Dean's World

"Kerry supporter, what is best in life?"

"To rip up your enemies signs, to see their free speech rights driven before you, and here the lamentations of their three year old daughters!"

(with appologies to Conan)

Oh, come! Don't you know it is the *Republicans* that are the party of division, the party of hate, the party that pits Americans one against the other?

I really don't know what to say except to pour out a string of swear words mixed in with a description of me discussing manners with this "man" through the application of that wonderful medium known as a lead pipe.

Chris:

There's just something about a sawed-off baseball bat that's scarier than a regular baseball bat.

Sort of like, a sawed-off shotgun is scarier than a regular shotgun. (And God knows, a regular shotgun is quite scary enough.) "Sawed-off" has only one purpose, and you know it ain't a nice purpose.

Back when I was living in North Carolina (oooh! the eeeevil South!) I noticed that some guys down there would have a gun rack in the back window of their pickup truck. A gun rack with a sawed-off baseball bat in it.

Now, that's what I call scary. :)

You're probably right, Jack. But photos like these serve to remind people what a jerk you can make not just yourself but your side look like.

Scott: my posts above would remain the same. Making three year olds cry is the work of a major creep.

Ara: I wouldn't put it past a creep like that.

Despicable thugs. And, no, it is not symmetrical. No, it does not go both ways.

Paul Burgess wrote:
"It was "open-minded," "loving," "tolerant" people like this asshole who in college turned me off to Liberal/Left thought for good."

Indeed. Ever since 9/11/2001, the Left has pushed me ever further to the Right. The Left is the party of Robespierre, of Lenin, of Stalin, of Mao, of Castro, of Marcuse. The Left is the party of "equality", of envy, of hatred for "the rich", the able, the strong, the intelligent, the brave, the beautiful. The Left is the party of collectivism: the individual is nothing, the herd is all. It was the National Socialist German Workers' Party that supported Hitler. The Left is the party of nihilism, of hatred for all values. The Left's "tolerance", "compassion", and "understanding" are reserved solely for the enemies of America and the West (including Israel and all Jews). The Left is also the Stupid Party, and while I do indeed have plenty of enemies on the Right (Santorum, Bork, Keyes, etc.), I will never align with the Left in order to fight them.

To prevent that creep and so many others like him from smirking like that for four more years, I will vote for four more years of Bush unless someone can give me a good reason to vote for Kerry.

Check out the kid on the right of the first photo (the girl's brother). He's ready for a little payback.

Sorry, I'm just one of the angry left. Grrr. I suppose not "literally" evil, but it sure feels that way. Yeah, I'm only being put in the same category as the following people (not that you're responsible for the people who post to your site):

"The Left is the party of ... of Lenin, of Stalin, of Mao, of Castro, ... "

John Kerry isn't quite that far left, guys.
I'm so sick of hearing this kind of crap. Not only is it completely untrue, it's sort of tired, why don't you compare him to Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein? It's about as accurate, but at least more contemporary.

As for the urban legend, I checked snopes.com and didn't find anything (not that that necessarily means anything). But I have found several articles where real people testify that they have been made to sign loyalty oaths (not sure if they were created using MS Word ;) ) .

Steven, Point taken on the Democratic convention. As for taking your comment any other way, yes, how could I? That's what the party of "inclusion" is all about.

Incidentally, check this out:



Looks like you've all been had.

Even worse than this story is what I found when I looked for Michael Demmons's take on this:

"Thank you for visiting Discount Blogger.
The site is closed as of September 17, 2004.
Thank you for visiting over the past couple years.

I'll be back with something new - eventual"

I sure hope he comes back. I've been reading his blog every day. He is a good man and a friend of the Queen.

Thank you so much, Michael Moore, Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, and Joe Trippi, for nurturing and promoting this climate of hate, fear, and rage among Democrats.

Dean. There are times when you just amaze me. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and – oh, never mind that. Sometimes I think you're kidding, sometimes I think you're being disingenuous in the extreme, and sometimes and I think you just live on another planet, and post to your blog via telepathy. Not only is this guy a practiced political operative who probably staged this "attack", as has been pointed out on several of the sites you linked to, but you can hardly blame the four parties you mentioned (or others like them) for the actions of individual punks, or even "nurturing a climate..." blah blah blah.

Seriously, just sit down for a minute and think about why Moore, Kos, and the others have so much of an audience. Is it because they sprang magically out of the murky depths of the Democratic Underground, primed and ready to incite violence against three-year-olds? Or is it maybe, just maybe, because people have strong feelings about this election, and when human beings let emotions dictate behavior, rationality tends to get thrown out the window?

Really, if you think about it, violence in the heat of the moment at campaign rallies -gatherings which are not known for an abundance of levelheaded behavior even in the best of times- is far less malicious than the calculated actions of a father who is willing to bring his three year old daughter to such an event, knowing that his views will not be welcome, and if not planning for something camera-worthy to happen, then at least hoping it will. Tell me, would you risk your own kids in this manner? And please, if you do respond, don't give me one of your artificially naive answers to the effect that this poor, innocent Republican just didn't understand how violent all the evil, radical leftists are, and therefore didn't know he was taking a risk. Bullshit. He knew exactly what he was getting into, and even if he didn't, well, there’s no reason, there’s no fucking reason, for bringing a three-year-old to an opposing party's rally. It just doesn’t add up, man. The Chinaman is not the issue, if you know what I’m saying.

Steven,

"The Left is the party of Robespierre, of Lenin, of Stalin, of Mao, of Castro, of Marcuse....."

Damn, I didn't even know I was a viscious murdering Lenin-Stalinist. Thank you so much for clearing that up for me. All this time I thought I was supporting better funding for education, helping forge a society where the underpriviledged would have greater opportunity to attend college. Hell, I even thought that ALL Americans should have "free" healthcare. Oh, I forgot the part about my opposition to starting a pre-emptive and unneccessary war.

But, I guess instead of being a liberal democrat, all along I was just towing the "Red" line of evil 20th century communism. Thank you for showing me that I was all messed up in the head. Must have been all that American public education that steered me wrong - especially all those evil liberal influences I was exposed to in college.

Give me a break!

When coorporate CEO salaries have risen 300% more (312% to be exact) than workers salaries, something is askew. When you close a U.S. factory, layoff 30,000 workers, AND give yourself a nice big bonus (along with some tax breaks) how can you expect the "workers" not to be upset and make demands? And don't give me the lame-ass redistribution of wealth argument or scream "Class Warfare!" bullshit.

The Republicans (and most of the Democrats) are all about big business and catering to the rich lobbies and interests that get and keep them elected. That's the bad news. The good news is that despite the politicians, we just keep rolling along relatively well. Can you believe this great nation of ours, in this presidential election, is stuck with Bush and Kerry. They are both little-league bench warmers. Neither one of them is fit to run a country---maybe Taco Bell needs a night manager.

I really don't care who wins at this point. Bush already proved he doesn't know his head from his ass, and Kerry still has to ask "which one is the ass again?"

Dean, you once again completely missed my point, which was actually quite a bit along the lines of something you said in your response:

"I recognize that decent people might disagree with me"

That is exactly what I was trying to illustrate to you. I was not "excusing" this behavior if indeed it was real (and even if this one wasn't, there are certainly other cases in which it is). I was simply contrasting the clear implication made in your post about such a person's character. Let's take a look at a couple of key sentences:

She probably deserved it, huh? Her Dad being one of those evil Bush supporters and all.

Thank you so much, Michael Moore, Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, and Joe Trippi, for nurturing and promoting this climate of hate, fear, and rage among Democrats.

How, exactly, should that be interpreted as other than you trying to paint this as the work of a "hateful, afraid, and raging" leftist who thinks that three-year-olds who support Bush "deserve" to be attacked? This is exactly, exactly, the kind of thinking that pervades people who see every action by police at a demonstration as one step below all-out fascism. They assume that every time a confrontation happens, it's because the police have decided coldly and calculatedly to suppress free speech and crush dissent. They simply don't take into account the fact that police officers are human beings who can make mistakes and poor decisions in the heat of the moment.

Now, does this "excuse" the behavior of an officer who beats on a demonstrator? Of course not. But does his beating on the demonstrator make him a "bad person"? Nope, not that either. And does the rather paranoid and unrealistic assumption by the demonstrators about the character of the police officers make them bad people? Not at all. From the tone of this post (and many others), you seem to lean more toward the "yes" side on questions like the last two, and you seem to be assuming that I would lean toward the "yes" side on the first one.

My entire point was that I think you practice the same kind of partisanship and demonization of your political opponents that you so often decry... in your political opponents. I can tell you that, yes, I have been to a peace rally, only one, and I didn't particularly like it, because it seemed utterly pointless to me. But out of the 50,000 to 100,000 people who attended (March 20 in NYC), I would guess that fewer than 100 might have had any conscious inclinations toward violence, and they didn't commit any at all on this particular day. The vast, overwhelming majority were either American peaceniks or actual representatives of persecuted people around the world, and none of them seemed in the least bit violent. This is not to say that they might not become violent if provoked, but you know as well as I that this is just human nature. By the way, I also have a close friend who leans much more strongly toward that part of the spectrum than I do (especially after the rally, which basically turned me off to the far left for my own reasons), and I can assure you he is not a "bad person".

Of course I recognize that there really are rotten apples on my side, but I think they represent a tiny fraction of the whole, probably overall even smaller than the 100:50K ratio at the peace rally. If you have been to such a rally yourself, has it ever occurred to you that maybe, like your friend Michael Williams, by showing up at a gathering full of people with whom you strongly disagree, you might not have the most pleasant experience or leave with the most favorable impression? That maybe the idiotic signs comparing Bush to Hitler do not express the innermost sincere beliefs of the demonstrators who carry them? That, in fact, the whole point of a gather like that is to bring attention to one's cause? Granted, I think going over the top in that manner brings completely the wrong kind of attention, and in fact is more harmful than helpful to their cause, but that doesn't make them "bad people".

If you are an honorable person, you will have a very simple reaction..." etc

Yes, Dean. I shudder every time I see something like this happening. I don't like the behavior on an individual level, and it's even worse in the big picture, because I know it will be exploited by the right wing in exactly the manner this one has been. Unfortunately, "my side" did the same thing with the kid at the Young Republicans Convention. And no, at the time, I did not see any expressions of outrage from either your or any of the other right-wing bloggers I read regularly (quite a few). I didn't see any mention of it at all, in fact. It's only now, when you want to show how "balanced" you are, that it gets a reference.

All I'm saying, bottom line, is that the only way to avoid the spiral of partisan violence is to try to understand where your opponents are coming from, even when they do despicable things. This is not the equivalent of saying "it must be their opponents' fault", nor is it giving them a free pass for bad behavior. It's also not about touchy-feely "I'm ok, you're ok" stuff; I'm not saying that the behavior is ok, just that a single incident might not be enough to fully represent the moral character of a given individual. It's really just a simple matter of recognizing that if you were in that person's position at that time experiencing the same sensory inputs, you might behave in a similar way.

Er, correction: the mail link is in the upper left-hand corner, not the upper right-hand corner. %-)

Walter: If I've seemed rude to you, I can assure you that it has always been in response to what I perceived as your condescending, snotty tone, which you've displayed from day one on this blog.

Indeed, you seem to have made it your mission to come here, reply to something I said, and talk about how silly or stupid or ignorant I am, starting from the very first comment I recall from you when you basically compared me to Sean Hannity.

And if you think I haven't addressed one of your points, perhaps you should contemplate the possibility that you aren't making your points very effectively.

In any case, most of the Bush-supporting bloggers I know, including myself, are more than willing to criticize Bush fans who act like jerks. If you haven't seen that, perhaps it's because you haven't been looking very hard.

You are of course welcome to stay, but you should be aware of how you come off, and of the fact that I don't feel compelled to be nice to people who aren't nice to me. I've been doing this blog thing for too long, and have had too many people be snotty and rude toward me, and I simply will not apologize for being unwilling to take shit.

Reagan was _far_ more conservative than Bush, and yet Mondale ran a perfectly decent, honest campaign against him. Neither candidate ever resorted to smears.

Nixon was hated by many, and yet McGovern, and even McGovern's hippies, ran a better campaign than this one.

Walter Sobchak's convoluted equivocation here is the _best_ the Left has had to offer so far. All the other Leftists are blaming _the father_ for the jerk's despicable behavior. (And, by the way, Mr. Sobchak, notice the expression on the scumbag's face: it is not anger but glee. Therefore, I hope a Bush victory wipes that ugly smirk off his face this November.)

Their argument is:
"What kind of father would bring his 3-year-old girl to a Democratic rally, knowing that we Democrats are nothing but thugs?"

Which is the same as: "She deserved to be raped, since she was wearing a short skirt."

Which is the same as the Left's favorite theme song: "America deserved to be attacked on 9/11/2001, the World Trade Center deserved to be destroyed, those 3000 people deserved to be murdered, because of our imperialist policies."

Walter: I don't know if you'll be back to read this or not since it's taken me 36 hours to get back to you. I've been distracted.

I actually think the impression I had of you came of the first comment I could recall from you, wherein you basically implied that I should just face up to the fact that I'm really just Sean Hannity under the skin or somesuch, and that the first few comments after that were usually begun with a "Try to imagine..." as the phrase, which seems, at least from a stranger, to imply somehow that something that you're saying is totally obvious and that I'm being dense not to see it.

This may be my own sensitivities talking. I can handle most criticisms fairly well but it's easy to rub me the wrong way when you imply that I'm being intentionally dishonest or am a simpleton (I can be stupid, but I'm not a simpleton). Part of it is also, as I've said, I've been at this blogging thing for two years and, while I am still more patient than many, I must admit my patience is thinner than it once was. We went to comment registration because I was tired of being called a liar, a fascist, and worse on a daily basis (well that and the death threats and lawsuit threats).

I can very well put myself into the headspace of someone who is very angry about politics. I have at various points in my life inhabited very different parts of the political spectrum. I hated Ronald Reagan's guts when he was President, thought him both evil and stupid. And that he was destroying the country.

He wasn't. He didn't.

I think Michael Moore is a genuinely evil man. He lies. He's not just wrong, he lies, and what's more, he knowingly lies. Either that or he is clinically insane. There is no other way to interpret it. When it comes to his fans, they come in two varieties: 1) People who are misinformed and uncurious, and 2) People who embrace his evil and overlook it because they think it serves a higher good.

Type #1 I can forgive. Type #2 I can't. I feel much the same about Kos and his hordes.

A fool may follow an evil man and not be evil. I can forgive the fool. I can't forgive evil or its willing accomplices.

I see people like Kos, Moore, Trippi, and a few others on the left-fringe as being people who are, instead of trying to find consensus among Americans, have determined that sowing dissent and anger and rage and animosity and resentment, as being tremendously damaging to the country. It is almost as if they believe they cannot win an election on their ideas, so they have to portray their opponents as evil and whip up as much envy and rage at them as possible. So they simply do it, without a care in the world as to the damage they might be doing.

I mean, think about it Walter: what you're saying to me makes sense, except that I'm the one calling for civility, whereas these guys are calling for everything short of blood.

I will talk, at length, and tirelessly, with anyone who wants to tell me that my ideas are wrong if he'll bring me information, talk to me like I'm a person and not a monster, who'll crack a joke and crack back, as long as there is a mutual agreement (one that doesn't have to be stated): we're both trying to arrive at the truth. Not to defeat each other, not to out-clever each other, but to find the truth, whatever it is.

Which also, I suppose, works from the assumption that the truth can be known, or that we can at least get closer to the truth than before we began.

Which also means that a moral person is always willing to be shown where something he believes is wrong. I have a friend who believed that American troops were slaughtering millions of Arabs in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was inflamed, he was incensed... until I proved to him that it was not so.

I can forgive my friend for thinking something. I cannot forgive the disinformation peddlers who had the resources to do the fact-checking to find out that it wasn't so, and didn't bother, and instead kept spewing lies.

To me, inflammatory distortions, outright falsehoods, and refusing to look at facts that challenge our worldview, are a sort of betrayal. Not of me, but of my basic concepts of right and wrong, of moral vs. immoral behavior. I'll be content to argue until doomsday with a socialist about his ideas, some of which I may agree with and some I won't. But I just won't have any truck with someone who rants about evil rich capitalist swine sucking the lifeblood out of....

You get the idea. Maybe I'm too much of a sissy, I don't know. Maybe we should all be angry and nasty and shouting. But I'd rather follow leaders who eschew that kind of behavior.

I think that back in the early 1990s, Pat Buchanan was very corrosive to the body politic precisely because his candidacy was based on rage, animosity, resentment, and demonization. Michael Savage makes my blood boil. I cannot stand Matt Drudge and I usually refuse to read his site and have to hold my nose and grunt before I'll link it, because I think his irresponsible and nasty brand of "reporting" (if you can call it that) is terribly irresponsible and sometimes damaging.

Not that I believe I can or should forcibly shut them up. But I see nothing wrong with pointing my finger and saying, "YOU, sir, are being an asshole, and you're doing nasty, bad things."

This is what I see in Moore, Kos, Trippi, and others. And I find that doubly deplorable behavior when troops are in the field and need our support--and no, "support" does not and never has meant blindly doing what you're told, but it does mean hoping that we succeed even if you're pessimistic about it and wish we hadn't begun the venture, not corrosively shrieking at and second-guessing every setback as proof of impending doom and failure.

I guess I can't explain it if you don't already get it. Even if I'd opposed the Iraq operation, even if I thought Bush made a horrible mistake, I'd try to behave better than the Trippis, Kos's, and Moores, because the way they behave is just plain evil in my view.

You'll have to take my word for it when I say I'd be being just as hard on the righties if it were a Democrat in charge who'd done these things.

So I don't know now if we're still talking past each other or not. I think I get your point. I hope you get mine.

Dean:

Thanks for the e-mail. I figured you had gotten tired of me, but I'm glad you didn't. So anyway, to begin at the beginning...

I honestly don't remember the Hannity remark, althought it certainly sounds like something I would say in one of my snarkier moments. That's something I'm working on not doing, because oddly enough, people don't respond very well to that kind of thing ;). In any case, I do apologize for going after you like that. It would appear that I am at times as guilty as anyone of falling into my own trap- assuming the worst of my political opponents. That's also something I'm working on.

As for the "try to imagine" thing, I think that's a definite case of misinterpretation. When I say that, I don't intend it at all to imply that the person at whom it's directed is light on brain power. It's mostly just meant to clarify my argument and make it more concise by replacing long, abstract expressions of ideas with concrete real-world examples. This is not because I think my ideas are inherently better or that I'm smarter, but simply because I think abstract language tends to distort meaning, even among colleagues with specialized knowledge. Everyone puts his own interpretation on words, and it seems to me that using situational examples is generally more effective than trying to go through all of the concepts that can be encapsulated therein. Sort of like "a picture is worth a thousand words". I try to draw pictures with words, since I can't draw to save my fucking life.

As for Reagan, I would be interested to hear why you disliked him at the time, and what has changed your mind since. Not because I necessarily agree or disagree, but because I just think it would be intriguing to see the two different perspectives from the same person.

Now, unfortunately, on to Moore. I'll keep it as brief as possible, because he's just about too hot to handle. Basically, I don't think he's evil at all. Even if you managed to prove beyond the merest shadow of a doubt that everything in Fahrenheit 9/11 was a knowing lie, I still don't think that would make him evil. Evil is taking a civilian prisoner and cutting his head off in cold blood. How does making a movie compare to that? And as far as I'm concerned, the analogy to Leni Riefenstahl just doesn't fly, because the Democrats are simply not in any way the Nazi Party. So where is the evil? You can call him a partisan political hack, a propagandist, a liar; you can say he's intellectually dishonest, almost intolerably smug, and maybe just the least bit paranoid; you can accuse him of blatantly leading interviewees to the answers he wants, of making tenuous connections based on circumstantial evidence, and of editing his film in such a way that he can indireclty imply half-truths without explicitly lying. You can do all that, and probably be right about most of it, in differing degrees depending on your perspective.

But does that make him "evil"? I really don't think so. Because if he actually does believe in the gist of what he's saying (and I think he does) then I think it's easier to see how he might slowly, gradually stagger drunkenly away from the truth, rather than soberly and calculatedly distorting it. Oh, I'm sure there's calculation involved at certain along the way; I hardly think he's an innocent lamb. I just think that's only one component of the whole picture, most of which is composed of what Robert Anton Wilson would call a "belief system" or "reality tunnel". Speaking of which, if you're looking for some good books to read, you might want to check out Cosmic Trigger or the Illuminatus! trilogy. Cosmic Trigger really explains his theory of belief systems, which is really just a compressed way of saying that people have an astonishing capacity to construct a worldview based on filtered information... not filtered by the "liberal media" ;), but filtered by whatever fits into a general impression of what they believe is The Truth. "Reality tunnel" is a very appropriate term, because the idea is that people can end up focusing on a very small section of the overal picture, ignoring information that doesn't confirm the belief system that has been constructed based on this narrow view, and assuming that their perspective represents "reality". The point is, untrue statements may not necessarily be calculated lies, because in fact, the person may actually believe what they're saying. I'm not doing a very good job of explaining this, because I don't want to go on for too-too long, so I strongly recommend you check it out yourself.

Well anyway, I've already gone ahead and spent way more time on Moore than I wanted to. Please don't think of me as a Moore apologist at all. All those criticisms I said you could make about him are criticisms I've made myself, in my own head and to others. I just see a big difference between making a movie that attacks a national leader and regularly committing cold-blooded murder as a matter of policy.

Look, I do get what you're saying as far as the way the Koses and Moores of the world contribute significantly to lowering the level of political dialogue and presenting the less-informed with a version of reality that may have little to do with facts. I only rarely visit Kos, Atrios, or any of the other far-left bloggers, to be honest with you. I never visit Democratic Underground. I think those places for the most part turn into little more than intellectual circle-jerks where anyone can go to get their belief systems reinforced by people who, if not agreeing with them on every point, at least agree on basic principles (e.g. Bush is evil). I actually read right-wing blogs far more often, because I want my beliefs to be challenged; otherwise, there's a tendency to become dogmatic, simplistic, and, frankly, boringly repetitive. So yes, I agree with you on the basic premise that those guys contribute little or nothing constructive to the discussion. Again, however, I just don't agree that their motivations are at all malicious.

OK, I'm getting pretty tired and probably rambling a little, but thanks again for responding and for letting me know about it. I think I understand you better every time we have one of these exchanges, and I hope my positions are made clearer as well. I'll keep working on not coming off as a prick, because I definitely prefer this kind of discussion to pointless flame wars. And seriously, check out Wilson- he's really entertaining.