One of the best ways to judge a blog is by the quality of the comments. Since nobody reads my blog except a handful of my loony left friends, and only the looniest of them bother to post comments, the prognosis is not good. It’s very discouraging, but, you have to play the hand that’s dealt you, so I guess I have no choice. I have to respond. Here are a few of the, believe it or not, most coherent excerpts from the comments, with my replies:
from Paul Mandelstein:
You got to give to the raw meat eating RNC…making sushi out of Kerry….right or wrong, truth or lies.. it does not seem to matter….it’s a slug fest..a thug fest..and the dems need to learn how to sucker punch and talk straight……
my reply:
Here’s a quote from Mark Steyn:
“Americans should be free to call Bush a moron, a liar, a fraud, a deserter, an agent of the House of Saud, a mass murderer, a mass rapist (according to the speaker at a National Organization for Women rally last week) and the new Hitler (according to just about everyone). But how dare anyone be so impertinent as to insult John Kerry!”
I think the Democrats don’t need any lessons. They’re doing just fine.
from rico:
paul, are we the only dilletantes of this man’s ponderings?
like, jon stewart said on nightline last nite, the press has to get tougher about the way lies get told through out of context double talk…
my reply:
Where to begin? Have you read anything about the AP story which purposely inserted non-existent boos, in order to make Republicans look bad?
Or this AP story that calls Schwarzenegger a liar, when a cursory reading of his speech makes it clear that the AP are the liars?
Here’s an account of one man’s attempt to shame the New York Times into dong their job to fairly report such things as Bush’s “desertion” which was a front page story for weeks, for which there has never been any evidence, versus the news blackout when 250 of Kerry’s “band of brothers” expose his made-up story about being in Cambodia for Christmas.
The big media are in the tank for Kerry, although they are just beginning to back away, since nobody likes a loser. As Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek said:
“There’s one other base here, the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.”
The full text of his transcript is here.
from running spirit:
What? Philosophy has been permanently exiled by the banter of the villagers? The townsquare is buzzing with what ‘they’ are doing…the orators, the tax collectors, the Gods…while machines are being rigged for the outcome they choose for themselves…the upper 3%. Dems are no better than republicans. USA today sent Michael Moore to the RNC and some other heavy right winger to the DNC just to see what one side thinks of the other. Now what? Is Love sweeter, stock market fatter, education really preparing our kids to think for themselves, prepared to care for our world we leave them? Farmies, what’s happened to the dream?
my reply:
This is from a former girlfriend of mine. You see what I have to deal with? Let me attempt to extract some meaning from the above free verse: Politics is bad. Politicians are bad. Politics has nothing to do with the things that really matter.
I beg to differ with my own interpretation of what she is talking about. Politics, in a democracy, is simply the way in which groups of people, in this case the USA, figure out how to solve their collective problems. Politics is a noble calling. Many of those called are, and have been, noble. Some are not. If you don’t like the outcome, the only thing you can do about it, besides voting, is to attempt to persuade others to your point of view. That’s how it works. The alternative is tyranny.
from rico:
I’m beginning to think that the Russians and the Chinese are our best allies. Watch and see how they handle fundamentalist uprisings in their territories. Would you want to be a citizen of Chechyna who is not a hard liner Muslim?
The US approach to secularism is not being waged by Bush and his cronies right now. They are alienating more and more people by their narrow minded rhetoric.
Prove me wrong…
my reply:
Shooting school children in the back is what you call a “fundamentalist uprising”? You think “Bush and his cronies” are about to institute a theocracy in the U.S.? And I have to prove you wrong?
from rico:
You can’t make people equal simply by force. Our present gov’t doesn’t want to eliminiate war as a method. In fact, war is a primary tool for the US to keep it’s domination of resources and waste going.
We’re 1/20 of the world population, yet we use 1/4 of the resources and produce 1/4 of the garbage of thw world. And ‘we say’ that we want everyone to be free like us, but it’s a lie. We exploit the rest of the 3rd and 4th world to maintain our life style and we use force if necessary to keep it that way….
So, I say that by going along with the policies of Bush and his cronies you are dooming 1 billion innocent citizens to suffering, just so you can sit behind a computer and think you are right.
It ain’t just about women being free in these repressive cultures…it’s about the West thinking we can just steamroll over these cultures and make them free…for us to exploit…that’s got to stop, too, otherwise this clash of cultures will never stop…
my reply:
You can’t make people equal period. They aren’t equal. They never will be. Bush is certainly not trying to. You can, however, free people by force, e.g., WWII, the not so cold war, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq. As Protest Warrior says, “Except for ending slavery, fascism, nazism, and communism, war never solved anything.”
I’m so tired of this crap about how we are prosperous because the third world is poor. It’s just nonsense. We didn’t make them poor, and we don’t want them to be poor. The richer they are, the richer we will be. If the evil corporations could wave a magic wand and turn everyone in the world into a flush with cash consumer, they would do it in a heartbeat. Also, the richer a nation is, the better their environmental record. If you want to see desecration of the environment, go to a communist, or former communist country. Becoming a free, prosperous, capitalist democracy is not simple. It requires a huge cultural shift, and takes a long time.
from Bob:
I don’t know a single person who advocates “slavish devotion.” But it’s impossible for me to imagine Jesus condoning the use of bombs and machine guns for any purpose whatsoever. The horrors of Caesar and Rome were certainly the equal of Saddam and Iraq, yet nowhere does Jesus advocate violence in order to “liberate” (in the political and not the spiritual sense of the term) the people of Israel. As for arguing and loving, I think Jesus simply determined to tell the truth as he saw it (including the principle of nonviolence) and to accept the consequences: “Hey, killing our enemies hasn’t worked all that well so let’s try something else.”
my reply:
You may be right about Jesus. Even I am not quite arrogant enough to speak for Him. Nevertheless, one of the things I like about JC is that he didn’t leave us with a stone tablet full of rules, like Moses or Mohammed. He left us with a series of brilliant allegories, the interpretation of which was left up to the listener, or reader. These interpretations have been the subject of much discussion ever since.
He did leave us with one rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” If I were an Iraqi, or an Afghani, I would have prayed for the Americans, or anybody, to liberate me from the Taliban and Sadaam Hussein. Although certainly not unanimous, I believe that is the majority opinion in both countries.
Well, that’s it. Love you guys.
