You promise you ‘will stop fucking up the thread’

How kind.
‘Goodnight and Good Luck’–now go in peace. But first just go!

I have to give you some credit, you’ve won the battle of empty rhetoric between us. The effort for me to return the condescending attitude that comes so naturally to you is just too great. It dilutes my arguments in a way that you simply accept as how debates are carried out. By sinking to your level I have probably lost some credibility, and deservedly so. You win on this front. You are the master of condescention and I will challenge your reign no further. I’ll simply point out that your elitism and judgementalism have been the source of my amusement, since progressives supposedly abhor such behavior. I will continue to address those rare occasions that you actually present a reasoned argument, but I will propagate the attitude no further.

I bring up Clinton not so much as directly relevant to current events, but as an exploration and demonstration of the different standards to which you must hold Democrats and Republicans in order to maintain your ideology. You, RightPunch, provided the greatest example when, in order to demonstrate how Bush is adversely impacting foreclosure rates, you posted a FDIC report from 1998, during Clinton’s tenure, that showed rising rates, and blamed Bush. When I pointed this out…the sound of crickets. Your ideology remains intact, not because you defeated an argument, but because you dodged it. Then you accuse me of ignoring “technical details” in order to cover your tracks. I suspect even other liberals see through you.

Finally, on the matter of exit polls, I assume you all know that as a statistical measure exit polls have an inherent margin of error, usually around 3%. An election, however, is assumed to be an exact measure of those who vote, and so no margin of error is provided. It may not be a perfect assumption, but even Gore argued in 2000 that elections are exact when he said, “every vote must be counted.” So if you really think that exit polls are more accurate than election results…I don’t know what else to tell you.

In the real world, accusations of voter fraud in 2000 and 2004 have not panned out. Yet you rely on the accusations much more than the investigations which have turned up little. I suspect that comes from the same part of the brain that favors exit polls over election results.

“Imagine all the profits that all the arms makers will make. And, to them, so what if the world is destroyed in a nuclear war. That will just make jesus come back (a strategy originated by pat robertson).”

That’s a highly cynical view of American culture. While you are correct that corporations sell their products without regard to their value, the fact remains that there are THOUSANDS of deserving talents who are famous for their talent.

No one looks at Kurt Vonnegut as famous because of how he looks.

As for the ‘have a beer’ meme, that was cooked up by propagandists, and sold to you. Bush was NEVER elected legally to the post he has defiled — not in 2000, not in 2004.

America is 300 million people. Though the media endorses characters like Al-Reilly, his supposed ‘fame’ overcoming his actual talents in the first ten minutes, the fact remains that his viewership is a million people, 1/300th of the population.

Millions of people don’t access these supposedly characteristic beliefs in any individual’s ‘fame.’ And to bemoan the illiterate tv culture is to blame America as a whole for something akin to a brain disease suffered by a few million of its members.

Give up cynicism. It doesn’t really explain what is happening.

It horrified me (as it must have done many others) when I heard that a common reason people voted for Bush was that he seemed like someone these voters wouldn’t mind having a beer with.

(I must pause here while my spine curls into a pretzel shape and pierces my duodenum AND the base of my skull at the same time)

I mean, I can’t even look at that sentence without my corneas getting scalded. Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you want the person running the country to be a person smarter and more capable than … YOU? I mean, unless the “you” in that construction really /is/ “fit” her or himself for service in that important a role? Don’t you? I mean, sheesh, I never hung around a lot of bars or frat parties or anything, but criminy.

The very real and troubling problem that this country/culture is essentially anti-intellectual (and even anti- any sort of merit or ability) is compounded by the fact that the media have made god-damn-everything so visible and easily available. It’s an old saw but an old one that A. Lincoln, a tall, scrawny, funny looking guy with a squeaky voice, could NEVER get elected today. That’s a colossal problem, and it’s a problem that was not and could not be foreseen by the founders of this country. How can it ever be addressed?

This is after all the nation where fame is bestowed not because of any inherent talent, but mostly on the basis of appearance. Fame and visibility is manufactured, not earned. Real work and achievement is almost beside the point in the mirrored world of Good Ol’ Boy/Girl.

In re: your

“I just thought reagan was like bush too.. Maybe Republicans deliberately choose idiots as to appeal to an idiot nation.”

Yes.

The fact that Ronald Reagan, a wet Slim-Jim rolled in hair when he was alive, can bring (literal! I’ve seen them) tears to the eyes of conservatives is most of the proof I need that conservatism — at least as such people understand the term conservatism — is utterly unworthy of investigation.

But Reagan and Bush are also appeals to a /greedy/ nation.

The fact that GWB was elected (if that is what happened – at any rate, a bunch of people voted for him) should by rights blow a cosmic rift in all thinking peoples’ conceptions of democracy and capitalism.

It appears anyway to be a failure of the American system of DEMOCRACY that a person as woefully stupid, inept, uninspiring and incurious as GWB could get anywhere CLOSE to the most prominent job in the land. The man is probably not competent to manage a Denny’s — but there he is, sitting in the White House.

And it appears anyway to be a failure of the American system of CAPITALISM that if consumers want a thing, it will be given to them, EVEN IF IT IS BAD FOR THE WORLD. This applies to Hummers and cigarettes as well as Reagan and to GWB. A company could hire advertisers to create a genius campaign for a product that would ultimately cause the Earth to spin out of orbit and away from the Sun, and people would line up to buy it if the greed was cranked up sufficiently.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article349150.ece