I think I'm going to ignore a couple of Minnesotans on my f-list who seem to have come down with full-blown PDS. Don't need the aggravation, God knows.
Work today was back to normal, e.g. ninety minutes of actual work broken up by web surfing and calling Kaiser to get prescription refills straightened out.
Review of John Barnes' The Armies of Memory to follow; right now I gotta go shoot POS.
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Now playing: Pat Benatar - Invincible
Work today was back to normal, e.g. ninety minutes of actual work broken up by web surfing and calling Kaiser to get prescription refills straightened out.
Review of John Barnes' The Armies of Memory to follow; right now I gotta go shoot POS.
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Now playing: Pat Benatar - Invincible
- Current Mood:
disappointed
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wombat_socho- wombat_socho
Comments
and no pos shoot for you.
It's funny to be one of the few people in my crew with out a cap alt. If I was a spy, they would be fucked.
That said. I want a cap pilot! :(
Yeah, I'm pretty pissed off - clone jumped to 9-9, got my Typhoon ready for a night of POS shotting, blew many many iskies on LO so I could ride the Eye of Terror to AZN...and then I find out the op's been cancelled.
Hey, Daveydweeb! :condi:
Normally I enjoy discussing and debating with people I'm friendly with on the Left. I know they won't change their minds, they aren't going to change mine, but many times we do temper each other and clarify the reasoning behind our beliefs.
Much of the rhetoric I've heard and a lot of the rabid rumor-mongering I've seen has taken the enjoyment out of that excersize.
In order to remain friendly in the future, when this is all over and it becomes obvious that the "PDS" is nothing but a spectre, then I will still be able to be friendly with my friends on the Left and not say something now out of sheer frustration that might lead to a larger arguement.
Amen to that. It's going to be a rough election season, as politics seem to get more and more polarized with each passing year; it's helpful to remember that the people posed as "enemy" by the pundits on both sides can also be your friends, neighbors, and family.
That's the thing - most of the pundits I read online (Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as the main example) aren't hardcore Republicans, and don't reflexively regard Democrats as the enemy. Neither do I - I have few enough friends in this world, I can't afford to narrow the field further by shunning those to the left of Francisco Franco. (j/k, the line would actually be more to the right of Rudy Giuliani.)
I know you to be a pretty sensible person, on balance, and it really freaks me out to see you repeating the crap dished out by whackjobs like Andrew Sullivan, DU and DailyKos. I'm sorry if I overreacted, but that "Uncle Tom" comment hit a little close to home. My nieces are both black and dealing with the pain of "not acting black", and they got to hear that kind of nonsense all the time in high school. Talk about not fitting in - few people stick out more than black Hispanic Goth anime fangirls. :(
To be fair, though, I don't read/watch the pundits on the left, myself, as I'm sick of bile. It's just that the Palin feeding frenzy happened so fast and furious that it was hitting the middle-road news outlets before being well-checked. It's hard to say if the McCain campaign was stupid or brilliant (possibly both) for springing the Palin nom from out of the relative blue: on one hand, it caught the competition by surprise; on the other hand, it caused the media to grab at every shred of "news" they could possibly get their hands on.
I was a little worried myself that Governor Palin might be the second coming of Dan Quayle -who was not half the moron he was portrayed as- but her popularity with the base and the growth of the alternative media has prevented the media from doing the kind of smear job they did on Quayle. It doesn't hurt that she's very poised, very down-home, and not about to let herself get pushed around. Having Frank Murkowski's scalp does that for a woman, I hear. :)
Quayle dug his own grave. He may as well have handed himself to the media and contemporary satirists on a silver platter, with an apple in his mouth. All politics aside, the man was a disaster to the English language.
Before being nominated as Bush the Elder's VP, Quayle had developed a reputation as one of the more tech-savvy young Senators, mainly due to his interest in space and missile defense issues. Of course he came to look like an idiot, with reporters constantly following him around noting his every misstep. You'd look like a moron too if that happened. I will admit that he seemed easily rattled - something he has in common with the junior Senator from Illinois. ;)
Perhaps we are defining "smear campaign" differently. (I'm saying this in all seriousness.)
I do have some sympathy for the poor bastard - he's quite obviously a TCK trying to fit in *somewhere* where he can be comfortable being himself, and he hasn't found it yet. Being in the harsh spotlight of national politics while being beholden to the Daley Machine ain't going to help.
The definition of "smear campaign" is one I was introduced to during my two runs for the Minnesota House, e.g. "presenting true facts about your opponent that said opponent finds hard to explain to their constituents".
Edited at 2008-09-13 08:00 pm (UTC)
Yeah, there's the issue. My definition has always included a necessary component of deliberate fact-twisting. Depending where you look for a definition, too, there are references supporting both your and my definitions of the word.
Getting back to Quayle, what I was trying to get at is that the media didn't really have to do anything other than quote the man. I bought a book back during the Bush Sr./Quayle years that I found fascinating, simply for the audacity of it. It was listed in the humor section of the bookstore, and all it was, was a collection of verbatim Quayle speeches. The "author" of the book merely put chapter headings between the quotes, and that was it.
(Pardon any grammar problems -- your "reply" boxes have gotten rather narrow, and so I'm typing blind.)