Black and White
CNN.com - House approves wiretap law before hitting campaign trail - Sep 28, 2006
I honestly fail to understand how not wanting a warrantless wiretapping program and demanding that prisoners be treated like people is equivalent to “coddling terrorists”…
Seriously, I’m getting really, really sick of this “with us or against us” crap. It’s the same damn tune the Republican party has been singing for the past five years… first with the Taliban in Afghanistan, then with Saddam Husein in Iraq, and now with the much more amorphous and generalized term of “terrorists”, who could be (and, presumably in some people’s minds, are) anywhere and everywhere. Nothing is black and white, and questioning motives or practices is not logically equivalent to siding with the enemy. Of course, since nobody in Washington (along with most of this country) seems to have been capable of actually passing a logic class, this kind of rhetoric usually works wonders in an election pinch when you’re down by a few dozen points in the polls… both sides are guilty of this, but I’ve been listening to Republicans do it more consistently and with greater fervor lately, and it’s kind of starting to piss me off.
There are days when the fact that half the people in my college logic class didn’t grasp that the statement “Bill Gates is rich, Bill Gates is a software programmer. Because Bill Gates is a software programmer, all software programmers are rich” is a logical fallacy makes me fear for the future of debate.
Can we elect Jon Stewart as president? Seriously…
Oh, and while I’m on the subject, when exactly did election season become a mud-slinging exercise? Really, that’s all any of these ads ever do anymore… nobody ever goes on TV and says “this is what I stand for, this is what I will do”. It’s all about “this is what Jackass McStupidface has done in the past. Why on God’s earth would you want to vote for that asshole?”
Maybe I should make an ad that actually says that, and get someone to run it… even if it’s just on a cable channel late at night so I can actually use the words “jackass” and “asshole”. I just wonder if anyone would get it…
September 29th, 2006 at 5:49 am
>> “Leaders concede that differences between the versions are so significant they cannot reconcile them into a final bill that can be delivered to Bush before the November 7 congressional elections.”
It may be totally about the politics. That’s not likely going to make it to the WH anyway if the differences are that great, or at the very least it will get deferred to next year when it’s ’safer’ to fight about these things again. *Both* sides are simply getting their votes in right now as posturing.
I’m curious what the Senate version is though; This one at least has some restrictions on it, though even this ol’ Republican is a bit nervous about how vague those are.
Agreed about the mud-slinging. I gave up on watching those ads over a decade ago (thank you DVR technology!). As for your idea, why not just create one off-the-cuff on your own and YouTube it? That’d spread like wildfire this time of year…
–TSK
September 29th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
*hugs Alah*
People like you make me think that just maybe this nation isn’t doomed.