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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (148585)	11/24/2005 1:37:22 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 793649

Let me parse..."that no Dem Member personally called Bush a liar." No Dem authored statements that directly or indirectly called the President a liar. I am quite certain that a few directly and almost all indirectly called the President a liar. That is to say from their mouths they have directly and almost all indirectly called the President a liar. I believe your use of the word myth is a myth. And Micheal Moore sat with Jimmy Carter by universal invitation at the dem convention. That's a unamimous civility KO.

To: D. Long who wrote (148585)	11/24/2005 2:16:51 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793649

Members of Congress have been far less civil when referring to the administration as a whole. Then "liar" crops up quite a bit. Which is the point. Derek, to acknowledge one deviation from the point is not to miss the point. It doesn't contradict the point, merely mitigates it. A subset of a thing is not the whole thing. It's a form of cognitive disfunction to fail to differentiate. This is a phenomenon that occurs all the time. If, to use the classic example, someone says that the fascists kept the trains running on time, right away people start hollering about how horrid the fascists were. Of course they were horrid, but that doesn't mean they didn't keep the trains running on time. You should be able to say that the fascists kept the trains running without having to preface it with a bunch of caveats about how horrid the fascists were, about how you aren't nor were you ever a fascist, about how your grandfather fought against the fascists, etc. "Look, no member of Congress said Bush personally is a liar! It's all a myth!" It IS a myth, apparently, that members of congress called Bush a liar. It is not a myth that a bunch of other people have called him and his administration liars. I take your point that making the former point can be misleading, but that misleading could be either intentional misdirection or the inadvertent presentation of facts to those who can't differentiate so they misinterpret. You and John apparently think that Cohen intentionally misled. I responded to John that I didn't have enough information to make that determination. It's plausible either way. I don't have a need to either justify or disclaim what Cohen wrote. I just found his presentation of this little subset of the thing interesting. I also find the reaction to it interesting. I appreciate the compulsion to disclaim the charges of lying against Bush and his administration and to vilify those who are making them. I can even understand the compulsion to suppress the subset lest someone fall for the misdirection although I am not sympathetic to the need to damn anyone who presents it. And I can't understand how the apparent fact that at the very least the elected officials on the other side haven't sunk to the point of directly calling the President a liar, that they have some standards they haven't yet breached, is not a small ray of sunshine. To fail to even grudgingly recognize the good news in that is to invite the next breach of standards--fist fights in the chambers.