying to change “some legislative or regulatory process.” I feel the remedy to bad decisions in a representative democracy is more, and better, information to the public.
On the contrary.
The Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments are all testament to the fact that we legitimately restricted the franchise and, by operation of our representative democratic process, eased those restrictions.
Nothing is different. This is how we make laws.
And just so I understand your mindset – do you honestly believe you can simply announce a rule – “you can’t fuck with it unless you have a good reason” – and that becomes the binding principle that all must follow? If you do, I fear you have grievously misunderstood the concept of representative democracy.
Your strict devotion to non-partisan and unbiased candor is a beacon to us all.
The thing is, you’re talking about Bricker here. Bricker’s values are not in any way American values, but ultra-right-wing Salvadoran death squad values. He has acknowleged that he is a supporter of the death squad ARENA partry in El Salvador.
ARENA was founded BY Roberto d’Abuisson, known as “Major Blowtorch” for his favorite interrogation device. d’Abuisson and ARENA’a philosophy on dealing with the opposition was a simple one. Are there rebel fighters somewhere in the hills around a little Indian town like el Mozote? Send in the (US trained and equiped). Atlacatl battalion, round up all the villagers and anyone else who had fled into town to escape the fighting, maybe between 700 and 1000 men, women and children. Torture all the men, then hack them to death with machetes in front of their families. Gang rape every women between 8 and 70 years old, then line them up and machine gun them all. Cut the children’s throats one by one while the other s watch and wait their turn; when that gets tiresome, hang the children- including babies- on trees, and when that takes too long herd the other children into the village church, nail the door shut, and burn them all alive. Kill every single person they can get their hands on, bulldoze the village, leave the bodies to rot in the sun.
Bricker supports ARENA.
(I’m not going to give cites for this or any of the other atrocities listed below. this is the stuff of nightmares; read about el Mozote on wiki and you won’t sleep at night. Google everything if you insist on more details).
Are six prominent Jesuit priests, including the rector of el Salvador’s most prestigious university, suspected of thinking bad thougts about ARENA? Send in a gang of twenty thugs with direct orders from d’Abuisson, torture and murder the six priests and their housekeeper and her sixteen year old daughter.
Bricker still supports ARENA.
Have four middleaged American nuns been suspected of caring for the children of murdered “subversives”, and of burying some of the bodies that ARENA wants to leave exposed to rot so as to terrify anyone leaving nearby? Send more thugs, also on the direct orders of d’Abuisson, to stop their car on a lonely highway. drag them out, torture them, rape them, kill them, and leave their bodies beside the road.
Bricker still supports ARENA.
Does d’Abuisson begin his political carreer by pasting posters all over el Salvador declaring “Serve the Fatherland! Kill a priest!”
Bricker, who claims to be a Catholic, still supports ARENA.
Does d’Abuisson proclaim publicly that ARENA’s goal is to eliminate the oppposition by murdering between 200,000 and 300,000 more civilians? (Out of a total population of less than 4,000,000- equivalent to murdering 30 million Americans)
Bricker still supports ARENA.
Brickers “values” are not American values, (unless “American values” are described as those of Dick Cheney, Timothy McVeigh, and Jeffrey Dahmer, and Bricker should be ashamed of passing himself off as a decent Americn. He isn’t a decent American, and he isn’t a decent person.
Gonna need a cite for that, hoss. I know that things he has said might well be taken to insinuate sympathy for ARENA and the monster d’Aubisson. But clear and unvarnished support and admiration? Gonna need more.
Was that before or after your threesome with Drew Barrymore and Jean-Claude van Damme?
Since we appear to be discussing things you have imagined.
My searching skills are mediocre at best, and I can’t find the quote. I know he said that he supports ARENA because I called him on it the time, I’ll keep looking.
It’s in part a plausible inference from his heartwarming tale about a father arriving in the US from El Salvador with only the shirt off his back. Either he had to sell literally everything else to buy a plane ticket, which no doubt he shopped carefully for to save every centavo he could, and nobody else in the family could spare him even a change of underwear for the trip - or else he had to flee the country in a huge damn hurry with no time even to pack. Which seems more likely?
ISTM that is the rule: strict scrutiny analysis generally attaches to voting rights.
OK, here it is, from March 2011:
Bricker Bricker is online now
And Full Contact Origami
SDSAB
Join Date: Dec 1999
Location: Northern Virginia
Posts: 35,347
Quote:
Originally Posted by GIGObuster View Post
Several Cuban-Americans fit this, and in my former neck of the woods, there are many white Hispanics, that thanks to prejudice they do get better deals than the mestizos (mixed race are the majority) or the Indians.
If Bricker was still in the old country he would most likely be with the elitists at the right wing ARENA party.
Yes, because the leftists were so great for our people, weren’t they? Viva la Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación, verdad?
Came out a little hard to read, but the last line is Bricker’s.
To make things a little clearer, GIGObuster commented “If Bricker was still in the old country he would most likely be with the elitists at the right wing ARENA party.”
Bricker answered “Yes”.
Clearer now?