Get out of here!
hwooo-ah I find your lack of faith disturbing. hwooo-ah
Can anyone think of a better phonetic spelling for the Darth Vader breathing noise?
Not sure, but just speaking for myself, I thought you were doing an Al-Pacino-in-Scent-of-a-Woman thing at first. 
My greatest masterpiece. You’re welcome.
Betcha he’d get more respect while wearing swim trunks than a lot of other world leaders would! 
the Oval office is a working office, its where work gets done. anyone who thinks you should be wearing uncomfortable clothing 24/7 while at work has some really weird issues. I mean ergonomics? keeping things comfortable in the temperature/noise/whatever aspects of the work environment is one of the great things about the last 20 ish years in the work place. why the hell would you want the friggin President of all people to be uncomfortable while working?
Better Obama than John McCain. :shudder:
Robin
Well, you never know. Since Bush policies were based on what PNAC wanted rather than the facts, of what use could Powell, whose job was to provide his president with facts, possibly be?
He looks like Obi-Wan wearing an Obama mask.
Nope. Never said it, ain’t gonna defend it. If you can’t argue based on what I’ve really said, I’d just as soon you didn’t respond to me.
If, on the other hand, you wanna debate the effect of hippies on this country’s culture, bring it on. I observed it first hand and was there from the beginning. In fact, some of my best friends were hippies. 
Tried it myself but just couldn’t get into it. Too much smoke and dorky clothes.
And the patchouli! Don’t get me started!
Here we go again: I never said any such thing! I said he ‘may not’ have had anything of importance to add. Is it your contention that everytime a cabinet meeting is called, the SECRETARY OF DEFENSE – as you so dorkingly put it – has something of earth-shattering importance to impart? I don’t think so.
But be that as it may, I also don’t think Powell…who was the Secretary of State, not the Secretary of Defense…had something earth-shattering to impart during every single cabinet meeting either. I’m sure much of what goes on is largely a matter of routine…at least some of the time. If such urgent and important things were going on as you suggest, I doubt the meeting would have been pre-scheduled to last only an hour and made certain to end on time.
However, the defining issue that determines which of us is batshit insane, is that I know that I don’t know what went on during that meeting, whereas you clearly think you do.
Secretary of Defense! What a dumbass!
Nope. Did at one time though. I wasn’t quite as cute as Wally, but I did dress like that. The thing you guys don’t seem to understand is that life wasn’t like it was in those shows. Yeah, people looked and dressed like that then, but they didn’t act the same way. Beav, Ozzie & Harrit, et al., were idealized versions of life back then. Those of us who lived then know better, and it sounds silly when people say we want to ‘go back’ to that kind of life and point out to us that it was never really like that (which you haven’t), which is something that we’re already plainly aware of.
Thank you. It’s not hard knowing the right thing to do, when it smacks you in the face.
We all read or hear things from time to time, and if it sounds plausible and no one in a position to do so refutes it, you take it as fact. I’d read years ago that Reagan never entered the Oval Office without coat and tie. I read years later that GWB followed his example. I don’t know who is responsible for the confluence of those two statements and whether they were speaking from experience or just doing PR, but either way they were obviously wrong.
This brings to mind another question. I also read once that the Oval Office is largely symbolic and ceremonial and that most of a president’s actual desk work gets done across the street (via underground tunnel) and the Executive Office Building. This is one of the reasons it seemed plausible to me that a president might honor the office with coat & tie, since he wasn’t there all that much. Still, your comments along with the photos of Bush and Reagan conducting what appears to be serious business there, tends to put the lie to that. Does anyone know for a fact what the real deal is there?
Yeah, that’s what this is about. Not an idiotic attempted smear (by Card, not you) against the president that has fuck all to do with his job performance, nor the fact that conversing with you is one of the more frustrating experiences one can go through on the SDMB, it’s that the folks in this thread are just incredibly offended at the suggestion that someone wear a suit. Yeah. That’s it.
I’m sure you thought of several different ways you could have expressed your opinion before settling on the most irritating way possible. Congratulations, you’ve managed to annoy people yet again, while simultaneously thinking the problem is with everyone else.
I think that somebody in the President’s cabinet will probably have something to say most of the time, yes. Locking him out of a meeting he was going to attend is a supremely stupid idea.
I knew I should have looked that up. In any case, I capitalized it for emphasis, in that it is a very important position, and State is at least as fundamental as Defense.
Bullshit. You keep implying (or flat-out stating) that Powell would have nothing to say. My position is that he most likely would have. Usually people aren’t named to the Cabinet to keep quiet and twiddle their thumbs during a meeting.
In the Bush Administration? I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
Oh, good! Now I get to say it again: I never said any such thing!
Feel free to point it out and make me a liar, if you can.
No, but every cabinet meeting isn’t necessarily brimming over with extremely urgent business on the part of every member either. Given the number of people involved and the amount of time allotted for the meeting, I’m having a hard time thinking that this one was that much of a biggie. I mean, there are a dozen or so cabinet members. IIRC, the meeting was scheduled to last an hour, so that works out to five minutes each if they all get into the act. And given that it’s simply the way of things for issues to ebb and flow, I’m sure there are some meetings where certain cabinet members require more time than others, and those others then aren’t doing much but sitting around listening (or twiddling their thumbs, as you put it). And even if the time were to be divided up equally, it still means that each cabinet member is twiddling his/her thumbs for fifty-five minutes.
Doesn’t seem like much of a difference to me.
Main Entry: 1ad ho·mi·nem
Pronunciation: (ˈ)ad-ˈhä-mə-ˌnem, -nəm\
Function: adjective
Etymology: New Latin, literally, to the person
Date: 1598
1 : appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect
2 : marked by or being an attack on an opponent’s character rather than by an answer to the contentions made
You guys are right. I misremembered the definition. Thanks for the correction.
It used to be. Then we tamed fire.
Complete hijack: does that seem odd to anyone else? Both the New Latin part and the ‘to’ part. I’m not sure ‘ad’ is really used in that sense in this phrase. (Note , SA, that I’m not criticizing you in the least here. It just seems, well, a little odd.)
The full phrase is argumentum ad hominem.
You know, the listening at a meeting is important as the speaking: there would have been things said there that he needed to hear, and it’s inefficient to have him have to go back and ask everyone what happened.
Locking someone out is childish. You shouldn’t have to “send a message” to your cabinet. The absolute default assumption is that everyone there is a total professional who would only ever be late if it was absolutely unavoidable. If someone is competent enough to be on your cabinet, they should be competent enough to know when they should hurry the Prime Minister of Whereever off the phone to make the meeting on time, and when they should take the time to complete the conversation. If there actually is a problem with an individual being late, they should be addressed, not locked out.