Again, I think this is manufactured outrage. The prohibition against taking partisan politics abroad has always been taken to mean you shouldn’t make partisan statements in front of a foreign audience (i.e. airing your dirty laundry with others). It has never meant, for example, that a president can’t give an interview to an American newspaper reporter while sitting in Air Force One, even if it’s sitting on the runway in Moscow. Nor has it ever meant that a politician couldn’t make partisan comments in a phone interview with an American journalist while sitting in a hotel room in Beijing. It’s all about giving speeches to foreign audiences.
Those examples simply are not relevant to the subject at hand. In the first case, Pelosi is not being criticized for talking partisan shit abroad; she’s being criticized for (allegedly) underminining the administration’s diplomatic stance through actual action, by meeting with an unfriendly foreign government.
In the second case she is being criticized -with reason, it would seem - for diplomatic ineptitude on that trip.
Neither example is about Pelosi just engaging in partisan bickering abroad.
Ya, Cisco, but while this is among the lamest SDMB partisan threads ever (it turns on a distinction between what McCain said, what he meant, and whether he can tell the difference), you couldn’t even come up with an egregious example. So it’s not that bad around here, though I concede that a lot of conservatives appear to have fled for the hinterlands. That said the phrase, “Manufactured outrage” strikes me as embarrassingly apt.
Picking a nit/chatting with Sam: “The prohibition against taking partisan politics abroad has always been taken to mean you shouldn’t make partisan statements in front of a foreign audience (i.e. airing your dirty laundry with others).”
Probably. It also was about having a united front against a foreign menace, like the Soviet Union. Googling tells me that the “Water’s edge” phrase was coined by Senator Vandenberg (R) (sp?) who in the 1940s advocated vigorous debate regarding tactics at home while leaving the commies no doubt about America’s ultimate goals. In GQ, I just posed the question, “Outside of the US does, "Partisanship stop at the water’s edge?”
The fact of the matter, however, is that many of us conservatives, being a sensible and pragmatic lot, have simply grown tired of pissing in the wind of leftie bias that so thoroughly permeates this place.
Further, as elucidator himself has pointed out on occasion, we can begin to sound like a broken record as we argue time and time again against the same old erroneous and biased memes that are the fuel that drives this place. For your edification I’ll list the main ones here:
Bush is EEEVIL!
Conservatives/Republicans are teh suxxor!
So are God-believers…stupid, too!
Whatever is wrong, anywhere in the world, was caused at some point by the U.S.!
Eventually, the conservative poster can come to feel: “WTF? Screw 'em! Let 'em believe this nonsense, I got better things to do with my time.”
I probably don’t post one-percent as much as I used to and this is the primary reason why.
We certainly are lucky that our esteemed conservative brethren are able to rise above the petty strawmanning and well poisoning that us liberals are wont to engage in.
Setting aside the misuse of the term “meme” (goddammit, it doesn’t mean “an idea I think is dumb”!), and setting aside the temptation to call “cite?” on these obviously false claims, I’ll ask you to be honest. When someone does say something vaguely similar to these claims, don’t they catch a lot of shit from the board’s leftists?
None of these claims are false. You don’t need a cite; they are too obviously true to make a request for a cite anything other than trolling.
Take an obvious example. There is a thread where leftists are rejoicing in the death of Jesse Helms. You posted to it, and you didn’t say a single word in condemnation of it - you joined in the pile-on.
There are some honest leftists on the boards, but you apparently aren’t one of them.
I just opened an IMHO thread asking who were honest conservatives and liberals in the eyes of the other viewpoint (ie, asking conservatives for honest liberals and liberals for honest conservatives). The question interested me.
