And yet, for all of that, there she is - my closest friend's wife, a registered Dem, lives in NJ, who is gonna vote for Giuliani "because he saved us all after 9-11."
Hopefully he will divorce the stupid b*tch...
But there are a lot of them out there - pay ZERO attention to news coverage, and have the medias "hero" meme safely esconsed in a lead-lined room in their teeny little pin heads where it will be unchanged by ANYTHING. Those folks scare me more than the NASCAR dads, security moms and Talibangelicals (h/t Drifty - I think - too good not to steal) do.
Apropos Condi's latest bedsh*t, word from the existing staff:
"There are all kinds of opportunities here," said Patricia Butenis, the deputy chief of the US mission. "There are people who think we live under a constant barrage of mortar attacks, but it isn't that way all the time."
Ahh, the mortar barrages are only part of the time! Why didn't you say so!
There's probably a lower mortality rate from Prostate Cancer there than even the good ol' USA!
If she's your best friend's wife, maybe you'd get a chance to ask her, politely and nonbelligerantly, just how Giuliani "saved us all after 9-11." Then you might ask sweetly just what he did to protect us before 9-11, when it might have done some good.
If you get that chance, do report back. I'm sure we'd all like to know what her reaction was, see what passes for thinking in people like that.
LowerManhattanite, nobody enjoys Rudy getting his ass kicked more than I do.
But I think you overestimate the magnitude of the hurt that being caught out in a lie about a basically mathematical datum will do him.
To my wretchedly certain and personally attestable knowledge, we live in a land where most adults cannot add 1/5 to 1/7 and get the right answer. It is more than possible for someone who is almost certainly in the upper third of the intelligence spectrum to confuse 6/10 with 6%. I know, because I saw someone who was light years from stupid make this exact mistake recently.
Thanks to more than 70 years of malign neglect, we are living in the Kingdom of the Blind. And the old saying about that is flat-out wrong.
In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is NOT King. There are four possible options for the one-eyed man in the Kingdom of the Blind -
1) He's gotten very damned good at his Batesian mimicry.
2) He's moved to Tierra Del Fuego or Siberia, whichever is farther away.
3) He's on the run from a lynch mob and they haven't caught him yet.
4) The lynch mob has caught him, and he's lucky if they kill him minus the customary torture.
There is no fifth option.
Well, I think that's the point. The story is presented, accepted, then set in cement, every and ALL evidence to the contrary. I work with one, too. This is a very intelligent man, and he is still "fighting them over there so we don't fight then over here." No attacks since 911? Bush is doing just GREAT!
Sen. Olympia Snowe is one of my customers, and her name came up today at work in a work related sense as he walked through. "She's a f-ing RINO," he said (tweaked because she kinda wants out of Iraq). My brain can't process why anyone with an IQ high enough to feed themselves, a member of a labor union, who isn't making 7+ figures a year and isn't a KKKristian can STILL adore this dry drunk psychopath, yet there it is. It makes me want to run away. But where?
Your post sure makes me hope that Rooty is the GOP candidate. That would be fun to watch.
The correct answers are 12/35 and 60%, right?
Stormcrow,
there's a lewd version of the kingdom of the blind story.
It goes like this.
In a place where no one wears underwear, if you wear one, who'll laugh at whom?
That is the state of affairs today everywhere. Nobody wants a wonky, nerdy, correct answer.
"He's a Ph.D and I'm a C student. Look who's president."
Who said that?
& that pretty much is the state of the world today, not just the USA.
shanks
I got one disagreemetn with your post.
I loveed having gym first adn lunch at teh end of the day (fallowed by study hall. I got to school 1 hr after every one and left two hrs early.
then again I was nevere a big beleiver in that whole showing up to class thing
Maybe if we had a Prez who was a PhD, they'd do a better job than this rube. One thing certain, I think we've all seen what a Harvard MBA Prez can do leading this fading Republic.
The Wanderer you haven't worked with PHD's befoer have you.
A PHD is not a sign of inteligence, its a sign that some one is stroubern and single minded....not nessicarly good trates in a president.
The more Lowermanhattanite writes about Rude Rudy, the more I want him as the Republican candidate. Oafish and belligerant just don't sell real well out here in the Midwest plus the Religious Right has already thrown the guantlet down... please let it be Rudy "a verb, a noun and 9/11" Guiliani.
Stormcrow,
There is a fifth option.
5) The one-eyed-man man shrugs, joins the lynch mob, and persecutes harmless blind people.
We've had plenty of people in office who are smart, savvy, and thoroughly know the score. Most of them have been assholes. Bush Sr. is one such person. There's no indication that Poppy is delusional. He's just an evil fuck. Smart, though.
The problem isn't competency.
It's morals.
And there is rarely a convergence between competency and morals.
Rudy, thankfully, lacks both.
And there is rarely a convergence between competency and morals.
Rudy, thankfully, lacks both.
Rudy is one of the rare exceptions.
If you look at all closely at the record of the Bush regime, what you see is stupidity and incompetence, doubled, redoubled, squared, and cubed.
This is typical of immoral regimes. That doesn't mean it's universal. But your average thug dictator, say, is liable to be a lot closer match to Stalin than Andropov.
In order for a police state system to produce and then serve under a Stalin, all that needs to happen is a sufficiently ruthless and intelligent guy getting himself into the right spot. But if you follow Stalin's career forward, you will note that he destroyed all possible competition as a precautionary measure. This is what got bright, talented competent guys like Sergei Kirov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky murdered.
The only people he permitted to rise for any length of time within the system were incompetents like Klimenti Voroshilov. He needed at least halfway competent secret police chiefs, but you will note that he ran through three of these during his tenure in power. And by the time he was dying, Lavrenti Beria had a monkey on his back, 24/7 - he knew he was next.
And that's why the USSR came within the thickness of a hair of losing World War II within the first six months after Barbarossa jumped off.
If you examine the Nazi regime, you can see the same sort of dynamic in motion. It is obscured by the fact that Hitler inherited the best army on Planet Earth at the time. But an astute reader will also note that attrition within the key figures in that army fell disproportionately on its more competent members. Recall, for instance, that Guderian lost his field command in direct consequence of standing up to Hitler over the fact that the lines before Moscow were insupportable post the December 5 counterattack.
In order for a police state system to produce and then serve under an Andropov, a number of possible but unlikely things have to happen.
First, he has to rise high enough within the system, so the part he rises in pretty much has to be a meritocracy. Those don't grow on trees when corruption and general plundering of the state are the order of the day. Then, he has to act competently once in power, which is counterintuitive.
Stalin was far from stupid, and look what he did.
Andropov, OTOH, did the counterintuitive thing - he promoted competence. If he had not succumbed to complications of diabetes so early in his tenure, this might have cost him everything.
Of course, the regime of the late Saddam Hussein also makes a fine example of the effects of a completely amoral man in power. The Iraqi Army got it's ass handed to it in the Gulf War mostly because Saddam murdered just about every really competent general he had outside of his own relations. And because of the fact that he kept all the rest on very short leashes.
Heinlein was right - evil is basically stupid. Because the selection processes it needs to put in place to guarantee its own survival tend to institutionalize incompetence.
G.W. affable? Hardly, unless you are the same sort of cockroach yourself. For myself, I've spent my 51 avoiding assholes like that.
Worse, "She's a Ph.D and I'm a C student. Look who's president."
Who said that? The fucking leader of the 'free world'? WE ARE DOOMED. THE US of A EXPERIMENT IS OVER.
BF- "A Republic. If you can keep it." Oops, we or at least the theys, could not. A CORPORATION MUST NEVER AGAIN HAVE THE RIGHTS OF A CITIZEN.
A CORPORATION MUST NEVER AGAIN HAVE THE RIGHTS OF A CITIZEN.
That has proven quite the egregious legal fiction, hasn't it?
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