Dude, Olberman and Maddow are so MEAN. Surely that counts the same as calling for revolution and presidential assassination.
-Joe
No; I’m saying that I don’t let the crazies influence what I believe or how I vote or what I think. On two issues that are very important to me – ending the drug war, and educational freedom – I’d hazard to guess there are higher numbers of crazies on my side than on the other. So what? I am not going to change my opinion because X% of those who agree with me on the issue are nuts, while only Y% of the other side is crazy. (Well … unless X is like 90%. Then I might get nervous. But we’re nowhere near that point).
I’ve read quite a few dishonest and stupid arguments in favor of drug legalization. Should I reconsider my view for that reason, ignoring my own (eminitely logical, natch) reasons?
Is this a common occurence at Palin rallies? I doubt it very much. (If you’ve been to multiple Palin rallies you can fight my ignorance.) It sounds like what one or two assholes might say, just like there were assholes who wished death on Bush at anti-war rallies.
No, I am not. Actually, I’m not even sure what this means.
I don’t know why you keep repeating this. I already said they weren’t equivalent in my last post. They advocate very different policies.
If you’re talking about a difference in the tenor of their rhetoric, I’d acknowledge it if I saw it. I don’t. I see Hannity and Limbaugh misleading and spinning, and I see Maddow and Krugman doing the same. I’ve seen Bush=Nazi posters and Obama=Nazi posters. How I’m supposed to quantify that, I have no idea; if you do, you tell me. A while back someone said that nobody had compared Bush to Hitler … I gave links to dozens of instances of people doing exactly that, and he basically said “Well, they do it to Obama more.”
I suppose you could produce a poll where, say, 18% of registered Republicans say "Obama is intentionally trying to destroy America,"and then compare that with how many registered Democrats said in 2005 that “Bush is intentionally trying to destroy America,” and see if that is less than 18%. Maybe it would be; but it wouldn’t be 0%, and it’d be closer to 18% than zero. And at that point, you’re basically reduced to saying “Well, our side has *marginally fewer *idiots.”
Sorry, that doesn’t impress me. Like I said, if 90% of the crazies were on one side, I might start being concerned. When it’s 60/40, 70/30 … meh. I think what I think, and screw the crazies.
Of course, the other way to go is to say that “well, they had reason to think Bush was trying to ruin the country,” or that “Bush really was like Hitler” or that when Rush Limbaugh says “I hope Obama fails” it’s an objectively bad thing, but when someone said they hoped Bush failed, well, they were justified. And at that point … well, we’re pretty much done there.
Careful, buddy. All I’m saying. Just watch it.
I’d rather voice my views with an intent to improving both parties, and write officials of both parties, and support candidates of either party that I like. I don’t need to pick a side to do any of that. I’m not grousing about “the other side” because to me they’re both “the other side.”
Charles Johnson (the guy who runs LGF) was always a lefty AFAIK. It was only after 9/11 that he hammered on the importance of dealing with fundamentalist Islam. That was his primary intersection with the Right. I only started paying attention to the site when they outed the Dan Rather docs as being fake.
In the last year or so, if anyone posted ideas Charles didn’t like, their comment would be deleted and they’d be banned. There are pages of discussions that got turned into massive delete lists. That’s when the blogs started delisting him. If you don’t allow open comments because you don’t like the ideas, I don’t think you belong in the whole online thing.
According to the Wikipedia article on LGF, well, here’s the pull-quote:
Andrew Sullivan is “breaking away” as well and has an even bigger list.
Look, I didn’t mean MEAN like in average. I mean mean as in vicious.
And if you want to discuss your insane lust for her, well, I suspect it’d be kind of like doing a 14 year-old boy.*
-Joe
*disclaimer - I have no actual experience involving sex with Ms. Maddow nor 14 year-old boys
How many times is “ok” to you? Clearly Palin was amping the crowds up.
The Secret Service seems to have dispelledthe whole “kill him” thing.
Recognizing that something has happened before and will happen again whether or not I like it is not the same as saying I approve. Of course you knew that; you just wanted to get a nasty little smear in. Classy.
Of course she amps people up. That’s what politicians do. I have never seen anything that indicates she was fomenting violence; nor am I persuaded by those on the right that Obama or Pelosi are to blame for Kenneth Gladney getting beat up. Politicians get the crowds going. There’s always a few assholes who go too far.
America has a long history of people freaking out over politics (what was the Boston Tea Party but an organized political riot?) as well as a long history of people freaking out with the fear that other people are freaking out.
It’s not, as others have already pointed out. Only if you could establish with fair-minded reason and evidence that both parties equally suck might you have the beginnings of a hint of a point.
But since you insist that Obama is “worse” than Bush and his Administration, who:
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Ignored very emphatic warnings from the Clinton Administration to watch out for Osama bin Laden and al Queda (I saw a TV interview in which the Bush Admin transition official in charge of military and terrorism openly mocked the Clinton Admin’s adamance about bin Laden and al Queda),
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Told us to shop instead of join together and sacrifice after 9/11,
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Unambiguously lied us into a horrific and utterly unjustified war,
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Stole desperately needed troops from Afghanistan to do it and still sent 250,000 too few troops with very little practical regard for their safety (the Dems pushed far harder to protect them),
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Canceled the scheduled implementation of excellent plans developed over many years to head off looting; provide law-enforcement and law courts for ordinary Iraqi citizens; provide electricity and sewage and other vital infrastructure maintenance and improvements; and generally keep the ordinary Iraqi citizens on our side (see Fiasco),
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Violated the Constitution and our treaty obligations several times and revoked some basic civil rights openly and some basic civil rights secretly,
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Issued the largest number of “signing statements” excusing himself from heeding the Constitution and the Legislature in history,
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Committed treason in revealing the secret identity of a covert CIA agent in retaliation for her husband’s fully factual debunking of the transparently fraudulent “Niger letter” (which didn’t even list the name of the country correctly!),
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Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum
… fair-minded reason and evidence is not something it would appear that you would likely be able to provide us in that regard.
A credible multi-party or coalition system is not going to appear in this country for the foreseeable future, and no wishful thinking will change that. Hence, no ballots will appear that offer any real alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans.
So: say and believe what you like, but one party respects the Constitution and the Founder’s ideals considerably more than the other. And it’s not at all difficult to determine which party that is…
Hey, you asked! You had written:
and SenorBeef responded to your disingenuous assertion of effective moral equivalence by asking:
To which you replied:
In answer to which Whack-a-Mole simply asked
So you are the one who is evading the issue, and you are the one throwing around the insults. Who’s being “classy” now?
More to the point, SenorBeef’s root question is important and eminently fair, and that is not seriously diminished by the the Secret Service’s rejection of the claim in question given the fact that SenorBeef carefully phrased his question as he did. For whether or not people at Palin’s rallies actually shouted “kill him!” or not, there is excellent justification for holding that such cries would not be at all “out of place” at Right-winger’s rallies.
Hell, I attended a mere Halloween party here in Michigan hosted by and almost exclusively attended by gays and lesbians at which a large majority of them ended up screaming “Assassinate Obama! Kill the Socialist!” over and over again. And they were emphatically not joking or kidding. I later learned that the social “leader” and most of the members of that group were conservative Republicans. Conservative Republican gays who also bragged of illegally selling pot. Conservative Republican gays who also bragged of illegally selling pot and who openly called for the political murder of the President of the United States.
I couldn’t believe my ears, but I should have, and right away, too. It was stupid of me to be surprised at what modern American Right-wingers believe and want and what violence they’re willing to gleefully endorse in order to get it. When I asked some of them to define the term “socialist” (since they obviously were far too stupid to know what they were talking about), their only response was to shout the same slogan louder and louder: “Assassinate Obama! Kill the Socialist!”
Authoritarianism, ignorance, and poor cognitive functioning are by far the most salient hallmarks of everyday modern conservatism (see my post here, for a bit more info).
And let’s not forget the hate-fueled assassinate-the-death-panel-communist-socialist-fascist-monster-Obama town hall meetings this summer, complete with attendees carrying loaded semi-automatic weapons. Would you care to cite press reports of liberals carrying loaded semi-automatic weapons to anti-Bush meetings, please? Face it, if any Democrat had dared do such a thing, you’d have ripped them apart piece by piece and then have sent whatever remained to a secret CIA torture prison for the rest of time.
Your views essentially putting both parties into effective moral equivalence have no rational credibility. None.
Organized? It was nothing of the sort. Even the despicable Sam Adams tried to stop them. And it is telling that many of these ostensible “patriots” donned Indian costume in order to disguise their identities.
Oh, did I say your views lacked all rational credibility? Silly me! Now that you’ve cited that bastion of clear, critical, rational thinking, Reason magazine, I’ll have to retract that now, yes?
p.s.: Please don’t neglect or evade my previous post either, okay?
Reason magazine isn’t exactly radical or fringe. If you think it is, that says more about you than about Reason. I can think of fewer publications that are more dispassionate while still articulating a certain ideology than Reason. Contrast that to almost any left-wing publication, which starts resorting to emotional appeals by the time you get to page 2.
Posting the Andrew Sullivan link:
I can’t claim the same courage as these folks because I’ve always been fickle in partisan terms. To have supported Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Dole and Bush and Kerry and Obama suggests I never had a party to quit. I think that may be because I wasn’t born here. I have no deep loyalty to either American party in my bones or family or background, and admire presidents from both parties. My partisanship remains solely British - I’m a loyal Tory. But my attachment to the Anglo-American conservative political tradition, as I understand it, is real and deep and the result of sincere reflection on the world as I see it. And I want that tradition to survive because I believe it is a vital complement to liberalism in sustaining the genius and wonder of the modern West.
For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name “conservative” in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I’m not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in “The Conservative Soul”).
Now I know it started as a design blog, ‘little green footballs’ makes a lot more sense. It’s the result of pilling on a 1970s couch or afghan or bathrobe.
Sorry, no. If you offer me a choice of a punch in the face or a kick in the balls, I’m gonna say “neither” and fight both.
I’m not gonna debate umpteen points with you, dude. I probably agree with some of the things you’re pissed off at Bush for. He was a bad President, and I do not agree with many things he did. I did not vote for him.
I think any thinking person can see the difference between saying that they doubt something is common, and saying that it is OK.
So the fact that it didn’t happen is immaterial … it *could *have happened!
Not that I doubt it did/does happen. It did happen that people carried “kill him” type signs at anti-Bush rallies. I don’t conclude that most Democrats/liberals share that sentiment, nor that they think it is OK (though by the logic you’re using here, I suppose you might). I conclude that political marches/rallies bring out the assholes and extremists.
I hereby condemn that group of conservative Republican homosexuals from Michigan. Happy?
They dum, you smrt. lolz.
You might want to look for a list of all the actual violence from those meetings – not rhetoric, but who actually ended up getting whacked in the head.
You’re cute when you’re unhinged.
Dude, I sleep, mmkay? Not answering a post for two whole hours at four in the morning isn’t “evading.”
I think talking about myself much more in this thread is a hijack. The thread is about LGF (a blog I stopped reading in 2004 or so because it was … too far-right for my tastes. Imagine.) If you want to make this about me, take it to the pit. I don’t think it’ll work out well for you, but one never knows.
I’ll reiterate a question towards you earlier in the thread: Are your views amenable to new facts? Could the Republican or Democrat party do something so out of line or so good that it would change your view of how they were equivelant? If so, what sort of thing are we talking about? If not, then you’re “they’re all the same!” view is dogma rather than analytical.