Ann Coulter has crossed the line of decency. All humans with a beating heart should be appalled.
It’s not unusual for people to mobilize after a tragedy. Many people, after having lost children or loved ones to sudden death, have gone on to focus their energies on prevention, healing, and public education.…
Article comments
— go to most recent comments76 - Dave Nalle
Thanks for the kind words, Al. I suspect that Red has also not read much else that's posted here on BC, because he's falling into the common trap of thinking that anyone who defends the truth when Bush is involved is automatically some sort of far-right ideologue. If he did even a tiny amount of homework - like through our individual BC pages and the articles we've written - he'd realize that neither you nor I exactly fit his conception of a Bush worshipping bible-thumping rightwinger.
Dave
77 - MCH
Don't you mean, "Thanks, Brother Al..." (?)
78 - Al Barger
MCH, are you quite THAT alienated from the concept of friendliness that you can't stand to see the least hint of it? And you people say that Ann Coulter is hateful.
By the way, being as you're so intent on mocking "Brother Al" you might want to dig this little joint from the archives.
79 - Clavos
So, Al...Is that cartoon a good likeness???
80 - MCH
Actually, Nalle reminds me more of Cousin Eddie...
81 - jack e. jett
ann coulter use to be a man. he lived in new york and did drag shows in the early 90"s. he use to have an affair with star jones before her vagina fell out. then ann picked up and super glued it on her, changed her name then he was a she...and you know the rest........
hey ann take a walk on the media whore side.
star misses you.
jack jett
82 - Al Barger
Clavos, I'd say the caricature was at least vaguely looking like me- circa 1986. I have a few basic campaign pictures of 2004 vintage in the senate campaign archive. Oh, here's the better Al Barger cartoon. It's from the Indy Star.
83 - sr
#81 Jack E Off. Nice job sweetpea. Where you born this way or did you educate your self at the local trade school piss-ant.
84 - Clavos
Al, I liked the caricature from the Star. After looking at a couple of the campaign photos, I'd say it's a pretty good likeness, too.
I'm sorry you didn't beat Bayh. Indianans should be, too.
85 - Noreen
Al~
So I guess, then, that you don't have an insurance policy to benefit those you care about in case of your demise, untimely or otherwise. If any of them are millionaires, perhaps it's because their husbands were smart enough to make sure they had adequate coverage for their loved ones, especially considering that they were all in very potentially lucrative fields of work. And, if you are going to villify those women, then why not ALL of the families of the victims from 9/11, who all shared in various settlements as a result of the terrorist attacks? If we follow your (and Ms. Coulter's) line of thinking, then ANYONE who has received ANY money at all is just as evil as the "Jersey Girls". I also would like to know your thoughts on the other people mentioned by the author of the original blog, John Walsh and Candi Lightner. If we use your scale to grade them, then both of them should be burned at the stake for the ongoing exploitation of the deaths of their children. Both of them are probably millionaires (especially Mr. Walsh), yet I don't see any mention of their indiscretions in Ann Coulter's comments. (Yes, I do know that at least one of the widows, Kristen Breitweiser, has a book coming out in September. Is she any less entitled to tell her story and make money from it than anyone else who has? I can't remember, which producer of United 93 lost a loved one on 9/11? If Ann Coulter can use their tragedy to sell her book, then Mrs. Breitweiser certainly should be entitled to.)
Also, as to my ridiculous comment regarding victim's families, I do agree with you that just being a relative of of victim does not, in and of itself, make someone a righteous person with good intentions. However, since Ms. Coulter was able to make such heinous statements regarding the victim's families, I took a little liberty with my comments as well.
86 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Dear Barger (re #33):
That "A** C******" was, to use the exact medical term "a JOKE". Duh.
Yes, a joke - as in something like a light parody of 19th Century over-polite fiction (when libel and slander were much more prosecutable) with such Edward Bulward-Lyttonesque constructions as "It was on a dark and stormy night in the spring of 1871 that A** C***** first chanced upon the traitorously liberal hamlet of S****-on-the-H*****".
It was also a deliberate joke on my own argument - which has the potential of being oxymoronic. As in saying, "Don't say the word 'tiger'". Which, to make it simple enough for you to grasp without further assistance, requires, well ... saying the word "tiger."
Get it now? Or should I break out the PowerPoint slides?
In the meantime - Great Cthulu we pray unto thee: save us from the eternal fetid dampenings of the compulsively literal.
Though of course, what your real problem is, is this: whenever your side of the aisle tries to work out what our side of the is saying, you compulsively go for the interpretation that most easily supports juvenile ridicule. And why? Because that is the MOST COMFORTABLE view of your opponents’ efforts and capacities.
(Short breather break here while you work up your little screed on how that’s appropriate because “liberals” always operate on the level you WISH they operated on. Done now? Good. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.)
That worldview is functionally akin to Americans in 1941 believing that Japanese air forces were no threat because the Japanese were all myopic glasses-wearing runts. Or, lest I be accused of treason here, like National Socialist true believers being convinced that America’s entry into WWII would have no effect because the soldiers of a “degenerate mongrelized nation” couldn't stand up in battle to the Volk. Or ... or ... or ... History is rife with examples of this behavioral pattern. It is called being a victim of your own propaganda.
Here’s a debating tip: if you JHS lunchroom Catos insist on playing with the adults, learn to play on an adult level. Then, perhaps, something like a dialectic might ensue - instead of these endless juvenile rounds of blog-blather Old Maid.
Of course if you do that, there would be an added bonus for the rest of us - you’d be less boring. Not UN-boring necessarily, but definitely LESS boring.
But, as I hold out little hope for any such movement in the direction of maturity, how about this instead, Barger: next time you have a few bucks to spare, you hie thee down to DullMart and snaffle yourself a sense of humor.
87 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Dear sr (re #42):
You’re conflating a suggestion that the Coultergeist is not worth the gunpowder of a decent argument with a call for censorship. Brilliantly on the mark, oh yeah.
But thank you for taking the time to give us a perfect example of the Rabid Right as victim of its own propaganda once again - in this case the self-comforting straw-man argument that “dem Ol’ Debil Liberals” are always hypocrites on free-speech issues.
88 - Clavos
Mr. Gillick,
It's actually Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
89 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
re J. Leinung's comment (#38) - and, really, re (in general) MUCH of the Rabid Right's commentary throughout this discussion ...
How strange that he missed "any liberals who condemned Churchill" during the uproar; could that be because a liberal condemning Churchill would not have matched JL's comfortable preconceptions? (Again, folks, see my #41 above re the RR's weakness for viewing everything in the world through the distorting lens of their own self-comforting propaganda.)
Allow me cite my direct (and checkable) experience with the Churchill brouhaha ...
I am an alumnus of Hamilton College, that well-known Bill O'Reilly-certified hotbed of trademark "radical liberalism" - there very place that had the temerity to invite Professor C. to speak (on something entirely other than 8/11 issues, originally, BTW).
As you might expect, the resultant outpouring - or, rather, the INpouring - by phone, letter and net to HC was massive. HC took the trouble to post all the comments that came in by email, and did so in two sections: one for comments from alumni, students and students' families; the other from non-affiliated individuals. (See link at the end of this post if you ant to read them for yourself)
Myself, I took the trouble to download ALL the comments from affiliated individuals and parsed them for positions on the issue. Out of over 125 emails, not one that was posted expressed support for or agreement with Professor Churchill's comments on the dead of 9/11. Further, less than 15 expressed support of his speaking at Hamilton even if only on the principle of supporting free and open discussion. The overwhelming majority condemned Prof. Churchill and the college. And of THOSE, those that mentioned free speech (a majority of the majority) invariably brought it up by way of the classic weasel construction "I have always been a firm believer in Free Speech, BUT ..." So much for the RR's vision of lockstep PC liberalism.
Further, even the most casual observation of commentary in the media - mainstream or alternate - made it clear that across the spectrum of "liberal" comment on Churchill this ratio pretty much held.
There are a small lesson or two to be drawn from this. The one immediately pertinent to JL's comment is that there can be no doubt he missed "liberals" condemning Churchill and his remarks simply because he WANTED to miss them. I do not assume a sudden, conscious, willful blindness for just that situation. No, just the usual well-practiced, near-habitual blindness of the true believer. A blindness not so long ago mapped by researchers using advanced MRI - where they demonstrated that in people holding strong political opinions, conservatives literally did not process what they heard that supported liberal positions, and liberals did not process what they heard supporting conservative opinions.
Casual observation of this discussion would suggest that the same ratio of non-processing of complex or subtle concepts holds here on this site as well. A statement like "Well forgive me if I missed any liberals who condemned Churchill at the time but I still don't think there was anywhere near the level of vitriol and hatefulness directed toward him at the time as has been directed at coulter in the past week," is a perfect example. I remember both the specific (I can reference it) and general (YOU can reference it - Google, perhaps) level of vitriol and hatefulness directed at Churchill and at HC. It far outstripped that currently directed at the Coultergeist since her book came out.
In fact, the comparison between there two is ludicrous. Consider, if you will, nothing more than AC's book deals, on-screen appearances and legions of apologists - both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. Much as the rabid Right would like to argue that this sad creature is being trussed up for what the perjurious Justice Thomas was pleased to refer to as a "high-tech lynching", she is not only weathering the storm over her Widows remarks, she is reveling in it, tossing her bright rayon locks artfully in the wind and squealing with Marilyn Monroe-like delight as it blows her dress up.
When the Coultergeist is finally exorcised, it won't be over those remarks. It will come by way of the pumped up plagiarism "scandal" now brewing in the bloodthirsty media - all of it, left and right, tabloid and sober, print, broadcast and net. Once the ball gets rolling on this, as instance after instance of her sloppiness (or, rather the sloppiness of the drones she employs to do her research) is parsed out of her books and columns (and, no doubt her emails at some point) it will not stop till it rolls her under wailing and weeping over her sudden transformation into the victim of a pernicious "liberal conspiracy".
But the real fuel for the upcoming auto-da-fe will be her own raving defenses of herself and pyrrhic assaults on her critics, be they from the right side of the aisle or the other. This is already well on its way to becoming a true Technicolor meltdown, sports fans - don't miss it. Start by tuning in to her current tussle with the New York Post. And look forward to her upcoming tangle with her column's distribution syndicate. How long till they are forced by the publicity to parse, confront and acknowledge the regular instances of duplicated and unattruibuted cut-and-paste paragraphs sprinkled through her writings like raisins in a sour pudding.
Of course as she goes down, the Rabid Right will bewail her "martyrdom" on the altar of what they will be pleased to call "political Correctness" - while at the same time they thrill to this new "proof" of "liberal hypocrisy" on free speech issues. (This despite the fact that no one rational, left or right, has called for suppression or censorship of her writing - or of her remarks past, present or future.)
But the most amusing aspect of this - or the most pathetic, depending on your preconceived position - is that her "plagiarism", while exactly the sort of thing that gets the unwary fraternity pledge a stern warning, a conditional F and a semester setback and do-over in Freshman English, is really of little matter in the real world of what passes for "commentary" in our current climate of demagogic discourse. Are our standards of press originality and rectitude really such that using someone else's press-release boilerplate without attribution is the crime of crimes? Now that our colleges and universities have been sufficiently infantilized by the self-appointed hall-monitors of our culture - left and right - do we have to do it to our once vibrant vitriolic and unashamedly partisan press as well? Busting the Coultergeist for "plagiarism" is the mediaworld equivalent of sending Al Capone to Leavenworth for Tax Evasion. A weak, pathetic, "whatever works" victory.
Flatterers, demagogues and other fraudulents don't get tossed into the fourth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle of Dante's Inferno for failing to footnote - they earn their eternity in the ravine of excrement by lifetimes of hard work and dedication producing the essential material themselves. Let's give the Coultergeist her due, and not impede her on her journey to her chosen ditch.
LINK TO HAMILTON COLLEGE SITE POSTING OF EMAILS ON THE CHURCHILL FIASCO:
90 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Clavos of #88:
Yes. Typo. Snoopy would bite my ankle.
91 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
re my own #89:
MY APOLOGIES, PEOPLE, I mis-alluded. If Geryon drops AC among the flatterers to wade perpetually through the human excrement they spewed in life, it will be in the SECOND ditch of the eighth circle - not the fourth. (For what is demagoguery, after all, if it isn't essentially excessive flattery of the demos?)
Even so, I suspect her stay there will be a relatively short one. Soon she should be promoted (demoted, really, I suppose) to the eighth Bolgia - where she can spend her afterlife among the rest of the corrupted advisors as nothing but a living, speaking tongue of flame, burning eternally.
Or will she end up in the ninth - to be carved, cleaved, beheaded and disemboweled along with the all the other sowers of political discord? What a feast of rewards awaits her! Minos will no doubt ponder long and deeply before he hands down his final ruling on the soul of the Coultergeist.
Ah, Dante, my darling - should you somehow find yourself wandering through OUR tangled woods, would any of this be strange to you? I think not. I doubt if we've come up with even one new thing in the way of debased political discourse since 14th Century Firenze.
92 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Hey, stupid self! THIRTEENTH-century Firenze, NOT 14th. Duh.
93 - sr
j t gillick. Do you think I or anyone on this thread gives a rats ass concerning your Alumnus status at Hamilton College. Should we be impressed with your arrogant pompass ass wannabe intellectual arrogant elites attitude. We just tremble in fear at the awesome power of your intellect. Professor church of the hills is your god jtg. You are the perfect example of the liberal rabid elites. Dont you think j t? Sincerely wish you could have shared some space with me on vacation at the Honi Hillton. Im sure you spend each day flattering yourself and kissing your own arrogant ass. Have a nice day Profeeeeeeeeeeeeessooooooooor. "YIPPIE-KAY-YAY MF.
94 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
re SR #93:
No content whatsoever on the issue(s) under discussion.
As to the question of who gives a rat's ass ... Evidently, SR gives a VERY big one. let's hope that by next post he (she? it?) calms down enough to use time, space and effort more rationally and productively. Note also, people, how out of all I wrote on the AC and WC affairs, SR loses it over the fact that apparently I went to college (and may have read a book?). Someone has issues - BIG issues, apparently - about something other than the subject(s) of this discussion thread.
But that should be apparent to anyone who’s read SR’s previous posts. The sputtering invective starts with the third sentence of the first and continues in that vein, offering little more than more low-rent scatological invective (and shows an amazing obsession with bodily functions and human waste) and the sort of personal attacks on other posters you’d more expect to hear in an argument behind a strip mall tittie bar in Troy, NY. And all that to the complete exclusion of, well, anything resembling facts, arguments or adult reasoning. But then, doesn’t every discussion site gets its share of these frothing rant-and-ravers?; they’re as much a fixed factor of the blogosphere environment as cockroaches in an Austin diner.
SR’s score so far:
Comments - 5; Contributions to discussion - 0.
One interesting thing in SR’s most recent, though - he sudedenly seems to be claiming he was a POW in North Vietnam. As thus:
“Sincerely wish you could have shared some space
with me on vacation at the Honi Hillton”
Hmmmm. You’d think someone who spent time in Hỏa Lò Prison (aka “The Hanoi Hilton”, NOT “the HONI Hilton”) would know its name.
Tell us more about this, SR, - with maybe some convincing details about your honorable service. You wouldn't want us thinking maybe you’re just another one of those fraudulent bottom-feeding forms of life who try and pass themselves off as Viet Vets or ex-POWs, would you? You know, the ones who lie about their service in order to steal the respect and honor due those who DID serve, DID sacrifice, DID suffer for this country. I mean, what would YOU have to say about someone who dishonorably tried to pass himself off as an ex-POW just to gain an edge in a political argument?
DO tell.
Please.
95 - Imhotep
Thanks JTG. This was painful reading until you crossed our transom. I think I hear the rats abandoning their sinking discourse.
96 - Clavos
I think I hear the rats abandoning their sinking discourse.
More likely that's the sound of them trying to slog through all that turgid, Bulwer-Lyttonesque prose.
97 - sr
No surprise. Was to be expected from you jtg. My respect for you O. Your respect for me. O. Now we are equals because we both are a little short in the lofers. Just curious jtg. Do you really believe the comment of your last sentence is valid? Please share with us your true values of valor and self-sacrifice which no doubt are zip. And then you decide to falsely accused me.
Cant help noticing some venom within your comment. Look how much we have in common dipstick. Can just picture you pounding away at your cute little pink keyboard. At least you respected me enought sending some print for my toilet tissue collection. Nothing like a little tweek in the am. Please feel free to send me more of your great idiotic dribble and insights. Would like to share it with my beer drinking buddies at the trailer park watching alien abductions and elvis sightings while we attemp to master our first book. Dick and Jane. Well what did you expect big guy being a cockroach and all. MERRY CHRISTMAS little man.
Sincerely,
sr
98 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Clavos’ score to date: 8 posts.
6 are little more than idle, off-subject blogsplat (60, 73, 79, 84, 88, 96)
----- 2 social hamburger helper
----- 2 cartoon chit-chat
----- 2 on his growing Bullwer-Lytton obsession (Bullwer-Lytton up, dude)
2 with actual content - in which, alas, he goes right off the beam.
Specifically, C. gets it wrong as wrong can be on the odious “Respect For America's Fallen Heroes Act”, He seems to think that RESTRICTED speech is still FREE speech.
Nope. Like “NO means NO”, Mr. C., “FREE” means “FREE” - and nothing else.
Restricted free speech is an oxymoron. Government restrictions on speech are never anything other than an attempt to establish the principle of LICENSING speech. And the issue with licenses is always this: who writes the rules - for what purposes; who enforces the rules - and, again, for what purposes.
Who do you think will be the first person arrested for holding up a sign “God bless Our Fallen Heroes”; within 300 feet of military cemetery?
99 - Clavos
See, you CAN write clearly. You should do that more often, "dude."
You don't have the right to free speech to the extent of infringing on my rights; you can't come into my home and say things that offend me.
You also don't have the right to disrupt my private funeral.
100 - Dave Nalle
Some people just can't get the basic axioms that their rights end where my rights begin.
Dave
101 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Re SR’s #97 (and RE so many of the RR’s posts on this board)
Well, my last sentence in #95 said “Please” - but I’m guessing SR is referring to my raising the issue of those who try to pass themselves off as veterans, or ex-POW’s.
Notice how strenuously he avoids answering the question, or engaging the issue at all. He’s makes no effort whatsoever to support his claim to have been a POW (“Sincerely wish you could have shared some space with me on vacation at the Honi Hillton”). Instead, like the post-abandoning, duty-shirking G W Bush and the draft-dodging Cheney, SR retreats to the well-worn Rovian technique of shoot the messenger - hoping that if he can keep the noise level up no one will notice his evasions.
In this as in every other one of his posts, his technique is to get down to low-rent vilification as quickly as possible. And in the context of HIS posts, that “venom” charge wavers somewhere between pathetic and ludicrous. SR tells us he would enjoy watching a tape of someone else’s loved one dying (#29) then tries to make the issue “venom”. Sigh. Just another keyboard warrior whose idea of rational discourse consists of little more than vomiting forth all the abuse he can muster. As thus (from his posts):
• Arrogant
• Ass
• butts up and heads down on pink camel hair prayer rugs
• did you educate your self at the local trade school
• hope you have the video of your loved one (dying) I would take great pleasure watching it
• idiotic dribble
• Joe dimbucket
• Joe dimbucket with his pink water pistol
• keep on TWEEKING
• kissing your own arrogant ass
• little man
• little wimp dirt bag
• M(other)F(ucker)
• perfect example of the liberal rabid elites
• piss-ant
• pissing all over themselves
• Pompass
• sweetpea
• TWEAK (ad infinitum, in various spellings)
• wannabe intellectual arrogant elites
• You sir are no Andre the Giant. Maybe a Pee Wee Herman type wearing pink pedal pushers.
• You tell me toilet paper roll
• your cute little pink keyboard
So why do you suppose someone whose only contribution to the board is cheap invective is suddenly trying to make “venom” an issue? Because of course he has nothing worthwhile to say on the real issues. It’s just another JV move from the Rabid Right’s Debate-for-Dummies playbook: if you can get your opponents angry you can dodge awkward questions by accusing them of being out of control. (That's where “looney liberals” and “angry left” come from.) In fact, the playbook calls for just throwing that accusation out whenever anyone undermines their argument in any way - just turn the issue into THEM THEM THEM (aka, “argumentum ad hominum). It’s so shop-worn a technique that it creaks. In fact, the minute they employ it they’ve pretty much admitted publicly they have no argument left on the issues.
One real question here might be whether engaging SR’s gutterisms is worth the trouble. Is the game worth the candle? Not in respect of him or what he posts, not really. But when he (and his ilk elsewhere) get rolling on the boards, they give us a chance to deconstruct the patterns and techniques of the RR’s dishonest rhetoric.
What the RR really really wants is EVERYONE raging - raging at artificial enemies without and within, raging at strawmen and phantoms, raging hysterically, night and day. They WANT rage, they WANT resentment, they WANT division and turmoil. The smoke and thunder that a Coultergeist churns out like a special effects rig at a Cirque du Soleil performance - and the smoke and thunder she tricks out of those engaging her -help the RR obscure the real issues and drown out rational discourse. Foot soldiers of the right like SR are the blogosphere equivalent of the teenage “martyrs” the Iranians used to prod into the minefields before attacks during the Iraq-Iran war. They’re disposable cannon-fodder, unquestioningly (and unknowingly) obedient to their masters’ plans.
You get the same on boards discussing ID - limp-brained grad students from some back-end engineering program charged up in IDEA Club workshops to smite the heathen with the ID arguments. They invariably get worn down and leave, but not after scattering behind them a score of links to Creationist web sites and, inevitably, whining about the ‘arrogance” of the ‘scientific establishment”. Not unlike SR snarling about “arrogant pompass ass wannabe intellectual arrogant elites”. The subject and the words may vary from site to site, but the tune and its rhythms remain the same. They’re not on board to engage in rational discourse - they’re on board to sabotage it. In fact, they tend to ANNOUNCE that’s what they’re doing (“tweak a liberal”, remember? Pay attention).
The best way to deal with them? Just ENGAGE THE ISSUE - no matter what. Stay on target; don’t be distracted; don’t play their game. And, as you go along, take note of their behavior and apply what you learn from it. It’s an axiom of war that an enemy’s core strategy invariably illuminates that which they most fear.
--------------------------------------------------
[FYI (and in the interest of avoiding another round of SR’s “I'm rubber, you’re glue” comebacks): I left home at 17 and enlisted U. S. Army Airborne Infantry 1964; final discharge (honorable) 1970. My various unproductive military adventures include a competitive enlisted appointment to USMA. But as SR says about such things - who gives a rat’s ass.]
102 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
re #99:
The road to a public cemetery is not a private road - and extending the penumbra of "privacy" over public access is indeed an abridgment of rights. Further, equating the open road with your home is a false (and unpersuasive) analogy. You want a private funeral, hold it in a private cemetery. A military cemetery and, even more particularly, the public roads leading to it, are NOT private areas. Private grief does not warrant the suppression - no matter how temporary - of the Constitution (neither in whole nor in part).
That law was written for immediate political purposes, not for any public good. The RR lives drooling in HOPE that someone will violate it (ideally, while burning a flag) and keep this non-issue flaming on Fox News through the 2006 elections. The harnessing of rage and resentment is core to Rovian strategy.
(BTW, like some others here, Clovis seems to have difficulty engaging the real issues, and is beginning to exhibit the same tendency to force the discussion down to personalities and personal issues. Sorry, not my territory. If anyone finds what I write too difficult to read, they can hit the “PageDn” key; I won't mind.)
103 - Dave Nalle
The harnessing of rage and resentment is core to Rovian strategy.
And paranoid fabulism helps a lot in perceiving a 'rovian strategy' where there is none.
Dave
104 - MCH
"And paranoid fabulism helps a lot in perceiving a 'rovian strategy' where there is none."
- Dave
As he types confidently, after viewing the security cameras of his fortified compound...
105 - Dave Nalle
Actually, MCH, the only cameras in the 'compound' were set up in the chicken coop and since the foxes got the hens I've taken them offline. My neighbor has enough cameras for the entire neighborhood, however.
Dave
106 - Clavos
Clavos' score to date: 8 posts.
6 are little more than idle, off-subject blogsplat (60, 73, 79, 84, 88, 96)
----- 2 social hamburger helper
----- 2 cartoon chit-chat
----- 2 on his growing Bullwer-Lytton obsession (Bullwer-Lytton up, dude)
...WHO "is beginning to exhibit the same tendency to force the discussion down to personalities and personal issues. Sorry, not my territory.
Sounds like it's very much your territory, bud.
Oh, and BTW: Phelps and his creeps are picketing the funerals, not the cemeteries or the roads, and the funerals are private.
107 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
#103: no Rovian strategy for the Republican Rabid Right? Ludicrous on the face of it, and not worth further comment.
#104: Fine, sure, and no doubt fun to do - but look what being cute leads to in 105
#105: Yes - yet another childish, boring, time-wasting blogsplat Old-Maid exchange. Why encourage this?
#106: (a) Deconstructing the content and evaluating the worth of posts is not a personality issue (not for me, anyway).
#106: (b) So now our laws are to be written with such creatures as the odious Phelps and his ilk as excuse (ostensibly). This is the traditional method for writing bad laws - particularly laws curtailing free expression and free assembly. First find a group or individual or form of expression that is palpably “socially unacceptable” and disturbing and argue “Free Speech for DECENT people who have some sense of restraint is one thing - but for behavior like THIS, for people like THOSE ...” and get your indecent unrighteous law passed in a flood of decent righteous outrage from all the decent righteous people. A technique as old as politics, its process and purposes clear and obvious to even the meanest intelligence.
108 - Dave Nalle
JTG, I understand your concern here, but it's misdirected. This really is an issue of where rights overlap. It's one of the few sensible things to come out of congress in years. Why not take them to task for Patriot I and II which really do infringe our rights instead?
Dave
109 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Re 106: I have a fundamental disagreement with Mr. Naelle’s argument. The law in question is neither a balancing of rights, nor was it construed, constructed, passed and signed as one. It is the deliberate application of a cheap, easy hot-button issue to advance the suppression dissent.
Look at how well Mr. N has been worked, for instance: With one breath he claims “I believe in free speech” (essentially)- then with the next he’s saying “BUT ...”.
That “But ...” is THE classic escape clause for people who believe in free speech in principle but find they can't handle the reality of it in practice. (see what I said in #38). This is why, after all, why we need laws protecting speech, not laws curtailing it. When it comes down to what disturbs them, most people don't REALLY believe in free speech. They just like to think they do. They’re wrong about that, of course - and it shows under examination.
The underlying content of N’s argument is that “Free Speech” must be curtailed if it makes certain sacrosanct classes of persons uncomfortable. In this particular case the sacrosanct class of people is survivors of service people. In other situations, the pseudo-free-speechers declare Holocaust survivors a sacrosanct class and want laws blocking neo-NAZIs from demonstrating in their presence - or declare Black Americans a sacrosanct class whose presence outlaws the wearing of KKK hoods in their presence. In some circles this is called “surrendering to Political Correctness.” How unfunnily amusing that it is from the right that laws like this keep coming.
Mr. N says we should be taking the suppressors to task for the Patriot Acts - which use the war on terrorism as a Maskarova to cover and excuse their diluting and deleting so much of our fundamental rights. Terrorism - its actuality and its possibility - fills this country with fear, and out of fear we surrender rights in the interest of chimerical “security”. That is sad enough. But Mr. N thinks we should surrender those rights in the interest of emotional comfort. How sad is THAT?
“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither ...” B. Franklin.
If that is so, what do we deserve when we give up essential liberties to purchase a little emotional security?
110 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
follow-up on my #109:
MY APOLOGIES to Mr. Naelle.
The "in one breath ... then with the next ..." construction does NOT apply to what he wrote.
I conflated his single post with others by others, elsewhere, on the same subject. My bad.
I have no idea if Mr. N. believes in free speech, as he has not spoken of it here before. If I were to go on his one post however, I would have to conclude he does not.
111 - Dave Nalle
I certainly believe in free speech. I don't, however, believe that it carries the right to force people to listen to you.
Dave
112 - MCH
"I certainly believe in free speech. I don't, however, believe that it carries the right to force people to listen to you."
- Dave Nalle
CRASH!!!
(falling out of my chair, thinking of all the times Nalle has called those who disagree with him a "moron" or a "dumbass"...)
113 - Clavos
Careful, MCH!! The blogsplat policeman is gonna getcha!
114 - Dave Nalle
The right to free speech includes the right to be a moron or a dumbass or a tedious troll [Edited], MCH.
Dave
115 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Re #111 - “I don't, however, believe that it carries the right to force people to listen ...”
Well, according to THAT argument, thus endeth forever ...
• Billboards by highways
• Crosses on church steeples
• “Michigan State” on sweatshirts
• All Store-front signs
• Skywriting
• Sidewalk preaching
• Junk Mail (except, I suppose, in a VERY plain brown envelope)
• Dealer Logos on License-plate frames
• “Nautica” on Jackets
• Playing the radio at the beach (or in your convertible with the top down)
• Sound trucks during election campaigns
• Mister Softee
• Paranoid-schizophrenics telling us “the Martians in the CIA did it” on the street
• President Bush speaking at any funeral (except his own, I suppose)
No one is “forced” to attend on demonstrations in public or on what the demonstrators say. That is just another dodge around the real issue - suppression of dissent, suppression of unpopular (“impolite”?) speech.
116 - Clavos
JTG wrote:
Well, according to THAT argument, thus endeth forever ...
• Billboards by highways --Already restricted as to proximity to the highway, etc. in most jurisdictions.
• Crosses on church steeples --Specious argument, churches are private buildings.
• "Michigan State" on sweatshirts--Private shirt, private body..
• All Store-front signs--Private building
• Skywriting--If infringing on others' rights (as in hate speech, e.g.; yes.
• Sidewalk preaching--already restricted in some jurisdictions when infringing on others' rights.
• Junk Mail (except, I suppose, in a VERY plain brown envelope)--OUGHTA be outlawed, but specious argument-doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.
• Dealer Logos on License-plate frames--Private car (If buyer doesn't want it, yes. I take 'em off already).
• "Nautica" on Jackets--See sweatshirt.
• Playing the radio at the beach (or in your convertible with the top down)--If loud enough to annoy others, yes-already restricted in many jurisdictions.
• Sound trucks during election campaigns--Already outlawed in many jurisdictions under noise statutes.
• Mister Softee--???
• Paranoid-schizophrenics telling us "the Martians in the CIA did it" on the street--Never should have been turned out of the hospitals in the first place--a different issue.
• President Bush speaking at any funeral (except his own, I suppose)--Once more, funerals are private.
117 - MCH
"Careful, MCH!! The blogsplat policeman is gonna getcha!"
- Clavos
"The right to free speech includes the right to be a moron or a dumbass or a tedious troll [Edited], MCH."
- Dave Nalle
Clavos, looks like the blog know-it-all cop me instead.
118 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Re 116:
Missing the point entirely - and, so obviously missing so obvious a point, that out of charity, one has to assume it was missed deliberately. An inadvertently ludicrous response to deliberately ludicrous examples (is that a gotcha?).
All the instances cited consist of statements being made IN PUBLIC. Go outside with MSU on your private sweatshirt and you are making a public statement. Self-evident. The cross on a steeple may make its statement FROM a private place, but it makes its statement TO public space. So do store signs, billboards, skywriting and so on - through all the examples.
By the silly (desperate?) reasoning of the “private this, private that” claim, a protester could claim that the protest itself is made by “private mouths” - or that protest signs are “private letters on private cardboard”. Conversely, by the same reasoning we could argue to outlaw any disturbing speech on the grounds that it is heard by way of “private air in private ears” (which is, in a way, the final argument of hate-speech laws, isn’t it).
As to “funerals are private” - only if they are held in a private place. Protesters cannot trespass into private cemeteries; the roads outside cemeteries are public roads (where the approach roads are private, trespassing laws are sufficient). The protests take place in PUBLIC SPACE; and this law attempts to restrict free speech in public places.
Public spaces, public protests; no rights infringed. Some people just can't wrap their minds around that simple concept. Or, rather, refuse to do so or to face the fact that if speech is curtailed because it upsets others it’s simply the suppression of free speech.
There is no constitutional right to private emotional comfort that transcends that suspends others' rights under the First Amendment. The privacy of an event does not have some radiant power to project itself into and over public spaces, pushing out the constitution. Repeating the mantra "funerals are private" - no matter how many times you do it - doesn’t make public spaces any less public, nor speech any less protected.
There is no real argument here - just the same old "I find it offensive, so it has to be outlawed," argument against forms of free speech that annoy, disturb, anger. Citing hate-speech laws makes that all the clearer.
119 - Clavos
Yep, you got me--didn't see the difference between that comment (#115) and most of your other ones in this thread.
120 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
Re #s 99, 106, 116 et alia - “funerals are private” ...
Well, actually, on the whole, usually they’re not.
Even in peacetime, funerals are PUBLIC EXPRESSIONS of grief (and respect for the dead). The feelings may be private, but the expression of them at funerals is rarely so. And while civilian cemeteries may indeed be private (if open) spaces, to which access and within which behavior can be rightly constrained - the roads to them rarely are.
Consider if you will, the funeral cortege that passes you on State Highway 24 - headlights on, pace measured (usually) - often enough with a police escort. What is that cortège doing except proclaiming to every passerby, "honored dead are passing; please show the appropriate respect." It may not be "Go tell the Spartans ..." - but it will do.
How much more public can a statement get?
And all wearing of mourning - from the traditional “widows weeds for a year” to the black elastic band on the shield of police when an officer has fallen in the line of duty - is a conscious, PUBLIC statement - an open proclamation of grief and respect.
Further, in times of war the funerals of the fallen - and their graves and steles - cannot escape their having a political content in a political context. When the Prime minister of Japan pays his respects at Yasukuni Shrine or Reagan goes to the cemetery at Bitburg - or any public figure speaks at a funeral - the event is a public event.
The “funerals are private” argument holds no water. It would be more honest if phrased in accordance with its true intent: “funerals are SACROSANCT”.
121 - sr
Another Friday night. Im retired and have nothing better to do then address jtg#101. Truly honored that a person of jtg's pedigree would waste such valuable time commenting with the village idiot. Can just picture you jt at that cute pink tonka toy computer frothing at the mouth having to lower your impeccable standards to deal with trailer trash. Dam jt this is good. Best of all just thinking about some of your comments puts me in a state of uncontroilable laughter. Notice how simple my words are. Just to the point without your type of bravo sierra. Now what does jt say. Stay on target, dont be distracted, dont play their game and take note of their behavior and apply what you learn. jt whom may be the befool-ee here? Must I conclude the village idiot is now jt's mentor and teacher. How much time did you take jt out of your busy day to find 22+ items from my past posts? Did read most of your comment and read a few you directed at others. jt you seem to be one misinformed, ignorant and arrogant individual like me. Dont you realize you are no worse or no better and share baffone status with me. jt Airborn Infantry. 1964-1970 honorable. Instead of saying bravo sierra and I dont give a rats ass will at present on your word accept and respect. For me 1962-1982 honorable. Suggest jt you leave it their. sr
122 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
re 121: SR standard noise, sans content. Onward.
123 - JOHN THOMAS GILLICK
QUICK QUESTION, FOLKS ...
did I miss the post where SR explains and fills out his claim (#99) that he was a POW in Hanoi?
124 - sr
I was just asking myself the very same question jt. Think the guy may be a bulb short in the chandelier. Go figure. HI-HO, SILVER, AWAY.
125 - beadtot
In other words, her name resembles 'Colson' because she was expected to wheedle a best-seller out of him, and instead her own elicitations are on the booksellers' shelves.