I can’t believe that in a gracious thread regarding the current scandal on Capital Hill, we are still the hell talking about Monica and Bill and Hillary.
Stop it. This has nothing to do with them-it never will. The only commonality is the abuse of power.
Thank you, Bricker for your honesty. (not sure why you haven’t seen it before, but hey, scales fall from our eyes at different points).
I would like to think that there are men and women of integrity on both sides of the aisle-I would also like to believe in Santa Claus. All we as citizens can do is to stay informed, vote our consciences, and hold our officials accountable to the extent that we can. If this means writing letters to the op-ed pages for the rest of our natural lives, so be it…
One of Spider Robinson’s characters comments in an aside to his story that, when you get right down to examining everything about him/her, everybody turns out to be an asshole. Not excepting himself, or some notable examples of Good People. The trick, he muses, is to learn how to be an asshole with class.
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Bricker, it would be a veiled insult to say that the OP pleasantly surprised me. It did startle me, that you would find it necessary to say it at this time and place. But it’s part and parcel of what makes you who you are. Good for you to have posted it; I wish you hadn’t had to.
Clothahump and Shodan, all I can say is that you surely know how to shit on someone else’s noble gesture. Have you considered becoming trolls? In your particular cases, it might be an improvement. You don’t owe anything to the rest of the SDMB community; we know and tolerate your clueless foulness, sometimes better than others.
You seem to be implying that, if the Republicans do the right thing on the Foley issue, if they take their lumps and get rid of those involved in the cover-up, then all will be right with the world again, and the Republicans will once again deserve their self-proclaimed title of defenders of “law and morality.”
If it’s taken you this long to realize what dishonest scumbags they are, and if you think that this incident is the prime example of their perfidy, you’re living in a land of delusion.
And i love your title. I think, when you wrote “privately snicker at the Dems,” you misspelled “loudly excoriate the Dems while excusing or rationalizing dozens of instances of Republican dishonesty.”
I think he’s referring (in part) to the way that Hastert was initially kinda-sorta trying throw Rep. Reynolds under the bus to save himself. Pretty distasteful.
And, friend Bricker…privately? You’ve been hiding your partisan contempt, sheilding it from innocent eyes? Well, I…uh…that is, you’ve…ah… I applaud your reserve and circumspect civility. Such as it were. But next time, maybe, let it all hang out. Repression really isn’t good for you. Really. Curdles your chi. Bad scoobies.
And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Come to the aid of yours. Throw the scoundrels out. You’re gonna take a pasting, pretty much guaranteed, but you can use that as a purgative, shake things up. Then, at least, you will be in a position to criticize and compromise with a straight face.
And take comfort, for is it not written, that whatsoever shall go around, therefore shall it come around? Verily.
Very nice Op Bricker, I am sorry that some on the board, apparently on both sides cannot accept a well written Op in good faith.
Shodan, you enjoy drive-by shittings too much. What the hell was your point.
Clothahump: Can you cite that the Dems sat on it for that long, and even if they did, it excuses nothing and especially does not excuse the fact the party leadership knew about it longer.
mhendo: Bricker seems to be implying he was disgusted with the way the party he strongly supports disgraced itself in this matter. The rest is a matter of debate. I think you read more into it than was there.
I don’t agree. It’s seldom that I "loudly excoriate " the Democrats. You may believe that I routinely “excus[e] or rationaliz[e] dozens of instances of Republican dishonesty;” I prefer to think of that, in general, as defending appropriate and wise actions in governance.
As a general principle, I support the traditional platform elements of social and economic conservatism. I make no apology for that; I believe those are, in general, the correct and wisest principles upon which to base our government.
What prompted this thread was the sickness and disbelief I feel on watching elected representatives and conservative pundits nakedly put partisan loyalty over integrity.
Solid. So how about the anti-gay shit that conservative pundits have been spouting? Bricker, will you help me beat up Ben Stein? It’s for the good of your country.
Good to know, though, that my evaluations of personalities were correct. Shodan is a partisan fuck who long ago lost touch with anything moral or principled that guided his politics. Clothahump is a great big moron. Whereas Bricker may be committed to his politics but not at the expense of principles.
P.S.: There may actually be principled anarchists - ones who operate strictly out of a principled and thorough understanding of the nature of government - but I certainly haven’t met any at my college.
What amazes me is that anyone intelligent thinks there’s actually any qualitative or quantitative difference between the two parties in terms of integrity.
Way to show leadership, Bricker. You’re not stupid and you’re not implicated, so you can afford to dress up pragmatism as principle. It’s obviously sensible to stop defending the indefensible in this case. But whilst doing that might allow you to say you stand for law and morality it won’t mean that you do in any meaningful sense. And ceasing to seem like standing for weaseldom increases weaseling’s effectiveness.
I expect to see quite a lot of posts from you where you are quaintly “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.”
[On preview, I can’t resist playing the emphasis game again, it’s just too funny:
That word “thorough” is kind of a dealbreaker for nearly everybody, innit?
If this needs to go further, it should probably be in its own thread, but from high school through early college, I was convinced that as rotten as people could be, their real rottenness shown through when they got organized about it, and that a society with no high-level organization would limit the chances of mass atrocities occurring. I wasn’t utopian, but I was anti-dystopian. I no longer have even that much optimism, though: I don’t think that high-level organization is avoidable.
Bricker, you know, I reached this same point with the Iraq War just before the '04 elections, when it became blatantly obvious that the decision to engage in the war was based on… uhm. Some vision that had little to no connection to reality, and actively refused correction.
I was disgusted, embarassed, and furious. I’ve been thinking. I’ve got a way to… try to make things better. I’m going to put it up in Great Debates when I have a chance, because this requires thinking about. I call it descriptive certification. The equivalent of ISO-9000 for a politican. If you make a Contract with America, you should damn well stick to it… and be noted when you fail.
I think it’s time to inflict some responsibility on our civil servants to stand for what the hell they said they stood for, for them to behave with the very basics of proper civic understandings.
And I think it’s possible to digest it and note it when they fail this badly.
But the fact is that the only thing he criticised was the Republican reaction to this single (not especially important) issue, and the wording of his post strongly suggests that if, if they can only get it right on this particular issue, the Republicans are well on their way back to being the party of law and morality.
I realize that my argument partly turns on issues of political platform, and i recognize that it is possible to support what Bricker calls “traditional platform elements of social and economic conservatism” while also drawing attention to particular examples (like this) of naked self-interest and dishonesty.
The problem is that the current administration and Republican majority has been so fundamentally dishonest on so many levels and on so many issues that i can no longer separate support for their platform from support for their chicanery. With Reagan and Bush I, and with individual Republican members of Congress, i always accepted that, while i might disagree with their politics, there were good arguments to be made in support of them. Under the current administration and Republican congress, however, I have almost arrived at the point where i literally cannot believe that anyone supports the Republican Party at the level of national government, and that any intelligent person who does must either be wilfully turning a blind eye to evil, or actively supporting it.
If trying to cover up this incident were the worst thing that the Republicans had done over the past five years or so, the world would now be a measurably better place.
