Interesting thread, Dinsdale, but you missed a golden opportunity. This thread should have been called,
“Brrrrrrriiiiickerrrrr, come out and plaaaaayyyyy!!” <clink, clink, clink>
Or maybe not.
Well, I’m sure not inviting you to my next birthday party, then.
:rolleyes: Not remotely. I have no particular inside insight or information. I do, however, work for an outfit that interacts, tangentially and sometimes directly, with DoJ.
Don’t know how I missed that one.
I think TDS is generally hilarious.
Well, my post did - more than “remotely” - reflect my interpretation - which is what I plainly acknowledged was all it was.
If you are a fraction of the attorney you represent yourself as being, you are well aware that one’s words and actions will be interpreted various ways by various audience members. This is especially the case concerning a controversial matter. An intelligent attorney intentionally chooses his words and actions with an awareness of the multiple ways in which they might be interpreted. Subsequent claims of surprise and innocence in response to a reasonably foreseeable reaction suggests to me either incompetence in the initial act, or disingenuity in the subsequently proclaimed surprise.
I don’t understand why you point out your professional relations with DOJ. I’m not sure it would matter one way or another for everyone to know how many US Attys’ offices I’ve been in contact with this morning, and practically every day of my professional life.
(An appreciation of TDS is probably on a very short list of things Bricker and I agree on! Don’t care for Colbert, tho.)
I’m going to go out on a limb and try to guess what Bricker is trying to tell us between the lines.
At first he wanted to see more evidence before he called shenanigans.
Now he sees more evidence. It doesn’t look good but he doesn’t want to screw himself professionally with the DOJ, so it he thinks he better keep his mouth shut for now.
There may come a point where the facts become so damning that it will no longer matter if he comments on it publicly.
I don’t see it as weaselling. I doubt he’d get in trouble for defending the DOJ, so I’m interpreting Rick’s posts as telling us in semaphor that he doesn’t like what’s going on but he doesn’t want to say it out loud yet. Maybe I’m wrong and he still thinks everything is hunky dory. More likely he’s just hoping some kind of mitigating evidence will come out to make things look a little less insidious.
In any case, I can understand why he wouldn’t want to risk any personal or professional discomfort IRL by posting a little too frankly on an internet message board.
So the DOJ has somebody read this board, *and * knows from his screen name who he really is, *and * even cares? Wow, I didn’t know the Patriot Act went *that * far.
Or it could be that he just doesn’t have the integrity to admit to the rest of us what we all know anyway. Or maybe even to admit it to himself.
He got the call from Rove on monday afternoon. Bricker’s to be the new Attorney General! Naturally he wants to keep it quiet until the old body’s out the door. 
Well, that’s possible too. I’m just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I have to agree with your assessment. I am not a paranoid type myself, but if I would steer clear of this subject if I were Bricker, too, under the circumstances.
Or howzabout “Counselor! Come out, come out wherever you are!”
I’m sure that’s been used around here before. Heck, I recall thinking about using it for something sometime in the past.
Man, I saw Warriors in the vid-store the other day, and was so tempted to inflict it upon my family. But I was pretty confident that doing so would result in yet another round of, “You had us watch that why?”
I think I made the right decision.
Same here. If I think there’s a 0.5% chance of career repercussions for something I post at the SD-freakin’-MB, I’m not making the post. Especially if there’s also a good chance that I’ll be perfectly free to make it in the near future.
Yeah, I kinda was. I was well into writing the post when I realized what you were talknig about; I honestly thought that the on-topic people were still talking about Liberal’s “point” from his first post, and that the “Waco” cheap shot and its reported source was irrelevant silliness.
When I tumbled to the fact that I had been whooshing myself, I puckishly inserted a refrence to David Koresh in my post.
Me too. I have no idea if my employer reads the Dope (“I assume not,” she said as she posted from work), but if there’s a smidge of a chance something I say here could put me crosswise with the people who sign my paycheck, I’m not saying it, period. ISTM that there are pretty obvious legitimate reasons not to say too much about what you do, or say things to piss of your clients, on a message board you know is public, or indeed in/on any public forum. Because what’s you’re defense going to be if you’re wrong? “Well, I thought the chances were pretty remote that what I said would get back to you”?
There’s nothing intellectually dishonest about exercising some discretion.
Discretion would be recognising a discussion that could move into dodgy territory before you make some comment on either side of the debate.
It certainly isn’t making some comment, and then refraining from further comment when your position is challenged.
In other words, if you feel that playing the game might get you into bother, don’t bother getting dressed up for it and then walking away when the opposition gets their chance on the ball.
Particularly when his comment included a demand that Apos “make the case” and he might begin to smell something fishy. Seems like the case was made, or at least substantially well advanced, and he disappeared.
He didn’t say, “Make the case and I will demonstrate discretion by withholding comment.” And the gist of the allegations should have been clear enough at that point for him to perceive any jeopardy he might face for commenting that he should not have demanded that the case be made if he couldn’t respond once it was.
The discretion dog don’t hunt.
Which raises the burning question: what would Bricker’s street gang costume theme be?
Armani three-piece, with a gold “power tie”, accessorized with a briefcase and Blackberry. What else?
These are different things–commenting on a settled matter and snarking on an issue and then not being willing to debate it later are not the same. In any case, I don’t agree. If you should refain from commenting on an unsettled matter, then you should plain old refrain–not snark on an issue and then hide behind your shield of potenial career damage. IMO you should not post to such a thread until it is a settled matter and even then you should restrain your snark since you couldn’t participate fully beforehand.*
However, I’m not you, you’re not me, and we can agree to disagree on this as well as so many other issues. Thank you for your response.
*Was I unnecessarily redundant? Perhaps, but I don’t care.
Ah, yes, that would make him a member of the Law Talking Guys. They got a hell of a tough rep, I hear.