Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Re: Hate congress

[quote name="Reichsminister Doktor Goebbels"][quote name="laudablepuss"]<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2150152">Go ahead, hate it.</a> This reminds me of when Fusbett wondered why Bush's approval rating was higher than zero.[/quote] 1. Dickerson criticizes Republicans in Congress for sitting on their criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq War. Specifically,"[T]hey're not going to say anything in public now. Why? They don't want to hurt the GOP's election chances by appearing to criticize the president." If only they had the courage in their ideological convictions to screw themselves out of a job and hand over the legislative reins to a pack of unreconstructed bolsheviks set to disburse the national treasury to whoever can have the most nigger babies. I don't know a lot of words; maybe "the timid majority" means the same thing as "the rational self-interested majority" or "the not stupid majority." If you're really convinced it's a problem, the people to blame are voters who view all political contests as wars between cults of personality wherein the metric for electability is how much faith the relevant candidates have in their party's man-god. 2. Dickerson criticizes candidates (but <i>mostly</i> Republicans, so it's still okay to read Slate, disaffected twentysomethings) for the "low-minded attacks on their opponents" that we can expect in the election run-up. At least Dickerson admits this one is our own fault, since these are the most effective ads on the electorate. Nonetheless, his prediction that Republican ads will be more opprobrious because of "the GOP's dismal congressional record" is pretty tenuous, unless he meant that the Republicans are doing a shitty job of effecting Democratic policy objectives, which is all that can account for the idea that Democrats who are not in Congress are more likely to hang their hats on their congressional records than Republican incumbents who actually have said records upon which to hang said hats. 3. Graft is bad. Dickerson probably had a deadline, and was forced to come up with two more ideas for a hook. [quote] Let's all take special time out to hate Ted Stevens and his <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/19/ap/politics/mainD8IV78Q86.shtml">lame appologists.</a> He meant "tubes" metaphorically, huh? What about when he complained that internet companies were using the internet to deliver their product instead of FedEx and the post office like he thinks they're supposed to? HOW DARE THEY? Maybe he meant FedEx metaphorically too. And yes, he did say, <a href="http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/497">"my staff sent me an internet".</a> Add all this to the giant pork bill for (among other things) the "bridge to nowhere" and his shocking hold on the bill to let the public view congressional spending online. Just the picture of corruption and stupidity, I'd say. :( In case you haven't heard it, <a href="http://www.odeo.com/channel/37585/view">this</a> is kinda funny. At least the first minute or so. (Scroll down to DJ_Teds_techno_tubes.mp3.)[/quote] Do you really think he meant it's a physical set of pneumatic tubes in which a tangible copy of his email was sent? For what it's worth, it sounds to me like he meant to contrast FedEx with the internet. What he's describing is the consumption of bandwidth for "commercial purposes," essentially as a means for entities to deliver stuff. When the thing to be delivered is information instead of consumer products, this is a cogent metaphor. The internet has a limited capacity, just as a highway full of FedEx trucks has a limited capacity, and that scarcity is why FedEx pays to do what it does, whereas, according to Senator Stevens, the mysterious entites that send out scads of information are not required to pay for what they do. I have no idea whether what he describes is a real threat or not - I suspect it isn't - but everybody's response to this makes me wonder if you're so convinced the icy hand of Ted Stevens will make you pay to register your six fake Myspace pages that you'd prefer to ignore the issue and laugh dismissively at the 140-year-old man because he doesn't have the awesome Oink ratio you do.[/quote]