None of these folks hold a candle to Trump and Barr’s breaking of the norms of independence. None of them volunteered the DoJ to be their President’s personal lawyers like Barr has.
Maybe not, but what should we make of your ever increasing list of AGs to pick from your ‘go to’ was the Democrat?
And nobody is arguing that, andy. Sam Stone is obnoxious and on occasion, a PITA, but he has the right of this argument, albeit in a narrow way.
Let’s review, one more time: Escrodinger posted:
And in response Sam provided an example which he states shows that a previous president’s Attorney General was something less than independent:
And instead of rebutting his argument, or conceding that perhaps eschrodinger overstated his case (or perhaps could have edited better), the great majority either claimed Sam Stone was either (1) Purposely defaming the Obama administration or (2) using a Tu Quoque argument.
I will note that NOBODY has argued that eschrodinger was correct in stating that prior Justice Departments to Barr’s would not be a ‘tool of the administration as was very much the norm’. And nobody has rushed to rebut Sam’s Points that prior Justice departments have been at times ‘tools of the administration.’ (and he only went back as far as Kennedy; if you went back to the 19th century…).
Now that said, I concur the Barr was a particularly odious example of an Attorney General and the actions his Department took will be infamous in history, but in the narrow debate as Sam defined it, he has had the better of the argument, IMHO. YMMV.
And go on and keep fighting with Sam, but I’m busy coaching youth soccer tomorrow so I won’t be available for your 30-40 rebuttals…
Press on.
You can make of it what you want. The God’s honest truth is that he immediately came to mind, probably because I am on the right and therefore biased. But I readily and willingly came up with Republican examples as well, because I am trying be fair, and because it made my point even stronger when what I was arguing against was the notion that bias in the Judiciary is somehow a unique Trump phenomen.
In reality, I think everyone participating here knows damned well that complaints about a biased judiciary have been a constant occurence from both Democrats and Republicans for decades. Remember the furor over Janet Reno? Or John Ashcroft?
You could argue that I was wrong, as iandiii did, or that I was showing bias, but what you can’t say is that I was engaging in a tu quoque argument.
For the second time, the Justice Department is not the judiciary you fucking nit wit
I have said it. Many others have too.
It’s easy to say because it is true.
Maybe that coulda been phrased better, but it was clearly in the context of the Hunter Biden story, wherein the Justice Department wasn’t merely acting on behalf of the administration, but was acting on behalf of a political campaign. As bad as Ashcroft was, I don’t recall him engaging in anything like the political activities that Barr has.
It was implied by your tone. Maybe next time put more effort into making your point clear, and less into sounding like a condescending shit head?
No. Fuck you, get your own.
If Stone agrees that the Barr administration is orders of magnitude worse in terms of violating the principle of an independent DoJ than Holder and the other AG’s he mentioned, then I’d have, at most, minor quibbles with what he said. But I doubt he agrees with that.
And iiandyiii, that, my friend, is moving the goalposts. Sam Stone is arguing a narrow point (see eschrodingers post, with my italics) and you want him to ‘certify’ a point that is not part of that point.
FWIW, I agree (as I mentioned above), that Barr’s term will be a period of time pointed too with scorn in the future histories to be written, but if you want Sam to debate some other point (that Barr’s was the worst ever), please make it clear that you are requesting him to make that shift.
Just an old high school debater offering his opinion to a writer whom I respect. Press on.
ISTM that this “narrow point” is equivalent to comparing someone who stomps on a bug to a serial killer and saying “well they both are killers!”.
It looks to me like it seems that way for you and others in this thread because you keep insisting it was a tu quoque. If it were, then it would be a bad and dumb one.
But what he actually said was, in response to the suggestion that it has been “the norm” that the attorney general was super independent and not just a bagman for the president, how about the last one, who was a bagman for the president? That’s not a tu quoque. It’s pointing out a true thing – that attorneys general are not actually independent of the personal and political aims of the president they serve.
It is a fair response to say, for example, that that doesn’t matter, because Bill Barr is one of the top .1% of the most loathsome, corrupt and depraved human beings in the history of the world. This would require observing that the thing he was responding to was, in fact, not a very reasonable assertion, and he was correct to refute it. But nobody said that. Instead, it seems like everyone is pretending he said something dumb that he didn’t say.
It’s a bullshit argument, since other than one or two off-the-cuff statements, there’s no reason to believe Holder wasn’t runnning the DoJ independently from the President.
Bolding mine.
What other AGs have intervened in civil suits, investigated political rivals, or spread conspiracy theories to help their President? Politically? Yes, there’s always a bit of crosstalk. The AG DOES serve at the pleasure of the President. Personally? Fuck no, and get the fuck out with that bullshit.
Shit almighty. You’ve gotten so collectively wadded up about something you’ve decided was a tu quoque that you can’t interpret anything at all as anything else at all. I didn’t say a fucking thing about whether anybody else did any of those things, you donkey. Nothing I said has anything to do with how bad Barr is, except the part where I said how bad Barr is. Which, incidentally, should have been a slight fucking indication of whether or not I was defending Barr. For fuck’s sake.
In any other context than, in this particular instance, it working against you crybabies thinking you were unanimously owning a dumbass conservative, what I said would be completely uncontroversial. Yes, the personal aims of the president. So fucking what.
No, I’m pointing out YOUR bullshit. Again, show me any AG that personally attempted to use the DOJ to defend the President personally, not the office or political goals. YOU made the claim, as shown by the quote.
I don’t give a damn what you think of Barr. You’re making claims that are blatantly false, while also claiming other people are saying things they didn’t say. Back it up or fuck a chicken.
Bullshit.
In the original thread Sam quoted this part @eschrodinger’s post…
And responded thusly…
An extremely straightforward example of a tu quoque.
It wasn’t until post #539 in this thread that Sam quoted eschrodinger using the word norm when he dishonestly quoted him like this and pretended that that was the part he was responding to all along…
He’s a gullible, dishonest, chicken fucking piece of shit. There’s really no other interpretation that fits the facts.
Those defending Sam_Stone here are still basically saying that he was trolling. I suppose eschrodinger could have said, “I hope the Justice Department goes back to normal, pre-Tump levels of occasional malfeasance as opposed to the grotesque level of malfeasance we’ve seen in the Trump administration,” but I think we all understood what he said to mean exactly that. All Sam_Stone did was point out that eschrodinger was speaking in absolutes, which we’re not to do, but isn’t it oh-so-tiring when the debate breaks down to that level? Oh no, eschrodinger didn’t include enough wiggle words in his post. Get 'im!
Good job Sam_Stone, you successfully pointed out that eschrodinger was wrong to suggest that the Justice Department never, ever had any issues with independence prior to Trump. How clumsy of him. And how smart of you to provide an example of “the other side” in order to prove your pedantic point. I wonder if there’s a term for that. Maybe something in Latin.
It seems to me that if we’re granting latitude to eschrodinger for rhetorical overstatement, we could muster some latitude to Sam_Stone for making a tu quoque response that is also a poor rhetorical device used in response to correct the original comment. Pointing out an obvious argument fallacy is fun and all, but is it so important that we need to go 15 rounds of yes-it-is-no-it-isn’t? Point being, I think both of these posters deserve latitude in this particular case. Jumping all over Sam_Stone because Barr and the entire Trump administration are orders of magnitude worse than those that precede it is an intellectually lightweight way to get in cheap shots against a poster many of us disagree with on many socio-political issues.
Jumping all over disingenuous or delusional posters is one of the primary purposes of the Pit!
And I’ve done more than my fair share. But it seems more interesting to attack dumb thinking rather go round and round with tu-quoque-or-not-tu-quoque. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed an escalation in pedantry here that surpasses even the usual SDMB levels. That’s saying something.