Well, elucidator, i must take some of the blame for derailing your thread, but i also plead mitigating circumstances. My first contribution was in the spirit of your OP, but when danaeet alia decided to make it a debate instead of a fun-fest, i had to respond in kind.
Thanks for the kind words. I did consider breaking that piece of news earlier on, but i figured that if the xenophobes don’t know where you’re from then they actually have to pay attention to the content of what you say. But i’m glad you’ve outed me now.
I was born in Canada to an English mother and a Hungarian father, and i grew up in Australia. Don’t know exactly what Danae might make of that. No doubt, in her mind, i’ll be relegated to threads on hockey, the royal family, Imre Nagy, and Fosters. The fact that i’m doing a Ph.D. in United States History might redeem me somewhat, except that it places me in the centre of the vast liberal media and academic conspiracy that’s strangling America.
Oh, sod off, you ignorant, arrogant asshole. If you’ll look around a little before flinging your poo at us like a bored monkey, you’ll find that I’m perfectly willing to engage in reasoned debates with conservatives on this board, when they know how to write. I used to work as a writing tutor, and I was a damned good one, judging from student feedback.
Occasionally, though, some asshole would bring me something like what you’d just written, one step up from handing me a sheet of paper they’d just wiped their ass on. When that happened, I’d hand it right the fuck back to them and tell them that they needed to spend a little more time on revising and organizing their thoughts before I’d take a look at it.
Well, not really. I never did that, because I was being paid to be a tutor. But guess what? I’m not being paid to read your verbal vomit. Clean it up, organize it, or shut the hell up, you smarmy incoherent orangutan.
I was actually going to reply to Danae, about her(?) ability to claim that ritual denunciations are “facts” and that Bush still doesn’t have to accept responsibility for anything, but y’all have done a much more thorough job of that already.
Danae, I asked you a question, and given that you seemed to have used a lot of time and energy responding to the various issues raised in this thread, I am wondering why you avoided my question.
Are foreign questions not as worthy to be answered as American ones?
In the case that you simply overlooked my question in my previous post, I’ll ask it again, this time in bold so it will not be overlooked.
Why should we in Australia bash our own leaders? What have they done to deserve it?
I mean, you must know, since you recommended that we “go bash [our] own leaders, [we] have lots to do there with our distracting yourself with [YOURS].”
Oh boy oh boy oh boy! Will it be the washer and dryer set or the new 4WD?
I would just like to point out that the italicised words are not spelling mistakes.
Crocofiles are ferocious documents found in the beaurocracy of the Northern Territory and I believe in many parts of South America and Africa. They are big, scary, amphibious stacks of paper liable to take a bite out of anyone who comes too close. The public servant Steve Irwin the Crocofile Hunter is famous for the recklessness he shows when confronted by such fearsome paperwork.
Time Wrestling is the struggle to control and pin down things from a different time period. Hence, time wrestling crocofiles is the wrangling of vicious paperwork that will be filled out at a future time.
My point being that it is quite a challenge to do this while similtaneously bashing world leaders, but we manage.
In fairness, it would probably take you less time to read all of his past posts than it would for him to read that one dissertation on the evils of Bill Clinton that you wrote.
You can agree or disagree with his policies and public persona, but even his detractors have to admit that George W. Bush is a friggin’ Boy Scout. In the two years he has been in office, there has not been a whiff of scandal coming from the Oval Office and its immediate surroundings.
Sure, Bush’s opponents have tried to make policy decsions sounds like scandals or point to some long-past, unfounded claim of potential wrong doing. For example, Bush’s pro-business policies are not themselves scandals. Neither is the Administration’s decision to exclude certain NGOs from the decision-making process. What law is violated by excluding Sierra Club from the Energy Task Force? Bush receiving LEGAL campaign contributions from Enron, Ken Lay, and the rest are not scandals. Bush admits to having had a drinking problem and having had a checkered past, but he stopped drinking, straightened out and “got his act together.”
Contrast this with the Clinton White House. It seems every week there was some petty, small-minded lapse in ethical conduct: unreported diplomatic “gifts,” giving contracts to “friends” without receiving other, competitive bids; reviewing tax returns of political opponents; knowingly receiving campaign contributions from foreign nationals; soliciting campaign contributions from government property. I am not going to address the whole “Monica Lewinski thing” that was a lapse of judgement and NOT a violation of the law.
This does not mean I support President Bush or the potential conflict in Iraq. I just think that despite his faults, George W. Bush tries to uphold the honor of the Presidency of the United States of America. In contrast, Bill Clinton was a Mayor Quimby-type: a small person who treated being Head of State as being mayor of Spittleville, Arkansas. “Yee Haw. I’m President. Give my brother the town dog shit collection contract while I get a hummer from the town floozie.”
we must have a different definition of ‘whiff of a scandal’.
the whole Enron thing threatened to blow up in his face, Cheaney’s refusal to list the names of people w/whom he met to hammer out the national energy policy etc. those, IMHO would most certainly qualify as ‘whiffs of scandal’.
Seymour Hersh on Perle’s “whiff of a scandal”, for just one example. Bond, you may think that business “coincidences of interest” are not scandalous, but over here we aren’t as inclined to think so.
I’m surprised that anyone would equate the degree of reporting of corruption with the degree of its actual occurrence and severity.