Thanks Lib, I was wondering… 
I was hoping you would weigh in on the thread so I could decide whether to give you shit.
Some years I like you and some I don’t, but this year I like you, not that you give a shit.
You wouldn’t be related to Der Trihs, would you? And WTF does all this have to do with anything, anyway? In the first place, Gates is hardly giving it all away; secondly, what he is giving away (or more rightly, what he is putting to work) is money that he planned all along to give away once his career peaked…and he’s been saying he would do so for years; thirdly, the money that he is putting to work helping people and/or to fund scientific and/or medical research is money that he decided to put to work there only after careful study and consideration.
Maines, on the other hand, shot her mouth off and lost millions and she continues to shoot her mouth off and lose millions more. Her name does not belong in the same sentence, paragraph, or even page with intelligent, disciplined and responsible people like Bill Gates. Think of all the help Maines could have given “poor folks”, and “sick black ones at that”, had she not been so stupid, and had she been as charitable and forward-thinking and compassionate as Bill Gates.
Right on Starving Artist! But we won’t get any slack because Toby is a war-monger :rolleyes:
If she was “pandering” it was to let smart and enlightened people know that she/the band knew the score, that the war was a sham and Bush was a fuckhead, but I don’t think it was that calculated. Hell, millions of us knew that then, she wasn’t implying anything to us that we didn’t already know.
Since you’re a brain-damaged right-winger you’ll never watch Shut Up and Sing, but they show the “incident” and it’s nothing like right-wing assholes portrayed. It was said just as a quick little “btw” aside, and quickly forgotten. It was the “Free” Republic, I believe, that started a campaign to call attention to it. Then the morons piled on. Just like you still are.
She never lied about what she said (and she never lied about what the T-shirt meant, she even says it on camera). The only problem I had with her is that she apologised to the fuckhead.
I’m sure she’d appreciate the compliment.
I’ve seen Shut up and sing, and that doesn’t make Natalie Maines any less of an idiot. What is your fucking point? She cost her outfit millions of bucks. So she said Bush is a moron and the war sucks. Many people agree. And?
As I asked you earlier, do you go to work and scream “Bush is a moron”?
Fine and altruistic sentiments. Would you be willing to lose your job over it?
It’s fine to stand for what you believe in. But is it worth losing your ass over a point many prople already agree with? Politics aside, why take yourself down over it? WE GET IT ALREADY!
Maines did nothing to advance her cause.
Sometimes your beliefs are worth more than money, and they all had enough money to survive on and then some. I don’t think this is a matter of free speech, but I do think it’s a matter of standing up for your beliefs.
She never said any such thing. She laughed and joked that she was embarrassed that the president was from Texas. I’m not from Texas but I was (and am) embarrassed that the president is from America.
I’m not a famous millionaire to begin with, but if someone asked me, I’d tell them what I thought. I wouldn’t scream, just like Natalie didn’t scream. It was a quick joke and she laughed in an “ooops” kind of way immediately after.
Btw, I must correct myself. She didn’t call the halfwit a “fuckhead,” she called him a “dumbfuck” and they weren’t watching television, they were reading it. It’d been months since I saw the movie and I just watched the trailer on YouTube and it’s in there (very cleverly edited to cut off).
On preview, Natalie Maines did a lot to advance her “cause” (though it wasn’t a “cause” until moronic assholes started making such a fuss that they were blackballed and got death threats), she let us know that they were smarter than I, for one, had given them credit for. Not that I thought they were dumb, I didn’t think about them at ALL. I knew who they were but they were just a female country group to me. I’m not into country so I never learned anything more. The furor put them on my radar, and while I still am not into their music (except for “Not Ready To Make Nice” which is one of the greatest songs ever), I have the highest respect for all three of them and how they handled the whole thing. That early apology was a slight misstep, but that’s ok. At the time they were sincerely befuddled by the intense reaction.
I’m listening to Travelin Soldier right now,BTW, and tell me where Toby is all over the fucking place being a lapdog for Bush and the fucking war? What? Couldn’t find anything?
Well shit. You know, You can be a patriot and not always agree with current bullshit. The flag outlasts every fucking president. Presidents are people, the flag and patriotism are ideals.
The ideals are why we have Presidents, for better or worse. This country will stumble along way after me and you and Bush or Hillary are long dead. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
I can wear my patriotism on my fucking sleeve any time I want. It doesn’t matter what asshole is in the White House. That’s the whole fucking point. That’s why we don’t have Kings or “Dictator for life”.
I don’t wake up in the morning worshipping ANY President. I am a patriot though, and am going to tell anybody who gives me shit for a flag lapel pin to fuck off, or who gives me shit because I have a flag sticker on my fucking redneck pickup truck.
I have been alive through eight Presidents, some I liked, some I didn’t, but I am not going to say Fuck the US because of a particular administrations fuckups.
I don’t give a flying fuck what it means to you.
Are you talking to the OP? Or me (since I was the last to post)?
Who said Fuck the US? Natalie Maines never said that or intended to mean that.
Edit: Wait, you didn’t think I was saying that when I wrote “FUSA” did you? If so, geez, go suck Starving Artist’s balls. If not, never mind.
F-Fuck
U-cutesy for You (I know, I hate it too)
S-Starving
A-Artist
My apologies. I went off on a generic rant against all this political bullshit on the board in general. I am just sick and fucking tired of this divide. Just mumbling, and sorry again.
I just hate to see Toby brought into it :dubious:
Again, I’m sorry. I am going to bed.
I had thought he was a war-monger, but now I realize he’s just a sack of shit. He had misgivings about the war, and pulled all that shit on someone who opposed it? Because George Bush is smarterer than he is? And now he wants to make sure everyone knows it wasn’t his idea/ He sounds like the sort of man who can be made to do little good, and much evil.
It can be *very * hard not to hate somebody who figured it out before you did, can’t it, Toby? Even more enraging is somebody who was never fooled at all, like you were. Some instead choose to believe they were right all along, but the evidence just hasn’t shown up yet - they choose to look foolish rather than hateful, even though learning and growing is also an available option.
Hey, SA! Here’s another so-called “artist” who spouts off opinions about politics, the war, all that stuff, heck, he even has a whole section of his website devoted to page after page of his arrogant blatherings. The nerve! Who does he think he is, expressing opinions about this stuff instead of just shutting up and sticking to singing?
:mad:
Klaatu, why do you have to take a fucking stance? I care as much about your political opinions as you do George Clooney’s. If it’s reasonable for you to say dumb shit on a message board, it’s reasonable for Maines to say whatever she wants whenever she wants.
I’m not sure how you can say that Keith “is kicking the Dixie Chicks’ ass” these days, either. Taking The Long Way, the latest DC record has gone double platinum since it’s May '06 release, while Keith’s latest album, White Trash With Money has only gone platinum since its April '06 release. Of course, both sales figures are ones the respective artists should be proud of. And in both cases, the sales figures are a decline on each artist’s previous album, but that is a decline prevalent throughout the entire industry. There are lucky to be any major artists selling more than they used to.
One area the Dixie Chicks have lost ground in is amongst actual country music fans, but they have more than made up for that in attracting more mainstream fans. Have a look at Equipoise’s post:
The Dixie Chick plan has been to court the kind of people who will have exactly this type of reaction to their music, and it has paid off for them. Country music is very popular but it is a musical ghetto; it doesn’t cross over to non-country listeners much, and the internal machinations of its culture can seem confusing and ridiculous to non-fans. The Dixie Chicks wanted that crossover dollar, and while they may not have specifically planned to alienate their core audience with the anti-Bush comments, it certainly helped them along in their transition from country act to pop act. The [left wing/mainstream music listener*] idea that the poor persecuted Dixie Chicks are having their career ruined by right wing bigots is as fictional as the [right wing/country music listener*] idea that the mouthy, cowardly Dixie Chicks are facing the deserved consequences of their disrespect. (*Note that these categories are not the same thing, and much of the confusion has resulted because many people think they are.)
Toby Keith gets a lot of flak for his overly-flammatory, excessively aggressive “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” and he deserves a lot of it too. But his detractors tend not to be country music listeners, so they often miss the fact that outside of this song, Keith isn’t so much a fiery demagogue as much as a goofy, happy-go-lucky, all-American nice guy. This passage is pretty accurate:
However, what the Keith-supporters gloss over is that Keith, just like he suspects Fox News of doing, panders to the right to boost sales. Like the Dixie Chicks, he may well sincerely hold his political beliefs, but he is not above exploiting them to put on a bit of a show for the audience he courts.
As far as Natalie Maines goes…she’s cute and she sings. I would most definitely hit that.
The point is that Toby Keith is a slimy suck-up who publicly mocked Maines for (crudely) expressing a sentiment that’s not too far from what he now says are his own beliefs. They both disagree with the war, but he goes out of his way to paint her as a Hussein supporter so he can score points with his redneck fan base.
If he truly felt compelled to reply to her anti-Bush comments, he could have said something like “While I share her doubts about the president’s handling of the war, she was wrong to insult him.”
As for his claim today that he never supported the war, how about this quote from June 22, 2005, after he had returned from USO tour of Iraq:
“Last year when I was over there, I didn’t feel like it was anything we could ever win. But this year … four out of five of the Iraqi people would wave at the choppers (that his group flew around in). Iraqis want our great boys and girls over there. They’re tasting freedom for the first time.”
Sounds pretty supportive to me.
Here’s a link to the full story. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/22/earlyshow/series/summer_concerts/main703408.shtml
Can we have a quote from him that shows that? Something that he’s said about Bush that comes close to what Maines said?
You don’t know much about how entertainers behave, do you? I agree that it would have been better to do that, but the guy is a showman. It’s mind blowing that people can’t understand why even someone who doesn’t support Bush would get upset by another person saying, in front of an overseas audience, that she’s ashamed to be from the same state as the president. To me, that sounded more like a boorish attempt to pander to her audience.
It doesn’t to me. All he said is that he thought we might be able to win. Does one have to say that we will lose in order to prove one’s bona fides as a non-supporter of the war? That’s called supporting the troops even if you didn’t support the war initially.
Yeah, I think that pretty much undercuts anything anyone points to about him not being wholeheartedly for the Iraq war. Maybe he wasn’t. But if so, he sure had a hell of a lot of bad faith for anyone that dared to be against it.
Let’s look at a few things here. There’s a lot more to this than just simple antiwar politics. What we have here is a public and personal pissing match between two singers (started by Natalie Maines, incidentally) and amplified by that weird beast known as country radio.
Some background is necessary here. Both the Dixie Chicks and Toby Keith are creatures of country radio, and owe their tremendous success to airplay on those stations. The Dixie Chicks especially fit this mold, having an act tailor made to attract the primary country listener as it is defined today, namely a woman of early middle age working in a cubicle somewhere.
Country radio doesn’t equal country music, it ought to be noted. These are the same stations that totally ignored Johnny Cash when he was making the most interesting and innovative albums of his career. He didn’t make music the women in the cubicle farms wanted.
I find it interesting that Willie Nelson toured with Dennis Kucinich, and Merle Haggard has been sharply critical of the war, with little negative impact to their careers. In part this is because these men have decades of goodwill and credibility to bank on, especially among “real” country fans, but the greatest part of it is because neither man is getting much airplay anymore. Therefore, listener outrage and the corporate reaction to it can’t hurt them.
Now, Toby Keith is a country radio star, no doubt, but he came to stardom in a way that Willie or Merle could respect - he worked in oil fields in Oklahoma while playing honky-tonks and shopping demo tapes around. His music generally has a kind of blue-collar feel to it that does not seem at all a put-on. What I’ve heard of it, I’ve generally liked, while recognizing that it isn’t novel or revolutionary in the least.
After 9/11, Keith started to play the USO circuit, and this audience heard “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” many times. They were the only ones who did, as Keith had refused for personal reasons to record the song. Only after tremendous applause from the troops and a personal appeal from the Commandant of the Marine Corps did he relent and head to the studio.
After which, of course, Natalie Maines promptly shit all over the song. When Keith fired back, he was just as unsubtle as she was. And when she found herself in trouble with country radio audiences because of some ill-considered remarks, Keith was happy to pile on. The poster he showed at his concerts was a nasty example of this.
Not nice, not subtle. But Oklahoma oil field laborers typically aren’t subtle.
So trying to glean some consistent views or opinions from this mess probably is unwise. This is a personal matter between the two.