As I’ve been watching the latest polls, and the plummeting favorable-view ratings of Le Prez, and the suddenly heartwarming results of the nigh-inevitable Kerry/Bush matchup, I’ve started to think there might be a light at the end of the tunnel after all. And I was beginning to formulate an idea for a thread, the barest sketch of a post that would go up in late October if the polls were promising an ouster of the corrupt gang that’s taken the reins of our nation.
The title was going to be this, more or less: “Lefties: Please restrain your urge to gloat if we win.”
While I don’t have the body of the message written, the upshot was going to be something to the effect that we know the O’Reillys and the Hannitys and the Limbaughs and of course the God Damn Bushes would be gloating up a storm if they were victorious, and therefore we need to avoid falling into the same trap and display graciousness in victory. Aside from serving as an extremely satisfying demonstration of moral superiority :D, it would go a long way toward healing the divisions in this country that the so-called Uniter has been assigning his footsoldiers to carve while his own shining eyes are carefully averted. In other words: Be better.
But now I see that I’ve been pre-empted. The OP represents a promise to gloat. He’ll be flying the gloat flag. He’s shooting for a medal in the Gloat Olympics. He’ll fire up the engines on the U.S.S. Gloat and sail his ass out of Smug Harbor. He’s going to walk into Starbucks and order a triple puffed-up gloatoccino with an extra shot of all-fat swagger, and then he’s going to throw it in my face.
But you know what?
If Bush loses, and we get back to the business of running the country instead of funneling our wealth to the oligarchy to the exclusion of all else (as compared to the exclusion of much else, the way it usually is), I’m still not going to gloat. I refuse. Won’t do it. I will be very, very, very happy, but you won’t get a word of that idiotically hateful “IN YOUR FACE!” playground juvenalia from me.
I’m disappointed, Bricker. I thought you were better than this.
(don’t usually post ‘me too posts’ but now that the field must be more than 10 characters, I’m also obligated to post that I don’t usually post ‘me too’ posts).
me too.
And now you know better.
I am tired, tired of all of y’all–
Pubbies . . .
Lefties . . .
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All y’all should shut the fuck up right now and be Americans! That’s right, win or lose, we all have to live together after the election.
Is it not possible that we can disagree politically and still respect each other? i don;t think that people are evil for voting for Bush. Scylla and Elucidator are both honorable men who want the best for America and its citizens, and neither one wishes to disenfranchise or harm his opponent.
I’m voting against Bush because I think he’s a bad president, but that doesn’t eman that I must hate his supporters. I work in the building that houses the Bush campaign headquarters, and I share an elevator with GOP staff every morning. They don’t have venom-dripping fangs or blood-dipped claws; thet’re perfectly nice people who are, I think mistaken in their political views, but still decent enough folks.
Could we stop saying All Pubbies eat Muslim babies and All democrats are Al
qaeda sympathizers and just learn to disagree peacefully? Every great political leader I admire–Gandhi, Dr. King, Aung San Suu Kyi–has eschewed hatred for the moral jujitsu of peaceful confrontation and respect for their enemies.
Yes, yes. I’ll be gloatier than Gloaty Gloaterson, from the Land of Gloatstinia.
Look, I’ll admit (indeed, HAVE admitted) to giving vent to a childish desire to vent. But there was ample provocation. There are threads here accusing me of being a racist, of being a bigot, of being a homophobe. There are threads bashing Bush with irrational hatred, and they’ve multiplied. In the past week, the smug superiority of people who fall all over themselves to agree with how awful Bush is have eclipsed anything seen here previously.
I have always acknowledged that there is a case to be made against alm ost any of Bush’s policies… but that there is also a reasonable case to be made for almost any of them. Sure, I am convinced I’m right about my general support of the President, but I’m never said the folks that disagree are evil, or heaped scorn upon them, until this week.
Sure, this thread wasn’t my proudest moment. I acknowledge that.
I’ll buy that, Bricker. But surely the way to defeat it is to identify it and stand above it. “I will not dignify that with a response” is always a powerful argument.
Following with “this page’s” theme, I’d be happy to wager you a bottle of ice wine against a Bush victory, except I’m not convinced Bush will lose. I’m only convinced it’s too early to declare a winner.
I don’t know who Bricker is but I do recognize a gratuitous attempt to bait others.
Here’s my guarantee: when the election is over there will still be assholes posting in the SDMB and enough brown-nosed accomplices to give them the impression that they are cute and intelligent.
It would be no surprise that there are more idiots voting in America than intelligent people. And no surprise that we’ll have four more years to look at that beady-eyed dimwit with his screwed up mouth and knitted brow trying to look like he is actually thinking. Thanks in advance to all you fucking idiots who will vote for him.
Well guys, it was a close election, but Bush lost just I predicted he would.
Perhaps we can point to the very high voter turnout among energized Democrats in the electorate.
Perhaps we can point to general apathy amongst Republican voters who weren’t motivated to go out and vote for a president who used a GOP majority in congress to pass a massive entitlement bill and bring about unpopular immigration reform (to which Latino voters were apparently indifferent, so they voted for Kerry’s class-warfare populism anyways.)
Perhaps in some close states, like Florida or my own ideologically diverse state of Missouri, the balance finally tilted just enough when right-libertarians like myself realized voting GOP wasn’t worth it anymore just to fend off the liberals, whereas Greens finally decided voting Kerry to fend off Bush was worth it to them.
We all should have seen this coming months ago. All Kerry had to do was keep the blue states, which was easy and we all should have known it (though New Mexico was in doubt for awhile), plus add one decent sized red state to his column. Missouri, Ohio, Florida and Virginia were all on the edge of going Democrat and Kerry only needed to get one of them.
Now, here in November of 2004, it is kind of strange to see Bricker talking so confidently about yesterday’s election results and yet be so wrong. It’s like watching a postmodernist professor trying to alter reality through words. Such a sad spectacle
October 21st, 2009: I told you guys we should have nuked those alien spacecraft out of orbit the minute we saw them, but noooooooooo, you guys just had to welcome them as peaceful enlightened beings. Uh oh, I see Overseer Grimlock walking this way, I better not let him catch a human using the communication networks, there’s no telling what he might do. Oh shi
Actually there is an advantage towards democrats in the Electoral college. If you look at this electoral map you’ll see that Al Gore won all of the “safe” democratic states. Also you will notice that GWB won all of the swing states. GWB has to win almost all of the swing states to win and the Dem only needs on or so to win. That doesn’t sound fair to me but that’s the way it is I suppose.
I was all getting ready to quote this and thank you, gobear, but Jonathan beat me to the punch.
Bricker, I wish you wouldn’t post stuff like this, for the same reason that I don’t post wildly inflammatory anti-Christian stuff. I used to love being absurdly blasphemous in an effort to get the goats of hellfire-and-brimstone proselytizers, but at some point, I realized that my obnoxiousness toward them was necessarily obnoxious toward good, decent, compassionate Christians as well. When you gloat like this, you don’t just vent at the highly partisan ranters; you also vent at folks who try to approach politics in a respectful, reasoned manner.
Bush may win in November. I’m not sure, and I’m not much of a better, so I didn’t take you up on the wager. But he may lose, too, and surely you can see that. This thread makes you come across as scarcely better than Shodan, with his bizarre simian mockeries and japes about how out of touch liberals are.
Except I notice that his mockeries have been strangely muted lately…
You’d have much more credibility with that statement if you had made a practice of showing us what those “reasonable cases” were. That’s been pretty difficult, though, and it isn’t because of your own powers of persuasion. After this thread, you’ve made your own task even more difficult.
That statement, too, would have more credibility if you had made a practice of showing how your “general support” follows from the policies and principles you say you believe in.
But as it is, there’s a stench of *ex post facto * coming from your direction now.
You may have seen it, but that still doesn’t mean you’ve been right. One tends to see what one wants to see, especially if it’s self-absolving.
As an example, I’ve been making a reasonable case against the death penalty, which Bush favors, during my entire career on this board, most recently in Tell me why he shouldn’t die, you candy-asses..
Fair enough, but that counts against him. If you add up everything he’s done, and everything you think is important, complete with weighting factors, it is not at all clear based on your contributions to this board how you can still rank him on top. Without an obvious reasoning process to explain your support of Bush, we almost inevitably have to infer our own reasons to explain it. If what you’re being accused or even questioned about is unsavory, it’s partly your own doing for failing or refusing to spread any other explanation. I doubt you’re more than just a rationalizer and are really a homophobe or a bigot, but you do support a party that tolerates those things, and without clearly discussing it at all except by OP’s like this.
Don’t act like it, or act like you tolerate it unthoughtfully, and you won’t be thought ill of for it. That’s all.
Well, I trust have have adequately explained the homophobe business away – indeed, the originally leveller of that charge, Homebrew, has now graciously conceded that he does not believe me to be a homophobe, after extended conversations in the thread concerning same-sex marriage.
Now what? I suppose I need to work a bit in Evil Captor’s “Republicans Are Racists” thread? Carefully drawing out from him what specific policies he claims are racist, and then formulating a defense that shows that support for those policies is NOT necessarily racist?
Is there some database we can go to keep score? After all, newly-joining members of the board won’t have access to these threads. Perhaps I can get a laminated card from some representative showing I’ve been cleared of bigotry charges in the past, and so make it unnecessary to be put through the wringer again?
I don’t want to cast any doubt on you, Bricker. I know you to be a man of good conscience and I respect you.
The problem you’re expressing is that one is known by the company one keeps.
And sadly, reasonable people in both parties are defined by the extremists who get all the ink.
Is there any doubt that some percentage of Republicans are whack-job racists and homophobes? No.
Is there any doubt that some percentage of Democrats are whack-job socialists and free-speech-killing PC-types? No.
But those stereotypes are what gets applied to the larger universe of Republicans and Democrats because they make the most noise.
It would be simple for everyone to say “I realize that the other party has some crazy extremists but the majority are reasonable people”. But it’s not something most people want to do.
Congratulations. It’s posts like this one that abound on these boards and make me want to actually vote for that fucker Bush, just to have the satisfaction of hearing the ultra lefties wail some more. I was hoping for a viable candidate, although I’m pretty much resigned at this point to holding my nose and voting for Dukakis, but the constant barrage of the “Bush eats babies for breakfast” bullshit that has lately flooded almost every thread on the SDMB may yet make me change my mind.
