Huckabee's "William Ayers"

[lil mike]

If you seriously didn't hear applause then I guess this conversation is over.

Oh no, don't bail on me now!

[ekg]

So there we have it.  There was laughter, and if you are admitting the obvious, that it was a joke, lame or not, then what difference does it make?  Unless he seriously as a matter of policy wants to have kids taught from this guy at gunpoint, this entire thing is a nonstory, just like I thought.

wow..

you seriously can't do it can you?  You simply can't go against anything (R) .. there is something fundamentally broken within you..you will extract any single word you can to either claim some victory of correctness or turn the  thread, like you did with the title, and now the word 'laughter'.. of course we can hear the laughter, we're not deaf or so deluded that we tune things like that out, the question is, how can you not hear the applause and the 'yeah's' spoken in agreement with what he hopes for Americans everywhere?

Huck did not get up and give his speech like a Baptist preacher giving a sermon on hell fire and damnation, with shouting and spittle flying after each syllable .. he gave a professional,well-rehearsed, dignified speech that used a little levity on something he felt deeply about.. Was there laughter? Yes, was he any less serious about his wish No. Was the crowd was in agreement, which they voiced with their applause and the 'yeah's' heard? Absolutely  ..   All you have to do is watch the 30 minute interview with Huck to see just how serious he is about this Barton guy, but hey, you don't watch these internet video's do you? Just in case they make you see or hear that which you'd rather ignore..


it's impossible to miss or misunderstand.. so what beside him being an '(R) so he gets your full support no matter what, what is your reason for the faux ignorance and this defense of this?  I had hopes of with a new webboard, you would take on a different new persona that had grown into being able to look at his party, party leaders and their ideas and speak freely against them when they were off-the-charts fucked up.. I see that is not the case, while I can say what I wish about Obama, you still can not even hear applause when it is so abundantly there for anyone else to hear if they push the 'play' button..

Yesterday Obama said "And without even looking at a poll, my finely honed political skills tell me that almost no one believes they should be paying higher taxes."

let me guess, you didn't get that while he was being jovial instead of being bombastic, he was also being serious about a very heated topic..


Howie wants a civil discourse here.. I respect that, and simply have to  back out of this topic from here on out. I cannot sit here and watch you "Kazzy-bot" another topic..by picking and choosing the words you've elected as your 'buzz-win-words' so you can avoid the issue all together while still claiming some 'just as you thought'.. 'win'.

Howie, we all heard what Huck said.. we heard the crowd's applause and 'yeah's' in agreement with him on his vision of the Sainted David and his indoctrination of America.... it's fucked up, highly fucked up.. But he's not Obama and he's not a Lib so no one but a handful of us will care.. it's that simple.. move on..

[FooFa]

They used to say at 12 step stuff, whatever clean time you have is a good start for today. I guess some of them would use their amount of time as a cause for bragging and such. But I took the principle and applied it to learning and life in general. I tend to clash somewhat with "adults" because they so often give the impression that they've arrived and are just looking back, in the way they interact with younger people on sites.

I'm not saying the helmet boy approach to politics that I'm perceived as having is the right one by any means either. I am saying that there is something to be said for being in the moment, being open and teachable, non dogmatic and letting a story exist on it's own before prejudgment and/or partisanship have any place. If three or four people try to tell me something which essentially is the same thing, it's usually a good idea to figure out what they're saying rather than digging my feet in deeper.

[lil mike]

wow..

you seriously can't do it can you?  You simply can't go against anything (R) .. there is something fundamentally broken within you..you will extract any single word you can to either claim some victory of correctness or turn the  thread, like you did with the title, and now the word 'laughter'.. of course we can hear the laughter, we're not deaf or so deluded that we tune things like that out, the question is, how can you not hear the applause and the 'yeah's' spoken in agreement with what he hopes for Americans everywhere?

Huck did not get up and give his speech like a Baptist preacher giving a sermon on hell fire and damnation, with shouting and spittle flying after each syllable .. he gave a professional,well-rehearsed, dignified speech that used a little levity on something he felt deeply about.. Was there laughter? Yes, was he any less serious about his wish No. Was the crowd was in agreement, which they voiced with their applause and the 'yeah's' heard? Absolutely  ..   All you have to do is watch the 30 minute interview with Huck to see just how serious he is about this Barton guy, but hey, you don't watch these internet video's do you? Just in case they make you see or hear that which you'd rather ignore..


it's impossible to miss or misunderstand.. so what beside him being an '(R) so he gets your full support no matter what, what is your reason for the faux ignorance and this defense of this?  I had hopes of with a new webboard, you would take on a different new persona that had grown into being able to look at his party, party leaders and their ideas and speak freely against them when they were off-the-charts fucked up.. I see that is not the case, while I can say what I wish about Obama, you still can not even hear applause when it is so abundantly there for anyone else to hear if they push the 'play' button..

Yesterday Obama said "And without even looking at a poll, my finely honed political skills tell me that almost no one believes they should be paying higher taxes."

let me guess, you didn't get that while he was being jovial instead of being bombastic, he was also being serious about a very heated topic..


Howie wants a civil discourse here.. I respect that, and simply have to  back out of this topic from here on out. I cannot sit here and watch you "Kazzy-bot" another topic..by picking and choosing the words you've elected as your 'buzz-win-words' so you can avoid the issue all together while still claiming some 'just as you thought'.. 'win'.

Howie, we all heard what Huck said.. we heard the crowd's applause and 'yeah's' in agreement with him on his vision of the Sainted David and his indoctrination of America.... it's fucked up, highly fucked up.. But he's not Obama and he's not a Lib so no one but a handful of us will care.. it's that simple.. move on..

In a way, I share your disappointment.  Not with the absurd inaccuracies that Howey posted.  That’s par for the course for him and honestly, he doesn’t really care about accuracy in these sort of stories so that is no surprise.  Nor was there any surprise that you joined in with Howey at celebrating a bullshit story.  Certainly you took the comment of Huckabee’s seriously about holding a gun to every child’s head in your first post in this thread.  You say NOW of course you heard the laughter… I’m thinking no.  I’m thinking you heard what Think Progress told you to hear.  Otherwise this story and thread would have been over before it even got started.  The applause?  Was that for Huckabee’s gunpoint comment or after?  You know the answer but you won’t say it.

So what I’ve been told in this thread:

-That Barton is Huckabee’s preacher.

-That Barton is in fact a Preacher.

These two seem to be pretty much bullshit

-That Huckabee wants to hold children at gunpoint

This, which you regarded as the meat of the matter, turns out to be a joke, which was easy to discern after listening and watching the clip.  Whether Huckabee is a fan of Barton or not, or whether Barton is a kook (which I’ve already conceded) doesn’t matter unless you really really think that Huckabee wants every child in the country to actually be indoctrinated at gunpoint.

This isn’t nitpicking.  This is the basis of your argument.  Joke or not?  If it’s not a joke, then this would be a MUCH bigger story; national news coverage story.  This isn’t a comment like growing up in Kenya, which DID get national press.  This would be much bigger than that.

If you really think he’s dead serious about that as goal, then yes, this is a big story.  If it’s a joke, then it’s nothing.

It’s a joke.  It’s clearly a joke.

So this is your Porterhouse?

I would have to say that this isn’t even a dinner roll.  I mean, I’ve addressed your entrée, found it extremely wanting, and therefore you come to the conclusion that I can’t go against anything that has an R in it.  You can’t bring yourself to admit this was an extremely weak story from the get go.

I don’t expect you to agree with my positions.  In a decade I’ve never managed to change your mind on a single thing.  That’s fine, but the idea that I have to agree with you on something as idiotic as this is or I can only inflexibly defend “R’s” is frankly absurd. 

I like discussing and arguing policy, and once upon a time, you did too. Now the type of stories you like are stories like these, where you can take something out of context to try to slander someone.  As I’ve mentioned, I’ve no love for Huckabee and since he is the absolute opposite type of Republican that I like, I have no special interest in him or in protecting him.  In fact, I wouldn’t mind something coming up that would invalidate an opportunity for him to run for President again.  But the left is in love with this type of bullshit story and as a consequence, so are you. 

Constantly with you guys, it’s a never ending parade of bullshit stories like these.  Policy?  What’s that?  Huckabee wants to hold children hostage at gun point!  And the fact that you have to reach so far for a “story” shows how weak it is.  How can you even pretend to be interested in civil discourse when you spend pages trying to defend something like this?

And it sounds all the more absurd because I really can’t believe you are falling for this, at least at this point.  You really don’t seem to care about facts or evidence, and when I point them out to you, it just makes you stick to your guns even more.  I didn’t do any research to speak of on this.  I just asked a few questions and the bulk of the story fell apart.  And then the item that you thought of as the “meat?”  All I had to do was listen to the YouTube and hear the line in context, and how it was delivered.  Quite a bit different from the way Think Progress wrote it up. 

Yes, I’m disappointed. I really thought that after so long a cool off time we could go back to arguing in a way that we both used to enjoy, but I think I was wrong about that.  You used to enjoy actually discussing policy.  Now, it’s all stories like this, and the worst of them are these types which are taken out of context.  And THIS of all things, is what you draw a line in the sand about.  Not Policy, not Principle, and not even a factual personal attack story.  No, it’s one that is so based on spin that even the lefty TV attack dogs are not wasting their time with it. 

You’ve changed quite a bit in the past few years.  You’ve gotten less and less interested in doing your own research, from real news articles, and just resort to prepackaged smears like this that don’t even have the benefit of being factual.

[Howey]

Not with the absurd inaccuracies that Howey posted.  and honestly, he doesn’t really care about accuracy in these sort of stories so that is no surprise.

That's close to pushing the line in the sand we all agreed to...

The problem here, with all due respect, is that you dwell on one word to base your argument on, whether it be "preacher" "laughter" "applause". You mangle your world of words so only those you wish exist. All others are ignored. That's a fine thing to do in the big world of politicial discussions, hell; it's done all the time, but in our little world of political discussions it doesn't work.

This all started, not with ekg or me, but within your back and forths (if that's what you want to call them) with Kazzy on the muche: The two of you participated in a level of nit-pickery never before seen and in the process lost track of the issue. Your mind got so tangled up in Kazz-bot mode you, and she, both ended up focusing on the wrong stuff.

Unable to shake yourself out of this mode, you continued the myopic arguments with ekg to the point where she couldn't, or wouldn't reply. Issues? Don't kid yourself...you haven't discussed issues in ages. You've discussed insignificant details.

This thread turned into one of those myopic arguments. By the time all was said and done, the original intent of this thread was lost in a sea of cross-eyed jabberwocky.

The point of this thread wasn't specifically about Barton, Huckabee, children, preachers, indoctrination, or guns. You should have realized that when I changed the title. It was about the irony of the right wing's obsession with Wright and Ayers two and a half years ago. A furor that grew into a sideshow of right wing indignation. A furor that gave birth to today's ridiculous claims of birthers, socialism, mildly disguised racism, and a level of  rhetoric never seen before. A furor that had more to do with discrediting a man than the issues he represented.

Lost within all that is the issues. You've lost track of these issues, Mike, and concentrate on picking the peas out of the rice instead of enjoying the whole meal.

Was this issue with Barton convered by the mainstream media? Yes. Just not your mainstream media. Was it pounded into the ground with a hatchet and stake like your mainstream media did the issue with Wright and Myers? No. In my opinion, that's not because it's not a story - everything a politician says, does, or speaks is a story - it's because the somewhere, somehow the minds that power our mainstream media decided to concentrate on the issues rather than take a myopic view of a potential candidate's interactions with one person.

[lil mike]

That's close to pushing the line in the sand we all agreed to...

The problem here, with all due respect, is that you dwell on one word to base your argument on, whether it be "preacher" "laughter" "applause". You mangle your world of words so only those you wish exist. All others are ignored. That's a fine thing to do in the big world of politicial discussions, hell; it's done all the time, but in our little world of political discussions it doesn't work.

This all started, not with ekg or me, but within your back and forths (if that's what you want to call them) with Kazzy on the muche: The two of you participated in a level of nit-pickery never before seen and in the process lost track of the issue. Your mind got so tangled up in Kazz-bot mode you, and she, both ended up focusing on the wrong stuff.

Unable to shake yourself out of this mode, you continued the myopic arguments with ekg to the point where she couldn't, or wouldn't reply. Issues? Don't kid yourself...you haven't discussed issues in ages. You've discussed insignificant details.

This thread turned into one of those myopic arguments. By the time all was said and done, the original intent of this thread was lost in a sea of cross-eyed jabberwocky.

The point of this thread wasn't specifically about Barton, Huckabee, children, preachers, indoctrination, or guns. You should have realized that when I changed the title. It was about the irony of the right wing's obsession with Wright and Ayers two and a half years ago. A furor that grew into a sideshow of right wing indignation. A furor that gave birth to today's ridiculous claims of birthers, socialism, mildly disguised racism, and a level of  rhetoric never seen before. A furor that had more to do with discrediting a man than the issues he represented.

Lost within all that is the issues. You've lost track of these issues, Mike, and concentrate on picking the peas out of the rice instead of enjoying the whole meal.

Was this issue with Barton convered by the mainstream media? Yes. Just not your mainstream media. Was it pounded into the ground with a hatchet and stake like your mainstream media did the issue with Wright and Myers? No. In my opinion, that's not because it's not a story - everything a politician says, does, or speaks is a story - it's because the somewhere, somehow the minds that power our mainstream media decided to concentrate on the issues rather than take a myopic view of a potential candidate's interactions with one person.

The comparison with Kazzy is ridiculous on many levels but primarily because ultimately, Kazzy wouldn't give up, but she wouldn't argue a point either.  So she would just repeat one statement over and over, sometimes for days.  I have a point.  Sometimes mulitple points. Now you may not like them or agree with them, but by me having them, I'm giving you something to hang either a reply or counter attack on.  In this thread, I took up every point and had a reply.  I even agreed with all of you on what probably should have been the main point of this thread, that this guy Barton was a kook.  However to ask any of you a month from now (hell, now!)  if I agreed with any points you were making or if I was just robotically supporting "R's", what you would recall?

Forget mainstream media, how about MSNBC?  I watch that network more than most of you guys I bet.  So I have a good idea of what the liberal zeitgeist is.  Chris Matthews spent over a week on Huckabee's radio interview from a few weeks ago.  A week.  So if this story isn't getting that kind of coverage, I have to ask myself, if this story is really so damning?  The first page if this thread was about this guy being Huckabee's preacher and Huckabee wanting kids to be indoctrinated by Barton at gunpoint.  Now it sounds so ridiculous at it's face, I would have thought just one person (other than me of course) would have said to themselves, "really?"  But no, you guys ate it up.  So this wasn't about me automatically supporting "R's."  It was about a story that was so out there that even Chris Matthews wouldn't touch it.  So sure enough, I investigate and find out that it's a nothing story.  Believe me, if Huckabee had seriously proposed the gunpoint indoctrination of every child in America it would have been the leading story on all 3 major networks for a lot longer than a week.

The "insignificant details"  weren't so insignifcant.  They were the basis of your entire story.

I'm not trying to push across any line in the sand, but remember, you posted this story with the original title.  When I questioned it (multiple times) it would have been so easy for you to say that it was just a metaphor for the right wing's obsession with Wright and Ayers.  But you couldn't bring yourself to do that.  So it's hard for me to accept now, at this late date, that was your original intent.  If so, you blew multiple opportunities to address the Ayers comparison.  I did ask for it, and you should have let me have it.

But you passed on that, the (now) alleged reason for the thread in the first place.

Do I think you didn't really care about the accuracy of this story?  I don't think you did.  But I don't think, based on your history, that ever read that deeply into a story like this.  You probably came across it in your blogs, thought the headline and first few sentences were cool, and posted it, without thinking any more about it.  It's confirmation bias.  For you, the idea that Huckabee, or any Republican for that matter, would want to force the children of America to listen to his "preacher" at gunpoint is probably not very far removed from your prejudices of Republicans anyway.  The person who should have really read this story critically was ekg.  And I assume at some point she did and she decided to defend it anyway.

This isn't about me kneejerk defending R's.  It's about all of you, but her in particular, kneejerk attacking someone even with all the damning "evidence" washed away.  That's a mindless kneejerk response.

Listen, you might as well know, and you should have known anyway, that in a situation in which everyone on this board is left of center except for me, that means that I'm going to be on the opposite side of everyone on a lot of issues.  Can I handle it?  Sure.  It's not that different from the old muche.  The question is, can you, and everyone else handle it?  Based on this thread, maybe not.