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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chowder who wrote (10656)	11/22/2001 12:18:25 PM
From: kodiak_bull	Respond to of 23153

I'll address 3 posters below. 1. Bum: Okay, I'll let you and Kmeister slug it out in the I Hate Clinton Club, and I'll be grateful to hold onto my bronze medal in the competition. Btw, isn't it gratifying how absolutely irrelevant red-nosed Willie has become? 2. Quehubo, would you mind spending a moment discussing, in primer style, (the various grades) of heating oil and natural gas, and how they might replace each other? I know someone in the distant past must have done this, but since most people are either using heating oil to heat (northeast) with some gas for cooking ("now, that's cookin' with gas") or using (west and northwest) gas for heating and cooking, how does the option work? Is it pretty much done at the power plant level (which would mean electricity for heating, generated via coal, NG, nuclear or fuel oil)? TIA. 3. Whitepine: I agree that all of us are trapped within the times we live in (which is why it is senseless to judge Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves--there was no other way to be a Virginia farmer at the time; he could have been a South Carolina port merchant, of course, but then he wouldn't have been Thomas Jefferson). The difference with LBJ and his supreme form of cowardice is, knowing the Vietnam War was a quagmire, unwinnable, he chose to escalate and lose 58,000 soldiers' lives, untold materiel and destroy a generation and an economy rather than do something courageous, like pull out. He knew the war was unwinnable, from the beginning. He wasn't risking his life or his children's lives (he had the 2 daughters) but other people's lives. For his own knavery, ego and cowardice. The difference is not, as you noted, that he was the "victim of his historical context as much, but no more, than we all are," but that his cowardice victimized so many of his countrymen and their families. We don't elect leaders so they can be victims of their times, and certainly not so they can, through their own weakness, victimize the citizens they serve; we elect them to lead. Which, see, Abraham Lincoln. It is fitting to remember Honest Abe, a guy many thought was not up to the job, a truly courageous leader, on this day which he proclaimed in 1863. Kb.