Well, I didn’t see that coming.
Stick with pretending you’re the most calm and rational person in the thread. It’s not worth breaking character for stupid zingers like that.
Now watch him apologize in an effort to get some praise.
How is this analogous to the current situation?
Did the democrats rally around her? Did the democratic base widely embrace her ideas? (And keep in mind that the truther movement is actually at least half conservative - conspiracy theories tend not to be too purely ideological, there are a lot of crazy people that grasp anything with traction)
Were there media outlets dedicating lots of airtime to the her to express her ideas? Even advocating for them?
Were there people on this board willing to give her the benefit of the doubt by contorting themselves into extreme, ridiculous interpretations of her words? Did people say “well I can’t believe a congressman would say that, therefore I think what she meant was that Bush had read The Secret, and he wanted to go to war with Iraq, so he willed the 9/11 attacks out of his subconcious” and think they were making the most reasonable interpretation of her words?
Do you honestly believe that the general democratic support for her and her ideas was roughly equal to the birther movement, the “OMG SOCIALISTS DESTROYING AMERICA!” movement, death panels, “real americans”, etc?
Maybe?
Listen, if a democrat did advocate violent overthrow of the government, it would be a little more of a headscratcher. Why? Because they don’t have violent overthrow of government as a thinly veiled part of their platform. The Republicans have been ramping up the violent imagery and revolutionary rhetoric for years. Their base often talks in terms of taking back their country to the communist traitors. There are entire media outlets dedicated to telling everyone EVERYTHING YOU LOVE ABOUT AMERICA IS BEING DELIBERATELY DESTROYED!!!
And there are an army of apologists, who while not full blown crazies themselves, will refuse to rebuke the crazies amongst them and implicitly support the crazification of their side. This includes you.
So actually yes - in this particular case, it would be harder to accept that a democratic candidate would be referring to Thomas Jefferson’s calls for regular revolutions or second amendment remedies because the republican party as a whole has been trying to skirt the line between inspiring their base with extremist speech and not letting the crazies get too empowered and take over. Sharon Angle is an example of the result of this radicalization. So you can say - without any bias whatsoever - that it’s more plausible that a republican is talking about political assassination or violent revolution than a democrat.
But even if so - even factoring that in - if Nancy Pelosi came out tomorrow saying that someone should assassinate John Boehner, do you think the liberals would be twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to justify that she didn’t really mean it?
Awesome, we only have to go back 50 years. And even then - how widespread was the support for the black panthers? Did they have a lot of congressmen openly sympathetic to their cause? Did they have their own media outlets pushing their agendas? Am I being held guilty of not criticizing them merely because I wasn’t alive and the board wasn’t around then? Is it then assumed that because I’m criticizing the current catering to crazies on the right, that I must’ve supported craziness on the left?
The issue here isn’t just that left-leaning extremists have existed, therefore all is equal - the issue is that they’re accepted, celebrated, and encouraged on the current right. People who should know better are either blatantly advocating this or safely and deniably hinting at advocacy.
It just baffles me that no one seems to have seem the utter radicalization of the right but me. Everyone on the left says “oh the republicans have always been this blatantly evil and crazy”, and everyone on the right says “oh, crazy? What? Quick, look, a leftist blogger said something nasty 10 years ago!”
But it’s the most obvious thing in the world. The crazies have been empowered and radicalized and catered to entirely unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Am I really the only one to have noticed?
You almost seem proud to have alienated me, but why? I’d like to think I’m a pretty fair person on these boards. I have, many times, defended you or in particular defended your intellect, despite disagreeing with you most of the time. It means nothing to you that you’ve gone past the point of even being defensible anymore?
You sound like when I told Starving Artist that people like him were what made me reluctant to ally myself with any sort of conservative movement, and he was proud to have weeded out someone who wasn’t ideologically rigid.
Yes, yes, and yes, at least as much as Sharon Angle was embraced. See, this is the trick you’re using: you point as Sharon as though she’s the completely typical Republican, but shy away from McKinney as though she was the outlier.
But McKinney WON HER ELECTIONS. She was a sitting member of Congress.
If I had brought up Alvin Greene, you’d have a point. Greene was a mumbling idiot, but I agree that Democrats did not embrace him. McKinney was a sitting member of Congress. Yes, Democrats embraced her to the exclusion of other candidates.
Sure there were. There were folks in this board that agreed with the concept that Bush kne about 9/11.
Yes.
Yes, quite the headscratcher.
Abbie Hoffman, Lee Weiner, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Bobby Seale. What the hell do you think “the revolution” was in their minds?
Scratch that head.
Let me guess: history began in 2000, huh?
No, I don’t require you criticize them. I just require that you acknowledge that they existed, and not claim that Democrats have always been sweetness and light.
I think you’re too bent, or dishonest, to see the log in your eye while you quibble about the mote in mine. Your statement proves it: did I suddenly drop IQ points? Of course not. You proudly announce you’ll withold future admissions about my intellect, not because my intellect no longer exists but because you disagree with my political positions. That makes you a whore, a prostitute whose opinion derives not from the truth but from how you might profit in your dealings from your opinion. I’m neither proud nor perturbed to have alienated you; you’ve admitted that what you say comes from a place other than honesty. Frankly, why would I want an endorsement from such a person?
I’m not saying Angle is typical. I’m saying she’s a logical outcome of the idea of embracing the crazies to stoke your support. She absolutely represents the sort of psuedo-libertarian dicks that compose the most vocal parts of the tea party.
It’s true that she lost - but the very fact that this fucking batshit crazy woman had a chance at unseating not only a senator, but the senate majority leader, shows that she wasn’t just some fly by night kook that got 2% of the vote.
Well - she lost the election immediately after she made the comments about Bush and 9/11, right?
I’m leery of using this comparison because the 9/11 stuff is a conspiracy theory and that often stands outside of political issues. Lots of people on both the left and right embrace every conspiracy theory they come across. Conspiracy theorists almost always have motivations outside of pure partisanship.
There are exceptions - say, Vince Foster, for instance, but generally the big stuff like the moon hoax and 9/11 and the general distrust of western medicine all has a pretty broad political base.
With that I ask you - were the people defending the idea that Bush was behind 9/11 the usual reasonable liberal leaning crowd here (your apparently analogues on the left) or the CT nuts?
I became an adult and voted for the first time in 2000, so my personal experience in politics began at that time.
How far back do we need to go to find equvielance? If the democrats were perfect angels for the next 50 years, could you still say “well, in the 1960s, there were some leftist radicals, so the republicans that now want to force sterilization on black people and turn gays into puppy food aren’t any worse”
Tell me, right now, who is the left’s Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin/Sharon Angle/etc? Now you may take the normal apologist line and say “Keith Olberman and John Stewart!” - and this is actually entirely consistent with the cognitive problems in your world view. Just because you can identify people that are on the opposite spectrum does not make them equal. Olberman and Stewart have far more honesty and rationality than Beck/Limbaugh.
What are the left’s current equivelant to birtherism, death panels, and basically “EVERYTHING ABOUT AMERICA YOU LOVE IS BEING DESTROYED BY COMMUNISTS”?
Again, you might identify something held by 1-2% of people and then say welp, all is excused, I found the equivelant! But you’d be completely ignoring the fact that even the presential hopefuls are trying to beat each other to question Obama’s citizenship because they’re actually afraid that taking the sane, rational route will make them unelectable.
I never claimed anything of the sort. I’m saying the republicans right now, in the last few years, cater to crazies by lying, putting everything in apocalyptic terms, encouraging racism and xenophobia in a veiled way, etc.
In what way have I been inconsistent, exactly? Give me a specific example.
You’ve always been a tradeoff between occasionally saying something interesting and otherwise being a completely worthless partisan hack. In the past, I didn’t find the partisan hack part so overwhelming that I couldn’t acknowledge the other stuff. I’ve always talked about your intellect in terms of “you could contribute so much, yet you waste it all being a Baghdad Bob apologist for everything remotely identified with your political affiliation”
But look at the subject of the thread. You are fucking ridiculous. You honestly defended, repeatedly, the idea that when Angle said it’s important that we win this vote, otherwise we’re going to have to look to second amendment remedies - we need to take out Harry Reid - you defended this as her talking about citizens groups banding together to vote (even though her statement itself already said this would be a post-voting remedy) and that “second amendment remedies” had nothing to do with guns, etc.
The shit you said was so fucking ridiculous and over the top that I cannot possibly take what you have to say seriously. I honestly think you’re capable of understanding just how fucking absurd what you said is, but you were unwilling to admit defeat. But knowing you looked ridiculous, you wanted some way to distance yourself from the position, so you latched on to the quote about gun stores and ammo. But that quote had already been posted twice in threads you already read, so you’d already read them. So why did it suddenly enlighten you now? I think it’s because you finally realized just how fucking absurd your position was, so you grasped at the opportunity to say “oh gee, my original interpretation was not only quite reasonable but even likely, but in the face of this further evidence, I guess I can change my mind…”
So I thought that perhaps having realized that your choice of partisanship over intellect or rationality or honesty had lead you so far astray. That it might be a wake up call to return back to sanity or some modicum of objectivity. So when someone else asked you basically if you’d learned anything from the episode, you decided that no, indeed you did not, and got right back on “WELL I’M SURE THE DEMOCRATS DO IT TOO! ALL SIDES ARE EQUAL!” apologist bandwagon. The very fact that we’re having this same apologist/equivelance/bullshit argument for the 5000th time in a thread where your face is completely covered with egg shows to me that you have no willingness whatsoever to choose integrity/honesty/rationality over partisanship. Hence, a lost cause. You’re never going to get better. You’ve chosen very strongly what’s important to you, and what you have to say will not be motivated by honesty and integrity.
“Everything you love about America is being destroyed by corporations/insurance companies/wall street.”
The middle class is being destroyed, you know.
I seriously doubt it went down quite like that. If you’d care to reference the exchange I’d be happy to point out where your interpretation went off the rails.
The difference in the two propositions “America is being destroyed” and “the middle class is being destroyed” is that we can actually look a a graph and show that middle class jobs are being lost and replaced with crap jobs, and that real middle class income has dropped. Whereas in the first assertion, it’s not even clear what is being destroyed. It’s pure rabble rousing.
OK. So she’s a logical outcome of the fringe of a fringe party. Fine. That makes her.. pretty clearly FRINGE.
First, there’s no significance to the fact that Reid was Majority Leader. He still has to win a seat, and if she won, she would not have become Majority Leader. So this “not only a senator, but the senate majority leader” comment is deceptive. How is the majority leader any more or less insulated from electoral defeat?
No, I don’t believe I agree with your claim. Look how lopsided the question is among Republicans, and how even it is among Democrats. That’s not “a pretty broad political base.” That’s a pretty broad political base AMONG DEMOCRATS. It’s a tiny fucking sliver of a base among Republicans.
Which reasonable crowd here do you mean? Der Trihs? Diogenes? ElvisL1ves?
I see I’ve somehow become reasonable agian, though – at least “apparently.”
I think we should use my timeline, since it’s longer and more full of relevant experience.
Yes, I agree – I think both Stewart and Olberman are more reasonable than Beck and Limbaugh.
9-11 Truthers, No-Nukes, Cindy Sheehan, WTO and global trade protesters.
That’s not true. Unless you mean Trump, and the person “hopeful” that Trump becomes president is Trump.
And I’m telling you that during the Bush years, the Left did much the same thing. Care to look back over this board? How many threads were started wondering when Bush would cancel the next election, or when he’d invade Iran?
Look to the previous quote. You’re utterly blind to the irrational excess of the left and hyper-aware of the irrational excess of the right.
Is that the standard?
How quickly are you going to back away from that stanard if you miss a couple of posts in a thread you’re in?
That’s bullshit, and you know it. I’m outnumbered ten to one by you fucking loonies. It’s a bear-baiting contest, with ten dogs around Bricker Bear yapping and baying. Yes, the posts were made, and yes, I missed them.
I have the balls to acknowledge when I’ve made an error – a quality not shared by too many of your enlightened brethern, I might add. I just left a GD thread in which Whack-a-Mole has gently retreated from his mistake with only the barest hint that he was wrong. (An article ‘misled’ him.) I, on the other hand, am willing to say, clearly and unequivocally, “I was very wrong.”
If I’d seen the fucking quote, I’d say so.
I don’t give a fuck what you think.
I’m asking this, because I don’t honestly know–I know she was voted out of office after making crazy statements. Did she make any particularly crazy statements and then get elected at any point in her career?
And God help us, mind you, if Sharon Angle is a “typical Republican”. But this last election cycle, there was a lot of scary that came out of the woodwork from the Republican side in this vein.
Until she started saying crazy things, when she was promptly turned out of office by her own party.
Prior to 9/11, the only crazy thing McKinney said seems to have been that Al Gore didn’t like black people (which may or may not have been crazy).
Bricker was asked what the left’s current equivalents are to birthers and other conspiracy nuts, and his responses include 9-11 Truthers. For support he cites a 2007 poll, taken at a time when 9-11 conspiracy theorizing was relatively popular as an anti-Bush statement. Stupid as that was, it’s subsided markedly since Obama was elected. The people I see going on and on about 9-11 these days do not seem dominated by Democratic affiliation; if anything they’re more far right/Tea Party types.
As for Cindy Sheehan, her five minutes of fame were up quite awhile ago. Anti-nuclear and anti-global trade protestors have their nutty elements, but it’s a stretch to equate them with conspiracy-raving birthers/Truthers or to suggest that they have any significant influence in this country.
SenorBeef’s comment about distrust of “Western” medicine having a broad political base is dead on. Love of woo and the Great Pharma Conspiracy are popular both on the Left and Right (Ron Paul/Libertarian types just lap it up).
Uh-huh. As you claimed (in a thread related to abortion), conservatives think liberals have bad ideas, liberals think conservatives are bad people. :rolleyes:
Too bad you don’t have the smarts to avoid posting the same sort of partisan troll bullshit over and over and over again, and having to apologize over and over and over.
That’s clear enough. What’s sad is that you don’t seem to give much of a crap about anything, except attempting to poke holes in others’ arguments using your Vast Semantic Powers and being a “spoiler” when faced with other people’s reasoned convictions.
Yes, there was, and I don’t for a moment claim that Republicans have been the voices of clam and sane reason in this past election cycle.
Or at all.
What I object to is the claim that Democrats have been the voices of calm and sane reason. Senor Beef says he became an adult in 2000, but seems to have utterly missed the batshit crazy that was directed at Bush.
McKinney was re-elected to Congress in 2004. Her 9-11 remarks were made in 2002. So yes: she made crazy statements and subsequently got relected.
Um… she lost a primary in 2002, yes, but HER OWN PARTY put her back in office in 2004. So I guess HER OWN PARTY decided she wasn’t that crazy?
Does this mean you are conceding that the Democratic Party is, in fact, sympathetic to the Truther movement?
Check out the big brain on Jackmannii!!
Yes, genius, when Bush was in office, the looney left was in fuller voice than they are now. And now, with Obama in office, the looney right is on the ascendancy. This proves not that the the left is becoming more reasonable and the right more unreasonable, but that the occupant of the White House is a lightning rod for loonies. During the Clinton years, we heard how the Clintons staged Vince Foster’s suicide. That shows nothing about intrinsic qualities of the left vs. the right insofar as sanity goes, while Senor B would have us believe that the left is inherently more reasonable.
True.
But you’re proving my point – that idiocy knows no political boundaries.
Yes, and I retracted that claim pretty quickly, didn’t I?
Funny you forgot to mention that. I guess that’s just how the Left rolls, though, huh?
Fair cop. I didn’t realize got back into Congress. Although it seems she was effectively forced out again after accusing the Capitol police of racial profiling.
In any event, I will concede the McKinney is crazy.
Will you concede the Bachmann, Gohmert, et al. add up to far more crazy?
That if we could quantify crazy, Bachmann + Gohmert contain more of it than McKinney?
Yes.
But I see you said ‘et al,’ suggesting that you want to say that all the crazy on the right is greater than all the crazy on the left, or that all the crazy on the part of elected politicians is greater, or something. I don’t know who’s in ‘et al.’
I think the thing that bothers me about it is the current trend for specifically violent crazy from the right, as opposed to the generic crazy from the left. (as you correctly note, this trend was reversed in the 60s). At this point, considering myself a moderate, I find myself unwilling to cast votes for Republicans because of the implications of the specific forms of the craziness of some Republicans.
Is Maxine Waters there? She accused the CIA of being involved in selling crack cocaine to poor black neighborhoods. And she’s a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus ( and current member!)
See, I wonder what happens in your collective minds when you read that.
Do you say, “Yeah, that’s crazy, but you know… not THAT crazy. That’s just the kind of thing the CIA would do!”
How do you manage to make a claim like that into no big deal, so that when you start tallying up instances of crazy on the right and the left, that one doesn’t weigh in much, if at all? What’s the process?