As askeptic suggests, I think you’re cutting them too much slack. I don’t find it particularly plausible that this guy just went rogue with this, especially given the additional facts in the NYT article. But your position is fair and charitable, and we definitely need more of that. So, for the record, I regret the implication of certainty contained in the OP and title.
As an aside, I’d very much like to see the content of their “correction.” What does that even mean? Oops, we didn’t mean to imply that Obama’s election would lead to a second holocaust?
That would be a valid point if I was a known child molester who had been convicted several times and caught on film molesting kids and caught in several bogus denials…
The problem with this is that you have based your conclusion that the GOP would do something like this on past stories that have as much basis as does this one.
This is why I was arguing with Dio over the use of the word “lie” in a thread where he said McCain lied but there wasn’t much evidence for it. And then a week after we had that argument, he said something in another thread about “all of McCain’s lies.” This whole thing is a house of cards that you’ve built where your opinion about the GOP colors your perception of an event which in turn is then used as evidence for that opinion.
Mr. Parker has offered the specific name of a person who claimed responsibility, who worked for the Republican Party of Penn and who said it was authorized. He has met his initial burden of coming forward, and you now have the burden of rejoinder under the traditional rules. You have said the party has disavowed it and fired the guy. Is there anything else to add? Yes, the guy obviously used party computers to email 75,000 people. This was hardly the only stupid thing supposedly authorized by the McCain campaign. At this point, unless there are further things to add, those who are undecided can make up their minds. That’s how non-troll debate works. If you simply say they haven’t met their burden, when they have offered their evidence, you are conceding through incompetence in argumentation.
Actually, the law is “as a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” So the OP was correctly applying the law since uh… <reads rest of thread> WHOEVER sent and approved that message Godwin’d the election by making a comparison to the election of the Nazi party. And the invisible, unspoken corollary does indeed imply (and I’m speaking from experience here) that the side that doesn’t bring up Nazi’s has implicitly won the argument at hand. The precedent for this corollary was probably set here.
I’m wondering about the man-hours, and therefore labor cost, it would have taken to weed through their Pennsylvania voter database and supposedly pull the email addresses of only the Jewish voters. They probably would have needed to cross-reference the names with an external list as, to my knowledge, people don’t give their religious affiliation when registering to vote. It seems this would have taken more than one person, which lends credence to the argument that this was not a rogue act. On the other hand, if this guy did all of this alone, in a clandestine manner, then he probably spent quite a bit of time with this when he should have been doing other things. How could it not have been noticed?
I’m sorry. I just don’t buy that this was done in a vacuum.
No. He is asking to prove a negative, i.e. Prove that the McCain campaign did NOT authorize the email.
How can anyone possibly do that, which is why he responds with the child molester allegation. If I accuse you of X, the burden is on me to prove that you did the activity. My word (and in this case the word of the worker) is not good enough. Otherwise every allegation would be undeniably true.
You cannot be asked, and, in fact, you cannot prove that you did not do X…
One major problem is all these “independent” organizations that can send out whatever shit they feel like. Our local race for the House is particularly ugly, yesterday I received three different mailings (glossy, colorful, postcards) accusing the Democratic candidate of being a socialist, a unionist, and a taxist. None of these cards officially came from the Republican candidate or party, they came from things called “Freedom’s Watch.” The funniest was from the NeurosurgeryPAC, claiming that only the Republican candidate can fix America’s health care system. I cracked up; I’m not sure who the NeurosurgeryPAC is, but I don’t I would trust an organization of neurosurgeons to have the foggiest clue how to “fix” the health care system, except in their own self-interest.
Peter Feldman, the guy who personally went running to the press with the Ashley Todd big-black-man story, who informed the world that the B was for Obama? So…they didn’t fire him over that?