Of course you ignored every single thing I wrote that was critical of Democratic corruption. Hug your labels. Loudly proclaim your martyrdom.
Republican corruption apparently deserves a free pass. No, it deserves applause and respect, damnit, because this is AMERICA, home to god-fearing patriots! Pointing out inconvenient truths is downright hateful because decent people just let little white lies slip on by without comment. That kind of behavior is just rude and people with integrity won’t stand for it in politics. Just look at Karl Rove. And maverick Johnny McCain, so outraged at being swiftboated he refused to shake hands with Shrub. Oops. Wrong election. Now Maverick Johhny, iron man of his word, realized campaign smears were fine and honorable tactics but only hateful liberals make a big thing out of a man changing his mind. Liberals are so rigid and spiteful that way.
Alas. You poor victimized schmuck. And Bricker, the horror, the horror. All he wants to do is pass laws that force his religious beliefs onto everyone else and a chance to convince us he’s right. Is that soooo much to ask from a decent, stand-up guy who hates governmental interference in the lives of citizens, the People, damnit, his flock? Er, just people. Converts-to-be. But still ones living by his religious rules, baby. He’ll take the sinning out of this Republic by law, for its own good. WHY are people so ungrateful about that?
You, Starving Artist. All you want is for the world to go back to better days, the Fifties, erase a mere half-century, to a halcyon time before liberal influence destroyed everything that was decent in society. You just want to live in a kinder, more civil society. A principled Republican one, where Shrub’s 27% approval rating really means the majority of Americas are either indifferent or actually like him, deep down. So they don’t, you know, actually disapprove because that’s just harsh and hateful; you know, like liberals.
Welcome to la-la land, spiritual home of neocons everywhere. Delusion welcome but not required. Opportunists and religious nuts, the Actually Pretty Small Tent is right this way. Practice your attack-then-cry-victim before entering. Remember: when in doubt, just lie like a motherfucker.
You miss my point. As when you attempted to stretch an US Weekly cover to indict the entirety of the media into a left wing cabal, you are stretching the actions of a few to cover the entirety of the opposing political side.
Hey, hendo, you know what? I got bitten by a dog this summer. A big one. A German Shepherd. Twice. One of the bites left a bleeding wound on my leg, through my jeans, about four inches long.
You know what I did?
Well, first of all I didn’t scream and yell and cuss and stamp my feet at his owners like a little titty-baby. And I didn’t come here to whine and cry and show photos of the bite in an effort to win sympathy for my poor widdle self and approval for my childish behavior.
No, I yelled at the dog and made a threatening gesture sufficient to make it let go and back off, and I yelled at its owners (or their children actually, who were playing in the front yard of the house next to one I was visiting, to get their parents. I explained calmly and in a friendly but stern manner that their dog had bitten me and that they’d better keep it locked in the back yard before someone really got hurt.
Needless to say, the panic evident in their eyes was palbable. It was obvious they had visions of their dog being hauled off to the pound and killed, and an expensive lawsuit as they tried to keep me from owning their house and other belongings.
I told them not to worry about it, the dog was likely protecting their kids, and I went on about my business.
So I hope you won’t mind if I take your view on my intelligence with just the tiniest grain of salt.
I’m another one stuck in the middle between the two warring factions of Dem and Repub. I have noticed this from SOME members of both parties over the last 48 years or so. Some people are just like that. Everybody is not. I think middle-of-the-road independents notice this more than other people do. I mean, we notice that both sides include people who act that way.
Now, if you keep this up I’m gonna have to call you a bald-faced liar, and I don’t want to do that because for some reason going back several years, I kind of like you.
But the fact of the matter is I did no such thing, and I’ve said so clearly when either you or some other obfuscator made the same accusation in another thread.
I used the US cover as an illustration of the type of media bias I had already described previously in the thread. It was EVIDENCE, an EXAMPLE of the type of thing I was talking about.
That you and others resort to mischaracterizations and lies about what I said is ample evidence to me that you lack substantive rebuttal.
(And now, I truly am out of here. Don’t make me come back again. :D)
Let’s let that be a discussion for the other thread. In this thread, you focused on the irrelevant portion of my post instead of the relevant. You’re broad brushing. You’re focusing on the actions of a looney few and letting them be your definition while ignoring the just as looney few of your particular side.
ETA: If you choose to return to the thread about the media in the pit or the linked thread in Great Debates, we’ll pick up that discussion there.
As for my opinion on your intelligence, i’m not surprised that you take my opinion about it with a grain of salt. The truly stupid, like you, are usually oblivious to the fact of their own stupidity.
I agree, that was the best way you could have behaved in that situation. But you could be Forrest Gump stupid and still arrive at the same conclusion, because your actions came from your character, not your intelligence. For example, you could have gotten pissed, called Animal Control, and had the dog destroyed. This would be a spiteful thing to do, but it wouldn’t be stupid. It would make you a dick, not a dumbass. Or you could have recognized that you have a good cause for a lawsuit, lawyered up, and sued the pants off of them, even though the actual hurt inflicted was negligible. This would make you greedy, and dishonest, but it wouldn’t make you dumb. Arguably, one could argue that you were dumb for not doing that, as you passed up the opportunity to advance yourself for little effort on your own behalf. It’s good that you didn’t, of course, but the point is, the smart thing and the right thing are not always the same thing, and doing one is not evidence that you are the other.
I’m sorry, but… really? Nonchalance over these kind of incidents?
I don’t know the whole story, but don’t you think that the dog’s repeated attacks warranted a bit more of … action? Unless you were actually trespassing, the dog showed it’s a danger to those humans who merely pass in front of it. The owners showed they haven’t got control over it. So: either the dog is dangerous or the owners are negligent.
Maybe it won’t really hurt you, but there is a big chance it will harm someone in the long run.
If I were in your situation, I probably wouldn’t let it be.
I believe that character and intelligence have more than a passing acquaintance. Without intelligence, one lacks capacity to build character. Besides, I think Forest Gump would have been somewhat confused, hurt, and uncertain as to how to proceed, but who knows? We’re talking about a fictional character anyway.
Having said that, however, I’m secure enough in the intelligence that I was blessed with to be unmoved by the insults of the likes of mhendo, who I find to be a thoroughly reprehensible person on many levels. After all, I can drive cars, find my way home, enjoy fine liquor and appreciate beautiful women. That’s good enough for me.
Neither political party represents me. I don’t much trust either one of them.
I quite like some conservatives. I hadn’t thought about it but Miller may be right about them being paleoconservative. (?) Hmmm. They’d no sooner ask your religion than they would what you do in bed. Dead serious. They’d be flat-out horrified. Both are deeply none-of-my-business territory, strictly off limits, both socially and politically. Not prudes but a strong sense of privacy. That may be a strength and a weakness. I’ll have to ponder that some.
Truth in advertising, all my friends are moderates in their respective parties, and they run higher to Democrats. They all vent with me about the reeking state corruption.
I’ve been furious for years. Shrub’s last election tipped it for me nationally and the rot in Illinois just drags on forever. I’m sick as hell of corrupt officials and yeah, I’m contemptuous of people who keep them in power, using ludicrous ‘philosophical’ excuses to justify it. If a cockroach crawls across your floor, you stomp on it. If a politician whores himself, you throw the bum out. If he/she’s from your party, run a better one next time. A philosophical opponent (and horse-trader) is better than corrupt or incompetent jerks stinking elected offices.
I swear I don’t understand why that’s so hard to grasp. Why the hell do political parties hang on tightly to corrupt assholes? Sure, some of them probably know where a lot of bodies are buried but they can still be inexorably finessed out. The jerks always end up being exposed then the shit hits the fan. Pitching out trash isn’t radical, it’s damned common sense.
Deliberately voting for trash? Awful behavior. It’s just a bad, antisocial thing to do, and excuses cut no mustard. I’m not talking about ‘moral’ flaps about pregnant teenagers or blowjobs. Not-my-business territory. But proven corruption and/or incompetence? People who give power to the corrupt are part of the corruption. Shit sticks.
You bet I have ‘anger issues’ lately. I’ve been running on about 4 hours sleep a night for weeks, desperately trying to find money that isn’t there in a budget that got slashed. The corrupt assholes in Washington and Springfield, IL (a.k.a. Chicago annex) made a total fuckup of the economy and squandered everything, just threw it away. It’s all trickled right down, baby. Tell me not to be angry if I have to look good people in the face and tell them their jobs are gone. Tell me not to be angry when they’re stunned and disbelieving and ask me how they’ll be able to keep their homes. Tell me not to be angry if I have to slash services to the public because we just plain don’t have enough people to run the place. Then tell me not to be angry with the venal, arrogant assholes who pissed away prosperity. As Ken Burns quoted about the Confederacy, “Died of a theory.”
Just don’t ask me to ignore the truth, distort reality or develop amnesia in the political game.
I was at the house next door on roughly a weekly basis for a couple of months after that and the dog was fenced in the back yard with a large BEWARE OF DOG sign on the gate. I never saw it again.
I did, and I’m glad. I didn’t have those little kids’ dog killed, the people penned it up, and all was well after that.
Another example of the benefits of thinking these things through and not reacting out of emotion occurred many years ago when my house was broken into while I was asleep. I suddenly woke up and in the dim light from the entryway lamp I saw a guy go creeping by my open bedroom door. Needless to say, this was disturbing. One wonders if he’s the only one, whether more are elsewhere in the house, what he’s gonna do, etc.
I was working an additional part-time job as a security officer and had a gun, but it was hanging, holstered and snapped in, in a closed closet several steps from my bed. There was also a Wild West style gun lying on the dresser near where he passed by. It was unloaded and disabled and if he had picked it up, the cylinder where the bullets go would have remained on the dresser.
Long story short, over a period of twenty minutes or so, he roamed the house and came into my bedroom several times. Each time he did, he bent over me, looking all around the bed for some reason. I was squinting my eyes to watch what he was doing and at one point I remember thinking that he was probably as scared as I was, and I had to stifle myself from chuckling over the vision of my sitting up suddenly and shouting “BOO!” I could see him in wide-eyed surprise and panic, flying backward and crashing into my chest-of-drawers. A form of hysteria, perhaps, but there you are.
Anyway, he for some reason didn’t seem all that threatening. He was unarmed, never had a weapon of any kind in his hands, and totally ignored the gun lying on the dresser just inside the bedroom door.
So I did nothing but wait for him to leave.
After twenty minutes or so, I began to get sleepy believe it or not. :eek: So I decided the time had come to try to get to my gun and apprehend the miscreant. I got to the closet and opened it quietly enough, but almost instantly when I unsnapped the holster he hit the front door and was gone.
There was a family living next door that consisted of an elderly couple, a redheaded guy in his thirties, and a pretty fourteen-year-old girl and two little red-headed boys. I had gone searching the neighborhood for the intruder and when I returned the the guy in his thirties was out in the yard looking into my house (all the lights were on by this time). I had shined my flashlight at him when I first saw him and noticed he had blood on his forearm. The intruder had gained entrance by breaking a large window in the front room and I thought that was rather suspicious to say the least. He claimed to have been up anyway working on a lawnmower or something and that was how he cut himself. He said he was in the yard because he wondered why all the lights were on.
Long story short again, fingerprints on a piece of the broken glass revealed him to be the culprit. As he was in jail awaiting trial, the elderly couple came to see me. They explained that he had fallen off a truck when he was in the military in Korea and had never been the same since. They said they were sure he meant no harm and that their attorney told them that if I would just tell the truth about his behavior (the prosecutor wanted to go all out and throw the book at the guy because there had been other instances of someone breaking into women’s homes and sniffing/stealing their underwear; the women couldn’t identify him and a search warrant revealed none of their belongings) the judge would likely go easy on him and send him to a facility for mental treatment. So I told the truth - that I’d never felt particularly threatened by this guy.
The judge sent him to a mental facility for a year, and after that time he was back home. He and I would wave to each other as we came and went.
Now, imagine what would have happened if I’d gotten to my gun and shot and killed the guy. First of all, the cops would have treated me very differently I’m sure, and quite reasonably suspected that I had intentionally murdered him for some reason, and even worse, every time his kids were around and I left the house, they would know there goes the guy that killed their father.
So, not flying off the handle and using one’s intelligence to assess the level of threat and actions one should take can pay off bigtime in not doing things you’re sorry for later.
