>>To you, Richard, I'd say don't gloat too soon, as we're >>not dead yet.
In as far as this forum has a certain political agenda, I didn't post that to gloat. There are far easier ways to do that. Even if Jonah Goldberg might well be a barker for the conservative right I felt that there were pretty solid issues there that any number of people in this group could spin off from.
Regardless of how GWB *might* well lead our country on a slow donkey-ride to hell, do you really think that Jesse Jackson is any help to forwarding the cause of democrats? On one hand he spouts anti-semitism in NYC way back when (`Good Evening Mr Waldheim`) and now when it all hit the fan in Florida, he couldn't get down there fast enough to stir up the pot so he can defend "holocaust survivors".
There will be issues cropping up in Washington over the next 4 years that will either dig you in further with `prophet` credentials - or as some commentators have suggested there could be 4 years of nothing with Republicans and Democrats gridlocked in the way they are.
If in terms of government, if there ain't much that can be changed, why are individuals like Rev. JJ allowed to run around and keep underlining the racial and political divides? If we say that the government is corupt to the core (for arguments sake) why do we need people telling group A that they'll protect them from group B ("because group B are possibly evil") and then telling group C to arise against group D ("because group D will kill them if they don't jump first") We might well be on the verge of Armageddon, the Third Reich might well be close to rising again through a certain person who will remain nameless - but then again we might all just have to live with it as everyone lived with the previous manager (whose, arguably, already disgraced the country)
On another note...there was much talk that because GWB didn't back down over FLA he "robbed and disenfranchised" the "majority" of voters. One thing we might agree on is that the majority of voters didn't actually vote, so that statement is just a soundbite. Last time I heard there were about 200 million people on the slate to vote. Of that, only 100 million voted. So, whichever party can shelve the conspiracy theories about the other side will kick all kinds of ass in the next election.
Also, for the record, if Al Gore's `people` had tried to execute the FLA recount in one hit they might well have pulled it off. I checked the legal constraints you posted - and even though the law was pretty much followed, surely it doesn't take a genius to know that they should have been seen to give the Republicans a fair chance. They can cherry pick the regions they want, but if they're so sure about this they could have dropped in 2 dead cert Republican areas and still won it. At the end of the day, they could have been `on track` 95% of the way - but because of the way it was spun by the media and the political point men, it drifted into being marketed as Al Gore trying to rob the election.
Again, if the Democrats had run as tight a ship as they said they had run they could have nailed it by the first recount. But, with so many cans of worms around the country (bullied Haitians, illegal voters, citizenship surges so the criminals from abroad can vote, leaked scandals at the 11th hour, scare tactics, bribing street people etc etc) it wouldn't be good PR if Democratic aggitators start trying to trash election results. Like the good old days, each party holds a sword of damocles over the other.
I'll concede for the sake of argument that 50-60% of what I've stated is from the fact I watch the Fox News Channel for too long, but because of the fact that those things were even *suggested* the saying goes "there's no smoke without fire". I'd like to believe the Democratic party are the moral saviours of the country too (if it's good enough for Alec Baldwin) but the ghost of Dick Daley still looms...
(Or if you like a good political hypothesis, "If Daley did all the historians claim he did in Chicago, could he be held partially responsible for the fact that the USA was sucked in as far as it was to the Vietnam conflict? There is a school of thought that suggests that if Richard Nixon had got in that time, there was no way a Democratic House would have allowed him to take the country to war")
At the end of the day, though I might not be near to your thinking politically, I certainly respect you as a musician and lyricist and would admire the fact that you can make Bruce Cockburn and Billy Bragg look about as subversive as James Taylor and Jimmy Webb. To misquote the words of Matt Drudge - I didn't want the Republicans to win neccesarily because of their politics, I wanted them to win because I could live to see them shove all the criticism back down the throats of the NY Times and Streisand...
The worst thing you'll do is teach me something,
Richard
PS - Are you familiar with the music of Jan Garbarek? If you're not I can highly commend his `Rites` and `Visible World`
that wasn't my intention....
R
richard
(view)
>>To you, Richard, I'd say don't gloat too soon, as we're >>not dead yet.
In as far as this forum has a certain political agenda, I didn't post that to gloat. There are far easier ways to do that. Even if Jonah Goldberg might well be a barker for the conservative right I felt that there were pretty solid issues there that any number of people in this group could spin off from.
Regardless of how GWB *might* well lead our country on a slow donkey-ride to hell, do you really think that Jesse Jackson is any help to forwarding the cause of democrats? On one hand he spouts anti-semitism in NYC way back when (`Good Evening Mr Waldheim`) and now when it all hit the fan in Florida, he couldn't get down there fast enough to stir up the pot so he can defend "holocaust survivors".
There will be issues cropping up in Washington over the next 4 years that will either dig you in further with `prophet` credentials - or as some commentators have suggested there could be 4 years of nothing with Republicans and Democrats gridlocked in the way they are.
If in terms of government, if there ain't much that can be changed, why are individuals like Rev. JJ allowed to run around and keep underlining the racial and political divides? If we say that the government is corupt to the core (for arguments sake) why do we need people telling group A that they'll protect them from group B ("because group B are possibly evil") and then telling group C to arise against group D ("because group D will kill them if they don't jump first") We might well be on the verge of Armageddon, the Third Reich might well be close to rising again through a certain person who will remain nameless - but then again we might all just have to live with it as everyone lived with the previous manager (whose, arguably, already disgraced the country)
On another note...there was much talk that because GWB didn't back down over FLA he "robbed and disenfranchised" the "majority" of voters. One thing we might agree on is that the majority of voters didn't actually vote, so that statement is just a soundbite. Last time I heard there were about 200 million people on the slate to vote. Of that, only 100 million voted. So, whichever party can shelve the conspiracy theories about the other side will kick all kinds of ass in the next election.
Also, for the record, if Al Gore's `people` had tried to execute the FLA recount in one hit they might well have pulled it off. I checked the legal constraints you posted - and even though the law was pretty much followed, surely it doesn't take a genius to know that they should have been seen to give the Republicans a fair chance. They can cherry pick the regions they want, but if they're so sure about this they could have dropped in 2 dead cert Republican areas and still won it. At the end of the day, they could have been `on track` 95% of the way - but because of the way it was spun by the media and the political point men, it drifted into being marketed as Al Gore trying to rob the election.
Again, if the Democrats had run as tight a ship as they said they had run they could have nailed it by the first recount. But, with so many cans of worms around the country (bullied Haitians, illegal voters, citizenship surges so the criminals from abroad can vote, leaked scandals at the 11th hour, scare tactics, bribing street people etc etc) it wouldn't be good PR if Democratic aggitators start trying to trash election results. Like the good old days, each party holds a sword of damocles over the other.
I'll concede for the sake of argument that 50-60% of what I've stated is from the fact I watch the Fox News Channel for too long, but because of the fact that those things were even *suggested* the saying goes "there's no smoke without fire". I'd like to believe the Democratic party are the moral saviours of the country too (if it's good enough for Alec Baldwin) but the ghost of Dick Daley still looms...
(Or if you like a good political hypothesis, "If Daley did all the historians claim he did in Chicago, could he be held partially responsible for the fact that the USA was sucked in as far as it was to the Vietnam conflict? There is a school of thought that suggests that if Richard Nixon had got in that time, there was no way a Democratic House would have allowed him to take the country to war")
At the end of the day, though I might not be near to your thinking politically, I certainly respect you as a musician and lyricist and would admire the fact that you can make Bruce Cockburn and Billy Bragg look about as subversive as James Taylor and Jimmy Webb. To misquote the words of Matt Drudge - I didn't want the Republicans to win neccesarily because of their politics, I wanted them to win because I could live to see them shove all the criticism back down the throats of the NY Times and Streisand...
The worst thing you'll do is teach me something,
Richard
PS - Are you familiar with the music of Jan Garbarek? If you're not I can highly commend his `Rites` and `Visible World`
In as far as this forum has a certain political agenda, I didn't post that to gloat. There are far easier ways to do that. Even if Jonah Goldberg might well be a barker for the conservative right I felt that there were pretty solid issues there that any number of people in this group could spin off from.
Regardless of how GWB *might* well lead our country on a slow donkey-ride to hell, do you really think that Jesse Jackson is any help to forwarding the cause of democrats? On one hand he spouts anti-semitism in NYC way back when (`Good Evening Mr Waldheim`) and now when it all hit the fan in Florida, he couldn't get down there fast enough to stir up the pot so he can defend "holocaust survivors".
There will be issues cropping up in Washington over the next 4 years that will either dig you in further with `prophet` credentials - or as some commentators have suggested there could be 4 years of nothing with Republicans and Democrats gridlocked in the way they are.
If in terms of government, if there ain't much that can be changed, why are individuals like Rev. JJ allowed to run around and keep underlining the racial and political divides? If we say that the government is corupt to the core (for arguments sake) why do we need people telling group A that they'll protect them from group B ("because group B are possibly evil") and then telling group C to arise against group D ("because group D will kill them if they don't jump first") We might well be on the verge of Armageddon, the Third Reich might well be close to rising again through a certain person who will remain nameless - but then again we might all just have to live with it as everyone lived with the previous manager (whose, arguably, already disgraced the country)
On another note...there was much talk that because GWB didn't back down over FLA he "robbed and disenfranchised" the "majority" of voters. One thing we might agree on is that the majority of voters didn't actually vote, so that statement is just a soundbite. Last time I heard there were about 200 million people on the slate to vote. Of that, only 100 million voted. So, whichever party can shelve the conspiracy theories about the other side will kick all kinds of ass in the next election.
Also, for the record, if Al Gore's `people` had tried to execute the FLA recount in one hit they might well have pulled it off. I checked the legal constraints you posted - and even though the law was pretty much followed, surely it doesn't take a genius to know that they should have been seen to give the Republicans a fair chance. They can cherry pick the regions they want, but if they're so sure about this they could have dropped in 2 dead cert Republican areas and still won it. At the end of the day, they could have been `on track` 95% of the way - but because of the way it was spun by the media and the political point men, it drifted into being marketed as Al Gore trying to rob the election.
Again, if the Democrats had run as tight a ship as they said they had run they could have nailed it by the first recount. But, with so many cans of worms around the country (bullied Haitians, illegal voters, citizenship surges so the criminals from abroad can vote, leaked scandals at the 11th hour, scare tactics, bribing street people etc etc) it wouldn't be good PR if Democratic aggitators start trying to trash election results. Like the good old days, each party holds a sword of damocles over the other.
I'll concede for the sake of argument that 50-60% of what I've stated is from the fact I watch the Fox News Channel for too long, but because of the fact that those things were even *suggested* the saying goes "there's no smoke without fire". I'd like to believe the Democratic party are the moral saviours of the country too (if it's good enough for Alec Baldwin) but the ghost of Dick Daley still looms...
(Or if you like a good political hypothesis, "If Daley did all the historians claim he did in Chicago, could he be held partially responsible for the fact that the USA was sucked in as far as it was to the Vietnam conflict? There is a school of thought that suggests that if Richard Nixon had got in that time, there was no way a Democratic House would have allowed him to take the country to war")
At the end of the day, though I might not be near to your thinking politically, I certainly respect you as a musician and lyricist and would admire the fact that you can make Bruce Cockburn and Billy Bragg look about as subversive as James Taylor and Jimmy Webb. To misquote the words of Matt Drudge - I didn't want the Republicans to win neccesarily because of their politics, I wanted them to win because I could live to see them shove all the criticism back down the throats of the NY Times and Streisand...
The worst thing you'll do is teach me something,
Richard
PS - Are you familiar with the music of Jan Garbarek? If you're not I can highly commend his `Rites` and `Visible World`
