It seems to me that I give as much credit to McCain and Palin as most of the Usual Suspects do to Obama and Biden.
But Sarah Palin has more or less achieved the same position on the SDMB as Bush has. Any hint of support, or even a hint of dissent from the prevailing hysteria of condemnation, is enough to trigger the onslaught.
But there is a fairly blatant double standard hereabouts. Palin can’t read Gibson’s mind and tell what he means by the Bush Doctrine (did you know that Krauthammer, who invented the term, wrote a piece detailing that Gibson’s understanding of it was mistaken?). This means she is a complete idiot and unqualified and Gibson tries to scold her for it. Biden says he thinks Roosevelt went on TV in 1929 to talk about the stock market crash, and it is ignored.
Palin says she has foreign policy experience because Russia is next to Alaska. This is roundly condemned. Obama says he has foreign policy experience because he lived in Kenya and Hawaii when he was a kid. :crickets chirping:
The thing of it is, the Usual Suspects are idiots. Extremists, as a rule, cannot think in any terms that aren’t extreme. So they believe that the only two possible alternatives are:[ul][li]utter, ranting hatred for Palin (and Bush, and any other Republican who seems to be at risk for making it to the Oval Office), or [*]the kind of slavish adulation they feel for any Democrat who is at risk for the same.[/ul]But do a quick experiment, if you like. [/li]
Find a post in which I said that McCain was justified in canceling his participation in the first debate. Now Don’t Call Me Shirley is apparently convinced that I have said that. Unfortunately…
Not all of the SDMB, but all of the Usual Suspects, are knee-jerkers, and they are projecting. They assume that everyone else is like them. They look at most issues, decide which is the politically correct side (nearly always Democratic and/or liberal), plump for that, and then and only then look around for reasons to justify their choice. And on a board like this one, where a sizable contingent of the participants in political threads spend a large amount of their leisure time combing the left-wing blogs looking for rationalizations to do anything, they can count on some other nutcase to back them up, no matter how bizarre their position might be.
I don’t have that. Fortunately, I don’t need it. I can tell when I am winning a debate by other means.
If they try to set up a strawman, I am winning. If they begin screaming insults, I am winning. And when they try to put words in my mouth, they know I am winning.
There are a number of folks on the SDMB with whom one can have lively and interesting discussions. There are a number of others who serve only as bad examples, and are useful only for the amusement gained in laughing at them. And for them to admit their errors serves no necessary part in the amusement.
Like my dad once told me, if you pitch a rock at a pack of dogs, and one of them starts howling, that’s the one you hit. Don’t Call Me Shirley is howling, that’s all.
Regards,
Shodan