Okay, even I'm getting somewhat tired of all the repetitious anti-Bush threads...

The BBQ Pit
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First of all, if you need to know my posting history where political stuff is concerned, feel free to search me. Second of all, I generally want to say up front that my intention was not to belittle or insult the OPs of the kinds of threads I refer to. That said…

I’m starting to get a little weary of the volume and tone of the anti-Bush threads around here, ESPECIALLY in Great Debates, where the titles and OPs are just invitations for everyone who agrees with the OP to file in and pile on the President. It’s gotten to the point where I really think you could consolidate every single one into some kind of monster superthread and not lose any readability. I realize that this is an election year, and feelings are running high and all, but for some reason, I just can’t agree with this impulse to just post every time you hear about something Bush did that disagrees with you, (again) ESPECIALLY in Great Debates, which is supposed to be about debating, not just “come in and tell everyone how evil you think Bush is!” No matter what you think of him, I’m not sure anyone can see him sitting in the Oval Office, twirling his Snidely Whiplash moustache, cackling with glee as he and his devil-horned Cabinet plan the simultaneous invasion of Syria, Iran, and North Korea with Bible-brainwashed ex-gay soldiers armed with assault weapons purchased fromt he corner drugstore run by the wealthy oil exec who can’t get an abortion.

I’m also getting pretty weary of the tone of some of the replies, like the idea that if Bush wins, the country will inevitably slide into economic, theocratic, and terrorist chaos. I already groan when I hear a conservative say that a vote for Kerry is a vote for “Islamofacist rule over the U.S.,” so can you blame me for doing the same on the other side? It’s not that I disagree that Bush isn’t a great president, and that he could very well do more harm than good with another term. It’s just that the sheer hopelessness and terror that people sometimes express really turns me off - and I generally agree with these people on most issues! I’m sure they have good reasons for thinking such, and I’m glad they feel free to talk about it here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think it’s a little extreme and unfounded. What good will all that do if Bush gets reelected? Should we move? Or just sink our heads in our hands, moan in despair, and wait for the violent end of the grand experiment that is the USA to come?

Maybe it’s because I’m paranoid and worrier, and I’m trying to find reasons to suppress my own natural tendencies. Maybe it’s BECAUSE I’m paranoid and a worrier that I can more easily detect such impulses in others. I dunno. But my reactions lately to these kinds of threads have been a mix of worry and mild disgust/anger. Thus this post. Hope I’ve expressed my feelings clearly. Thank you for the opportunity to vent.

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But Clinton got a blow job!!!

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Part of me agrees with you about there being too many Bush threads, which is why I don’t open a lot of them, but another part of me says ‘well, if he didn’t suck so bad there wouldn’t be so many people complaining.’

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Well, I’m certainly not saying he doesn’t suck. It’s just that I look in askance at the level of hysteria that he invokes. Which, of course, you might similarly argue is his fault, but still.

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Why do you hate America?

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Maybe the moderators could create a special “Free Speech Zone” forum for all negative posts about Bush.

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Elect Kerry, then we’ll talk. Unless Republicans decide to rachet things up another notch above the Bush hysteria.

Maybe when I see Sam Stone or Shodan busting in here complaining about how sickening it is for the Republicans to run around handing out literature that says Kerry is Bin Laden’s man, Bush is our man, or how Jeb Bush’s people apparently tried to rig the Florida elections AGAIN via the felon list, or how incredibly dishonest it is for Bush to say that Kerry “voted against supporting our troops and then bragged about doing so” then maybe I’ll feel like there is some degree of fairness and honesty in the world, and I’ll take a break. Until then, sorry. You don’t get a free ride or your bullshit overlooked just because you manage to put it out in such overwhleming quantities, with such consistency.

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We should just have one big perpetual “Bush Administration Screw-Up” thread and toss everything in there.

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It would have to be at a secret address though. And, much like porn, could never be directly linked to.

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Jeez, I don’t know what the OP is complaining about. I’ve read just about all the “Bush is a Poopy Head” threads, and I’ve got to agree that at least a couple hundred reasons not to vote for him have been presented here, but I really just can’t make up my mind up yet. I’m sure just one or two more times that I’m informed of his poopy-headedness via this board and I’ll be able to make a decision. Really, just five or six more times and that should be enough.

Or maybe a dozen. Yeah, twenty or thirty more, tops and I’m certain I’ll be able to make a decision then. Probably.

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More the fault of his minions actually. Some of them seek to inject hysteria as a means of stifling rational (if bumptious) discourse.

Postponing Election Day? We Laugh But The Government Considers It

DMC has the right of it here:

Not talking about real issues because some asshole doesn’t want us to talk about real issues is a lot like caving in to terrorists. It’s not something that freedom loving people should do.

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I think the problem is that the election is getting nearer, combined with the fact that more people are using the internet to communicate than ever before. And the problem of being at war in the months running up to a national election.

And there’s lots of back-and-forth arguing because the motives for this war were so hotly debated. I mean, this is the first time (in my short memory) that we’ve attacked a sovereign country with the specific goal of destroying its leadership because they posed a grave and gathering threat sometime soon. That, and the unfortunate discovery that our reasons were just completely wrong.

So these bleeding hearts see the body counts, and know that hundreds of families on both sides are having to deal with the pain of their relatives’ deaths with the Big Lie looming over their grief. (“Yeah, he died, but he was defending America against, um, something that sounded good at the time.”) So people are really anguished about it and are taking it out on Bush.

And then there’s the spectre of war-profiteering that the Bush administration is so vulnerable to (what with Cheney currently seeming to draw a salary from Halliburton and all). And that just makes people even more polarized, because a lot of sore losers are still griping about the whole tone of the administration, what with Ashcroft taking actions that sometimes appear to be either limiting civil liberties or motivated by some sort of religious reasons. Like wasting time even thinking about whether statues can be naked or not, and spending energy to bust Tommy Chong for his son’s having a mail-order bong business. And then everybody gets their panties in a bind because of that weirdo general who made public statements that seemed to boil down to, “My god is bigger than your god.” (I guess religious people care about that stuff – I don’t.)

I get a little worked up about the issue of, say, the member of the CBO who was strong-armed into not telling Congress about the real costs of the Medicare bill, and I seem to have read somewhere that the CBO had a rule change that made it easier for them to make predictions of future economic parameters based on whimsy (I wish I could dig up that cite). So now the unemployment figures and CPI and other numbers can now be just another pile of shitty lies. As a scientist, that bugs me. And speaking of that, I think the Bush administration has been a little heavy-handed in dictating that Global Warming Does Not Exist, which subsequently allowed the administration to back out of Kyoto, because what the hell should we care about carbon dioxide emissions when carbon dioxide has no effect on global warming (which doesn’t exist, anyway)?

So you take some mild trigger, say, the Bush administration having thought enough about torturing prisoners to have their legal department look into it, and these unhappy people just start piling all of their other complaints on top of it. “Oh, No Child Left Behind was based on a fraudulent Texas public school system.” Or, “They’re removing funding from any aid organization that even mentions the word abortion, but allowing faith-based organizations to talk about whatever their god tells them to,” or, “How can he talk free trade when he supports steel tariffs?”

And once you’ve got one of these annoying little complainers started, they just keep going and going and going: “Well, he was elected by judicial fiat, you know.” “And that tax bill? Let me introduce you to the concept of ‘median’ as opposed to ‘average.’” Fucking whiners. And then, when the Senate of the United States of America starts debating an amendment to the constitution instead of dealing with any other fucking problem that might be more important, what do people do? Start another bash-Bush thread.

Fucking whiners.

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Tell you what…if he’s defeated in November, I’ll stop. If he wins…well…

Kelly bar the door.

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Lucky bastard! :wink:

(Just FTR I hated the SOB)

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I think you’re onto something, groo. Being at war ratchets up the heat and volume automatically. The last time I remember an election this fraught was during the height of the Viet Nam “Conflict”. The simple existence of war increases the stakes–and so it should.
I also think we were numbed for quite a while afte 9/ll. It was such a horrific attack, on civilians, on our soil. It was completely unthinkable, but it happened and we didn’t have a clearly defined enemy to focus on, much less ponder the consequences of anti-terrorism measures. Now we’ve had time to come out of the funk, only to find ourselves in a foolish, ill-conceived war and the government already making massive inroads into the lives of citizens.
It totally sucks, but the floods of bile and bitterness were probably inevitable. I know families that split–parent against child, spouse against spouse, sibling against sibling, over ‘Nam–and never really reconciled. I’d sure hoped never to live through such a thing again but we’re well on our way.*
In some ways I’m nostalgic for the good ol’ days of ordinary political sleaze. It was bad, but the actual consequences weren’t nearly so dire. This is an election with teeth. I guess the glut of rabid theads go along with that, even though I wish–strongly–that many of them were better thought out and cited instead of just blind ranting.

  • The sharp differences weren’t hashed out over the internet, but take a hard, long gander at the music, writings, rhetoric, etc. of the times. It wasn’t remotely fun, fringed, drug-addled psychodelia, though that’s the aspect that was saleable.
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I count one thread in the first 58 currently in GD specifically about Bush. There is, also, one specifically about Kerry. There are also threads about Joe Wilson, republicans, burger flipping, Republicans and the like, but these are only tangentially related to Bush. There are a few more in the Pit about Bush specifically, and about conservatives more generally.

To put it in pit language, what the fuck are you talking about?

One out of 58 is too many? Shit, for a while there it seemed almost all the GD threads were about religion and the bible.

Perhaps when you say “anti-Bush” threads, you are being loose and including Abu Ghraib threads too. Even with this loose criterion, the vast minority pertain to Bush. Sorry, this one’s a non-starter.

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The problem being (IMO) that “Bush is gonna stage terrorist attacks to cancel the elections!” is considered a “real” issue. Hence the tinfoil reference. And I would hardly classify pointing out that the notion sounds like paranoia to a non-True Believer That Bush Is Indwelt By Satan as “injecting hysteria”. The hysteria was there from the OP.

And notice yet again which side is implying that to disagree is to cave in to terrorists. :wink:

If Bush wins, and he well might, the tendency described so aptly in the OP will continue for the next four years. I wonder if it might be necessary for the moderators to limit the number of anti-Bush tantrums even in GD, as was necessary with Reeder in the Pit.

Regards,
Shodan

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If you replaced “IMO” with “IMA (In My Imagination)”, I guess your post makes sense.

Yet again? Moron.

Yes, and the chances that they’ll ever have to limit the “pro-Bush” threads are about the same as the chances they’ll have to limit “pro-cancer” or “pro-earthquake” threads.

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I think the way Republicans have used the war is what got me so pissed off. The fact that Republicans are actively campaigning with messages like “Kerry is Osama’s man, Bush is my man,” turning homosexuals into the new Southern Strategy, or trying to fix the Florida election AGAIN, keeps me mad. The fact that every election Democrats have to put up with people in nice suits walking along poor black voter lines handing out cards reminding them that they need two forms of photo ID and should be paid up on all their outstanding legal issues in order to vote, the fact that Democrats control the majority of the votes in the country but via increasingly more ridiculous gerrymandering control less than half of the seats: all these things keep me from standing with the Republicans even on issues I agree with them on.

And hey, it also makes me really mad that people like Shodan and Sam Stone are forced to implausibly pretend that Bush is a really great leader and we’re all just crazy. That’s the real tragedy here.

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IMA?

IMA?