Two things come to mind:
- Does Jeri look young enough to be Fred’s daughter, or young enough to be his granddaughter?
- Of those separated-at-birth twins, Fred Thompson and Peter Angelos, which looks uglier?
Pray revise your hopes. Attractiveness can lead to reproduction.
First of all, I’d be surprised if the first Mrs. Kerry’s depression wasn’t a contributing factor in their seperation. But that’s neither here nor there. I disagree with you, though, there is something superficially similar in their actions. Both of the divorced a sick wife and married an heiress. The comparison just falls apart if you look at it more closely.
But, you know, he’s using a rhetorical device. If you can get your opponent to concede to a point, and then show it contradicts an earlier position, you can be convincing. It doesn’t have to be true or logically valid to be effective. I can win an argument by misrepresenting your position just as easily as I can by debating you honestly…probably more easily, in fact.
Hey, she’s a coyote-date compared to Elizabeth Kucinich! 
I call it Shodanizing. If you say Gore has good ideas Shodan says Clinton lied. If you say McCain has been a womanizer and left his wife in a horrible way, the response is Kerry did it, Never thread responsive . It is dishonest . It is not debate.
Clearly not all of y’all are liberal.
This, on the other hand, is clearly true. It’s somewhat self-defeating, though: if you’re so bad at being right, your methods for determining whether you’re right are likely to be similarly flawed.
Scylla, welcome back, butterfly! I wonder if I’m the only nerd out there flashing on slake moths.
Daniel
Shayna clearly showed that Shodan was dead wrong and yet he still insisted he was factually correct.
I don’t know how to interpret that except as intentional dishonesty. The exchange with **RT ** was just bullshit word games that also demonstrated he has little or no desire for an honest debate and an exchange of opinions and information.
He’s not the only one on this board that does that kind of thing. My recommendation, just ignore his posts when he starts this crap. It’s a colossal waste of time to try and have an honest discussion with someone so enamored of his own opinions and so determined to call something “winning”. Why try logic on someone who employees illogical bullshit on such a regular basis.
It can be frustrating but at some point it’s just very boring. Save yourself the wasted effort and ignore him and talk to others. He’ll have a lot less success in his thread shitting.
Years ago I had a similar encounter with him, wherein he accused me of dishonest paraphrasing, and in the course of doing so paraphrased me dishonestly in a manner far worse (this according to conservatives and liberals–no bias there) than anything I could be accused of. At first I was pissed off at him, but by the end of it the whole thing was hilarious. He can be interesting in nonpolitical threads, but I think it’s been about eight years since I’ve seen him say anything surprising, interesting, or thought-provoking in a political thread. He is his own worst caricature.
Daniel
I like ol’ Shodan - always have. 
Friend elucidator has at various times referred to us both as ‘conservative gadflies’ who ‘delight in pricking the hypocrisies of the left’.
I won’t argue at this particular time as to whether or not Shodan has erred in his comments regarding RTF, but IMO many of his so-called drive-by postings are intended as elucidator has described.
No harm in doing so. The problem is when someone becomes so delighted by their own supposed hypocrisy-pricking instincts that they act the prick all the time, whether there’s hypocrisy or not–or, worse, when the hypocrisy is their own entirely.
Speaking truth to power is honorable. Speaking bullshit to posters, not so much.
Daniel
I see now that my obscure sarcasm can have sad consequences for a tender naif innocent of irony. I feel a bit like I felt when I had to explain to my son that Chuck Norris is gay.
Shodan, here is what you said in the thread in question:
First up, he didn’t say he could never support a military man who dumped his first wife when she was having health problems for a rich hieress.
Second, *she * was the one who kicked him out, presumably because he was sleeping around.
Third, “when she (i.e. Kerry’s wife) was having health problems” strongly suggests that she had been fine, suddenly came down with some serious disease or major accident, and he bailed out. As been mentioned before, not only had she had depression for quite a long time, but she was the one requesting the separation.
And, of course, it wasn’t for Heinz, because he never laid eyes on her untl two years after the divorce.
You remind me of a man heavily flirting with another man’s wife, but walking that very thin line between real compliments and outright sexual requests. If he’s caught on it, he can say “point out a single thing I said that was sexual in nature, or where I touched her in a sexual way,” and the accuser will have to back down.
You constructed your sentence very carefully so as to imply that which you must surely know was not true. In politics, it’s known as plausible deniability. I’ve noticed over the years that you are very good at this.
I imagine your milage will vary, LHoD, but most of the time when I’ve seen Shodan acting the prick, it’s to the posters around here who are generally pretty ‘prickish’ to just about anyone with a conservative point of view. I’ve seen some **Sam Stone ** quality posts by Shodan from time to time when someone engages him honestly and in a respectful mien.
Me? A tender naif?
Aww, how cute.
Still, I must point out that your remarks were taken out of their original context; no sarcasm or [attempt at] irony was lost on me, I can assure you, mon frere.
Yeah, yeah, you guys are picked on, outnumbered, the board conservative blues, not good enough for BB King, maybe Deaf Lemon Pledge…
Wasn’t always like that, used to be lots of tighty righty on the Boards, like vast herds of bewilderbeest, darkening the plain. And nasty! Lord God, for nasty, snide in carload lots, avalanches of snotty. Then they’d all cluster around, giving each other high fives. And rude as a dose of camel clap.
And as time went on, and showed the utter crapitude of thier opinions, and their predictions…well, you know how some guys can be, guys who hold a grudge, kinda guys who just can’t resist rubbing their noses in it. (Not naming any names here, or anything, just some guys that are like that, ya know?)
Or come running in shrieking and foaming that they just heard on Fox Gnaws how they’ve found the stables for Saddam’s thermonuclear anthrax unicorns of Death, and we mocked them with perfect aplomb because we knew…we knew…that within a couple of hours they’d be sputtering lame excuses for their own cupidity.
Darwin, SA. Simple Darwinism, only those immune to embarrassment survived…Shodan, The Nameless One, and a few others, only those utterly immune to shame or self-doubt remained.
Not our fault they were full of shit, they stuffed themselves, we didn’t have anything to do with it. Sure, we pointed it out, but that’s fighting ignorance! Well, sort of. Close enough.
Shodan may post thoughtfully from time to time, but it really has fuck-all to do with how anyone else’s behavior. Witness: he takes ridiculous snipes just as any other resident jackass might, and shows no remorse over shitting in this thread again and again, spoiling any chance he had at posting constructively. I visit this board because it’s great that any viewpoint on the sociopolitical spectrum will be honestly debated. However, Shodan commonly offers so little to the discussion he’s barely worthy of a footnote in the annals of the SDMB.
It’s just completely fucking baffling to me that he’s never realized why it’s so goddamn frustrating to talk to him or simply digest the garbage he emits. I mean, really, just look at his behavior in that whole fucking thread. Something on the order of 50% of the lines of text he posts are his goddamn signature. I’m amazed he goes fully 3 posts before insulting “liberals” and making the most incredibly unintentionally ironic post ever:
It’s like he’s almost acknowledging that he took a big steamy shit all over the thread, but not quite. The thread started out calmly and rationally, then he puked in the pudding, and nobody wanted to eat it. Surprise! Shodan had no reason whatsoever to post as uselessly as he did, but he’s Shodan! He requires no reason, nor defense, nor rationale - merely 6 tons of straw and a few dozen cattle (you know, to shit on things for him, get it?).
It’s hard to believe in his sincerity, when he says stuff like:
I suppose he could sincerely be playing Opposite Day here, but if he can be that fluent at turning the truth inside out, he’s got to know what he’s doing to be able to do so.
Shodan is a troll. I’m open to arguments to the contrary, but I think they’d have to be of the variety that his game-playing doesn’t rise to the level of trollery. It’s inconceivable to me that he’s got no idea what he’s doing.
I agree that the proper remedy is DNFTT, and will endeavor to do so in the future.
Feel free to go back to the thread that inspired this one, and explain to me what ‘prickish’ lefty behavior towards him justified his trollish semantic games.
So have I. But even under those circumstances, those posts are a needle in a haystack.
Take the prior thread. The post in which he twisted my words so gratuitously was his first post in the thread. One can hardly say, “Oh, if you lefties hadn’t jumped on him so, he might not have done that.” We hadn’t said anything to him before that, because he hadn’t even been there.
But your point is well taken, and it’s why I haven’t used my Ignore list in some time. Because no matter who I put on it, sure enough, eventually they’ll raise a point in a GD thread that really needs to be responded to by an honest debater on the other side. It’s happened to me in threads I’ve started, that I’ve ‘overlooked’ such a post by a poster who has a ratio of hundreds of garbage posts per worthwhile post, and of course you can’t say why you missed it, since you can’t even hint at who’s on your Ignore list. (I guess it’s OK to say I used to have people on it before, nobody’s on it now, nobody’s been on it for a good while, and nobody is likely to be on it anytime soon. If saying even that much is too much, then mods, my apologies.)
Been meaning to post something along these lines for awhile, and this seems to be as good a spot as any.
He’s no worse than Elvis, though, now is he?
You’ve been hanging with the wrong crowd and lost the grasp of evolution. It’s altogether different from metamorphosis. Gone wicked mixed metaphor.