When I began reading the OP, my impression was that this thread was going to grow into something like this:
OP: Oh boy, That GWB is some character alright. He said blah blah blah…
Respondent: Woo-hoo that was a good one alright. But how about that Gore fellow? He said yadda yadda yadda…
OP’er (or another respondent): Ha ha! That’s a good one! But how about when (insert candidate of choice) said this…
And so on.
I don’t know why of either of the candidates even entertain the barrage of silly questions the press keeps asking them. This morning on one of those political news channels it was something about Bush naming his favorite childhood books. Then they showed that all of the books he mentioned were published when GWB was in his late teens to late 20’s. I would have stood & cheered if Bush had responded with impunity to whoever asked him that ridiculous question and said “what the hell does THAT have to do with the price of tea in China??”
Seems like the media has some special slippery slope department that specializes in coming up with oddball questions totally unrelated to running the country just to see if they can catch a candidate saying something ratings-worthy.
Sorry, pl; I only meant to ridicule Bush because he’s ridiculous, not because he’s a threat to my hero Gore. Gore is not my hero.
The U.S. political machinery has chewed up and spit out only two electable candidates for the American voter to choose from. Being forced by this process to choose which one is perhaps a degree less horrifying does not constitute, to my cynical mind, a defense of that candidate: just a slightly less vehement rejection.
My “defense” of Gore was merely to point out the lengths to which bushbabies will go to try to deflect attention from the bankruptcy of their own default hero. I’m sorry if my cynicism comes off as hypocrisy.
I read it, pl. And though it crystallizes what I don’t like about Gore, it doesn’t make me like Bush any more.
I guess I’m just cynical enough to see Gore’s faults as givens, with the political system we seem so eager as voters to criticize but so reluctant as a nation to change. Maybe, yes, more so, but he’s capable of winning the game we insist our president must play. Bush, on the other hand, would just founder and fold in any system.
Fair enough, lissener. I understand where you’re coming from, I just disagree with you. I think Al Gore is fundamentally dishonest in a way that should practically preclude him from being President at all.
And again, call me cynical, but I don’t think he’s at all unique. My reluctant decision to vote for him is because (well, besides the fact that his stated policies are more in line with my own leanings) the best thing his detractors can find to say against him translates, in my cynical lexicon, to “He really knows how to play by the rules we set up for him.”
And this cynicism is not, of course, unique: the reason the Republican’s impeachment/attempted coup of Clinton backfired was because the average American knew that most of the men in Washington had to be the ripest hypocrits to attack Clinton for indulging in the aphrodisiac of political power. How many professional politicians do you are pure as the driven snow? Well, I–along with, apparently, most of the public–don’t believe there are too many of them.
Granted, I see this cynicism as a huge, huge, HUGE problem. But until we change the relationship between cash and political office, it’s not going away.
Okay, if Gore is to be attacked as dishonest and a chronic liar for using phony anecdotes to “personalize” a political point, may I be allowed to mention Bush’s banana oil story about the little old lady in the Texas panhandle who told him to “ask the people for their votes” ?
Bush’s handlers swiped that one from Tip O’Neill, who told it about a little old lady in Boston. And he probably stole it from William Henry Harrison.
Okay, so here’s a question for all the partisans here. If Al Gore was the more conservative candidate, and Bush the more liberal, who would you support then? (I would go with Gore).
[Very Anal Mode]
Well, I can’t think of two places that are not America and not overseas from the United States. Are you thinking of Mexico and Canada? Last time I checked a map they were indeed part of the (North) American continent.
[/Very Anal Mode]
Well, Izzy, seeing as how you’ve never seen a gun big enough to make me vote for a Republican, I’d vote for whoever was the more liberal of the available candidates. But then if Robin Williams painted himself blue and offered me three wishes, my first would be to put an honest-to-god committed liberal in the White House.
But see, if Dubya were a liberal, none of this would be an issue, because you see liberal=intelligent, and he wouldn’t say things like “subliminablblblbbbbpphhht.”
I’m going to need an icy shower, after being exposed to liberal thought for this length of time. I feel so … dirty.
Perhaps Bush isn’t the world’s greatest thinker or most eloquent person. I’m more interested in whether he believes the money I earn is mine; and not the government’s to put into the ineffective, politically correct program-of-the-month.
So lissener, like a good little liberal, is quick to dismiss Gore lying with his arthritis drug anecdote as an “attempt to personalize and simplify a real situation.”
OK, got it.
That must have been what Gore was also doing when he:
Claimed at a union rally that his mother sang him to sleep as a baby with a particular union theme song. The song was written when he was 27.
Claimed that Bush wants to “cut Medicare,” when what he proposes is to cut the rate of growth from like 18 percent to 12 percent.
Claimed that Bush agreed with Newt Gingrich’s position of letting Medicare “wither on the vine.” Gingrich made that quote in reference to a bureaucratic office that Medicare funds currently have to be funneled through, making the process of getting funds to the elderly slower and more cumbersome. Any enemy of bureaucracy must be an enemy to a Democrat, though.
Grossly overstated his role in creation of the Internet and U.S. strategic oil reserves.
Waffled on whether he plans to attempt to regulate Hollywood upon becoming president.
I guess I’d rather be represented by a non-genius than a liar who floats like a scrap of paper with whatever way the political breezes blow him. (No Clinton-esque pun intended, there.)
[quote]
I’ll agree that Gore made a political miscalculation in using a fictional example to illustrate a financial fact. I do the same thing all the time, but I would hope to know better if I were running the presidential campaign gauntlet.
That said, it wasn’t a mistake made out of stoopidity, it was an (ill-advised) attempt to personalize and simplify a real situation. He had more faith in the public than he should have had.
Bushbabies can’t defend Dubya. All they can do is attack gore. It’s like I said, like “debating” evolution with a creationist. You ask them to defend creationism, and all they can do is try to find flaws in evolution.
In either case–bushism or creationism–there’s nothing there to defend.
Bushbabies can’t defend Dubya? Isn’t this like the pot calling the kettle black. If I’m not mistaken, the OP was an attack on Bush, rather than praise of Prince Albore. It’s so nice of you to assume the role of supreme arbiter of all that’s fair and right.
Yes, the OP was an attack on Bush, so I was hoping a bushbaby would rush to his rescue, but no, they just try to distract the dingoes by attacking Gore.
I don’t mind, mind you, attacks on Gore. I’m just giggling that not even bushies have anything good to say about the shrub.
Funny. I could have swore what I said was, whether a presidential candidate is highly eloquent and in the top one-tenth of a percent in intelligence isn’t nearly as important as whether he’s honest and has principles upon which he stands.
A little bit more substance there, I think, than merely an attack on Gore.
Ready to debate yet, lissener? Guess you never were.
Shame. I’d love to see someone defend liberal Democratic politics on a board that has the mission of fighting ignorance.