(08-15-2013, 02:29 PM)kandrathe Wrote: Campaign staff on both sides are frought with rabid insiders who come from legions of volunteers, and etc. But, a conservative shock jock like Jack Hunter or Hillary's aide Mark Penn, are people with pretty rabidly partisan histories. I mean, we've never even been allowed to read much of the President's written work either, which is strange for a someone attending Columbia who was pursuing writing.
The reaction to "Rand Paul's top aide thought the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was awesome" is "oh, well, Mark Penn! And what about all those things Obama might have written, if only we could read them?" This is false equivalence taken to a very high level indeed.
I mean, I *loathe* Mark Penn. But he's so far above neo-Confederate slavery apologists that they aren't even remotely comparable. Hunter's crime isn't that he's "partisan." It's that he is TOASTING the assassin of the man who ENDED SLAVERY. I'm all for historical nuance, but John Wilkes Booth? That's like toasting Osama Bin Laden, or Nicolas Ceaucescu - just perverse.
The innuendo about Obama is just strange, Glenn Beck-ish "question asking". Do you have any reason to suspect that this otherwise-reasonable individual has anything in his writings that even vaguely approach the kind of nuttery that goes on in the Rand Paul camp?
-Jester
Afterthought: In case we aren't clear about my larger argument here in the thread: The idea that "Oh, both sides are so bad, we must despair of all politics" is horsepuckey. It's intellectual laziness, freeing us from the obligations of evaluating politics and politicians on their own merits, and therefore, just maybe, supporting the better ones and eliminating the worse. You write: "It's boring... We heard two sides argue... No easy answers... Move on." and I can't agree more. But that's exactly what this thread seems like to me: For every Republican misdeed, we can find a Democratic one, and vice versa. Ergo, all politicians are slime, and we need some outside force (Rand Paul and the Libertarians?!?) to fix it.