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I have nothing to add to this thread, aside from being glad Bricker has the capacity to denounce blatant scumminess, except that I had only just started reading the Callahan Chronicles yesterday, had never before heard of Spider Robinson, and suddenly I see him referenced the very next day. Trippy.
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I find you, Bricker, generally a poster of principle, if a bit naive. I’m impressed at the level of both qualities you show here. Although with this thread you nudge the balance a little toward the principled side, I wish you godspeed as you continue to chip away at the mass of naivete that remains.
I love how the Democrat conspiracy to hold this until the election simply assumes that the media IS the Democrats, and that this particular conspiracy unavoidably includes FoxNews as one of those conspiring Democrats.
Truly the height of self-parody has been reached.
Good OP, and I agree with the sentiment that it’s disgusting to try and spin this scandal as anything other than a GOP mess. But… it will take more than clearing up this one scandal to make the GOP a beacon of law and morality again, if it ever was on in the first place. I mean, it’s laughable to even think that will scratch the surface of the problem. The GOP is drunk with power and simply can’t be trusted to have the best intersts of the nation as it’s primary goal. They need to be cut down to size and humbled, as I’m sure they will be in November.
What sad times are these when so many of us seem to think it particularly laudatory that a person might suggest that Foley’s actions and the Republican effort to cover it up were actually, you know, bad.
I think it’s super that someone can say that this bad thing was bad, and yet really unsuper that they can say that so many other bad things about the current Republicans are acceptable. If there weren’t secondary gain to be had for “calling a spade a spade” it might be just a little more impressive, but it would take a fool not to see that at this point, the politically savvy and self-serving thing to do is to shove Hastert under the bus. More than once, if possible.
When that same person’s take on pretty much everything else that is wrong with the country now is that we should stay the course, I’ll give them golf claps for the one time they get it right.
I probably agree with most of your views. I am sure it concerns the lead-up, conduct, and planning of the war, Tax breaks for the very wealthy and the treatment and holding of prisoners. Despite this and despite this being in the pit, I applaud Bricker condemning the political corruptness laid bare in the situation and I will save any arguments I have for him over the many other issues for other debates and pit threads. I respect **Bricker ** quite a bit. However, despite us both being registered Republicans, we have extremely different views about the current administration. Therefore, I applaud him for this thread.
Jim
Not that I disagree with many of your points, but I think this is the second time in a week that I’ve been surprised by your naivete, Bricker. Your anger is totally justified, and the Foley-related wriggling is astonishingly pathetic. But I don’t know where you came up with this belief that one party of politicians has integrity while the other doesn’t. Every group has its scumbags, and this is politics, where most everybody has the ability to be total scum when necessary.
Just a water’s testing question: has George Allen displayed a lot of integrity lately?
Too early to say, surely.
Wait, Bricker is saved: according to FoxNews, Foley IS a Democrat!
Problem solved.
Eliminating the bafflegab about Nexis database searches of Fox stories, doesn’t that little cite boil down to saying, “Our interior operation checked, and verified that we never ran a story about Foley until we ran a story about Foley”?? That’s what I’m getting out of it, and it’s pretty clear what they expect people to read it as (“We didn’t know until our first story”), even though that’s not what it says.
Of course, that should read “particularly laudable” not laudatory.
Just to make some further use of this correction post, I’m sure that there must have been some things that Pol Pot thought were just wrong. Not that Bricker is Pol Pot. It’s just that the question shouldn’t be whether or not one has any boundarires. Should it?
Wow. You gotta wonder if someone at FoxNews did that deliberately.
I agre with this. Doesn’t everybody just assume that all politicians all sleazeballs as a matter of course? I vote based purely on what kind of policies I think a candidate will support without giving any thought at all to perceptions of moral character. I just assume that none of them have any.
I’m really kind of amazed that someone as intelligent as Bricker would actually believe that one party had any more integrity than the other. The best you can hope for is that you can elect a party which will do what you want legislatively. The less you know about them as people, the better.
I read it as at least three news organizations were told about this story last year. At least one of these (Fox) is not considered liberal. So, it wasn’t just the liberal media sitting on the story until election time.
Bricker,
I applaud the fact that you’re not so tied down in partisan politics you can’t see what’s going on here. I’m not a dyed-in-the=wool Democrat. If it turns out that members of the Democratic Party had knowledge of this -which, I’ll be honest, I find to be highly doubtful- I would find it absolutely disgraceful and would want them all to go through the same investigations that I currently want Hastert to go through.
But I want you to REALLY look at what’s going on. A man has been caught almost red handed. Witnesses from as far back as ten years keep coming out saying “he did it to me too!” We have chat logs. We have e-mails. We have a congressman who has not denied a single charge thrown at him and, in fact, resigned immediately upon this scandal coming to light. Everything but a literal smoking gun and the kitchen sink is available to review and it conclusively proves this guy is a scumbag and has been for a long long time. It’s practically irrefutable.
And what is the Republican response? Blame the Democrats for setting him up. Blame Bill Clinton for doing it first. Blame the gays for instilling a fear of gay bashing. Blame. Lie. Weasel. Obsfucate the issue and muddy the waters. Anything but accepting there’s a problem, admitting it’s a Republican’s fault, and then finding a way to solve the problem.
My point is this: we have a problem. A problem created by a Foley and perpetuated by Foley. It is all but conclusive he did it. It’s simply undeniable at this point. This is as clear an issue where we can assign blame as I can think of. Yet the Republicans aren’t.
So is it probable, is it even POSSIBLE, that there are other issues where we’re not 99.9999999999% sure who is to blame for a problem only because we don’t have such clear and convincing evidence as freaking chat logs, yet the Republicans are STILL going on about how it’s the Democrat’s fault or Bill Clinton’s fault or the gay’s fault? Is it possible that this isn’t the only time the Republican leadership and the Republican media commentators have blamed everyone but their own party for things that really are their fault? Do rational people really believe this is the first time something so clear has been twisted to opaqueness by Republicans?
To be fair, some liberals (Soros’ people I heard, maybe?) did help break the story. But I don’t think there is evidence that they sat on it: they found out about it and pushed it in real time. And, of course, they didn’t create or make up the story.
Given that Republican party has just spent several months PUBLICALLY crowing about it’s opposition research operation to dig up dirt on Dems for release in and around October, it’s hard to see what sort of leg they have to stand on in kvetching about October surprises in any case.
Direct link to JPG image for those who don’t care to watch a video stream.
Also to be fair, AP news at one point put out that Foley was a Democrat, though they quickly corrected it. And D and R are pretty close together on a keyboard. Given the number of spelling errors in tickers on the cable channels, it’s not surprising to see some typos, although it is weird that while I’ve seen this sort of mixup on FoxNews before (Republican in scandal gets called or labeled a Democrat), I’ve never seen them mix up the letters of the state the person is from. Just the party affiliation. And only ever converting a scandal ridden R to a D, never the other way around.