Has the Schiavo case Become a Political Football?

Well Nimh...
We are right back where I jumped in. Lash will trot out a few crazies and claim they are mainstream. You can argue the alternative all day but you are only going to end up being sand.




(I was going to say "pounding sand" but for a brief moment I thought better of it.)

I am curious as to which thread is locked....... Oh, well.. More statements that Lash will claim and not back up.

Nope, you have to defend it. SImply claiming someone is nuts doesn't make it so.

I can claim GW is nuts. Do you accept that or would I have to defend it?

I don't accept the diagnosis. (For Gore, I mean, I'll buy McKinney but as said, raise you a Coburn).


I can help you out there Parados, no need to get snippy on that particular one count: Hillary is Poison!

parados--

Does the phrase "I'm not talking to you" mean anything to you?

nimh--

Let me know if Al's sojourn outside Sanity is a given, or if you want some scholarship on the subject... <hee>

Meanwhile, let me share some opinions I agree with on the subject of the direct the Dems have taken in the past eight years...

<disclaimer--This is a blog I found while googling some rude comment nout Gore's sanity. But, I concur.>

Passion Does Not Equal Sanity

Mickey Kaus think it's the Internet moo-la that's driving the Dems off a cliff:

Here's an alternative theory: Money. It used to be that at this stage, opposition party leaders would be making conciliatory noises in an attempt to please voters, and conservative or centrist noises in an attempt to please business lobbyists and PACs. But maybe the amount of money that can be raised over the Internet from Democratic true believers is now more important than PAC money. And if you want to draw a Dean-like share of this Web loot, you have to be ruthless in bashing Bush. Not all the consequences of Internet politics are benign. ...

I lived and breathed this stuff for sixteen months, and there is a lot of merit to what Mickey is saying. But at bottom there's something even more primal than money in play here: ego. The fact is that if you're not that skilled a politician, the only way you ever reach cult hero status is by tacking hard left (or hard right).

Remember the Al Gore 2000 campaign. Back then, Al was a dry, boring technocrat - able to spit out poll-tested lines that kept him in the game - but ultimately unloved. Then he fell into what he calls "that little known third category." And instantly, legions of left-wing activists rose up to proclaim him their president; people were still waving his signs along the inaugural parade route. Suddenly, this conventional pol became the most remembered and beloved loser in the history of modern Presidential politics. And no thanks to the DLCers - who even then chafed at Gore's left turn in the 2000 election, replete with a Shrumiam "people vs. the powerful" motif. It was the MoveOn crowd, not the DLC, who finally made Gore a star, and he owed them.

Fast forward to a little known former Governor of Vermont, a man with an unimpressive resume who nonetheless stirred "passion" and "energy" in his audiences wherever he set foot. And the Deaniacs bent the Democrats so far out of shape that even some mainstream observers wondered whether this "passion" - of which the Internet money was an outgrowth - was a prelude to true success. Here again, the Left transforms a pedestrian figure who panders to their interests into a cult leader - so much so that the internal culture of the Dean campaign held that victory in 2004 was secondary to building some transcendental "movement."

With Kerry, it was more about the money than about the love. Kerry saw the Howard Dean of the Val Air Ballroom and found more to emulate than to avoid. He acted like Dean lite far more than any supporter of the President could have hoped or imagined. I don't know how central easy Internet money was to this, but the money - and the stream of Kerry-on-offense stories in the media - did provide the Left with a convenient metric to defy polls and justify ever-riskier moves leftward, culminating in Kerry's total rebirth as an antiwar candidate at New York University on September 20th.

I remember thinking at the time that this was the final nail in his coffin. America had never elected an anti-war Commander-in-Chief. And it wasn't about to. The liberal money helped lock the Democrats into a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle in which the center was spurned.

The lesson here is that passion does not equal political success. I remember the floor of Madison Square Garden literally shaking as Zell gave ?'em hell on night three of the Convention, and I'll confess that I caused my fair share of that shaking. But I'd be insane if I confused that kind of "passion" (similar to what you might find at a Dean rally, except with flags) with an all purpose formula for victory to be repeated at all points in a campaign. Republicans make their politicians stars by actually electing them first.

Strangely, Mickey ignores the most compelling argument for the nefarious, self-defeating influence of the left-liberal Internet. Umm, where do you think this whole Dean-for-DNC thing got started? Daily Kos is Exhibit A, B and C for this phenomenon. Here's someone who tells us, on the central issue of our time, that "The war is long past lost." Who feels compelled to note, evenhandedly, the atrocities "on both sides of the conflcit." (sic) And who says, of the Americans who died in Fallujah, "screw them."

For Democrats, the litmus test for political sanity is whether they can repudiate stuff like this. But do Democrats feel they can't repudiate Kos because he brings too big a "community" to the table? Was Barbara Boxer aware of the "screw them" comment when she fawned over "the Daily Kos community" last week? Or did Boxer (and other Democrats) conclude that the benefits of being associated with the "Daily Kos community" simply outweighed the costs? I don't think Democrats can expect to win a national election until the calculus shifts in a fundamental way.

Which means we'd better be ready, because Hillary is unlikely to repeat the mistakes of Gore, Dean, Kerry, and Boxer.
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Whether or not you agree, do you think it's a legitimate theory?

OK, I'll do a nimh-job of Mr Lockbox.

More to come.

BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.

Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
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He invented the Internet. News to Jobs and Gates, I'm sure.

But that is not the biggie...

Internet of Lies


Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.


Status: False.

Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet. To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. Gore never used the word "invent," and the words "create" and "invent" have distinctly different meanings ?- the former is used in the sense of "to bring about" or "to bring into existence" while the latter is generally used to signify the first instance of someone's thinking up or implementing an idea. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean exactly the same thing, we have to ask why, then, the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet, even though he never used that word, and transcripts of what he actually said were readily available.)

If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while President, "created" the Interstate Highway System, we would not have seen dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Ike meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with his Internet statement.

Whether Gore's statement that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" is justified is a subject of debate. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977.

It is true, though, that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (although he did not, as is often claimed by others, coin the phrase himself) when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet, and he sponsored the 1988 National High-Performance Computer Act (which established a national computing plan and helped link universities and libraries via a shared network) and cosponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 (which opened the Internet to commercial traffic).

In May 2005, the organizers of the Webby Awards for online achievements honored Al Gore with a lifetime achievement award for three decades of contributions to the Internet. "He is indeed due some thanks and consideration for his early contributions," said Vint Cerf.

Last updated: 5 May 2005



The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

This one is legitimately interesting. The narrative of the piece would seemingly be on "your side" of the argument. He says Gore has been maligned with inaccurate accusations of insanity or crazy lies--but then, as you read the quotes, you can ably see Gore DID intend for his statements to be taken as the truth-- "I started the investigations of Love Canal...I started the internet..."

I trust your honesty. Read HIS STATEMENTS, not how they are couched in this narrative, and tell me what you think. Did he intend to take credit for these things--and intentionally left himself wiggle room in case he was called on it?

Don't you think there were a few too many to leave doubt about his maniacal intentions?

Anyway. We'll see what you say.

Al Invents World!

Taken from CI's apologist narrative on Gore:

Whether Gore's statement that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" is justified is a subject of debate.

It certainly is. Hence the debate.

c.i. quoted the "Urban Legends Reference Pages" snopes.com and did neither apologize nor narrate anything.

You misunderstood, Walter. It is a narrative and it is apologist for Gore. CI brought it.

Therefore, it is as I said.
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Meanwhile, googling "Barbara Boxer nutjob" brought me back to A2K. LOL!!!!

Thank you, Walter, for that clarification.

Would you defend Boxer as your average sensible politico?

Dean?
Kennedy?
Kerry?

Maybe someone could forward a few names of a band of six or seven they consider to be the mainstream of the Dem party? But that would HAVE to include the DNC chair....and we KNOW he's crazy.

They are all now playing to the fringies at MoveOn, where they get their money. Which has made them behave in a fringe manner.

Will wait for a defense.

I don't see any reference that refutes Snopes on Gore's statement.

Anyone have one?

I could as easily claim Bush is nutty since he stated that "Dissassemble" means to not tell the truth.

A single instance hardly makes Gore or Bush nutty. Particularly since the Gore statement has to be taken out of context and changed in order to attack him.

Snopes is not "an apologist" for Gore. They support their conclusions with facts unlike some people on a2k.

PDiddie, we need to see more of you. Love the cartoon.

Well, if you liked that one then you'll love this one:



BTW, when we saw them in Austin last weekend, Melissa, Ian, and Jillian said to say hi.

Wish we could have been there.