Rules for thee, and rules for me

[Woodsman]

Classmates said he smoked a notable amount of pot and bullied smaller students.

One of those who did get to know Bush in these early days was Peter Tibbetts. The connection, he said, was pot. The first time Tibbetts smoked marijuana, he said, was with Bush and a few other classmates in the woods near Pemberton Cottage. Then, a few weeks later, Tibbetts said he smoked hashish — a cannabis product typically stronger than pot — in Jeb’s dormitory room.

“The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb’s room,” Tibbetts said. “He had a portable stereo with removable speakers. He put on Steppenwolf for me.” As the rock group’s signature song, “Magic Carpet Ride,’’ blared from the speakers, Tibbetts said he smoked hash with Bush.

He said he once bought hashish from Bush but stressed, in a follow-up e-mail, “Please bear in mind that I was seeking the hash. It wasn’t as if he was a dealer, though he did suggest I take up cigarettes so that I could hold my hits better, after that first joint.”

Bush previously has acknowledged what he called his “stupid” and “wrong” use of marijuana. In the years since, he has opposed efforts to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use.

Apparently he gave it up for love, eventually marrying "the only girl he had ever dated."

Oh brother.


https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/pol...BfK/story.html

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Odd.

I don't recall seeing mainstream hit pieces on the sitting President's acknowledged marijuana use. Especially in the first election leadup. The marginal right wing press certainly went loco over it and still does.

But credible news sources? Not so much.

President Obama's drug use as an issue was very carefully managed in my opinion.

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Anywho, in my opinion.....ANY hit piece on a political candidate who enjoys the largesse of political dynastic nepotism should include the full spectrum.

Otherwise, what is the point?

Encourage hatred of the Bush dynasty? To what purpose?

To push voters into the arms of another political dynasty in the form of the Clintons?

Overall, I reckon these types of articles are counterproductive as it simply encourages divide between the political dynasty I support versus the political dynasty the enemy supports.

It's as silly as professional sports.

Sports fans/voters go full retard and live for the rivalries, failing to understand the team owners(special interests) and the star players(political dynasties) are focused on counting the money.

Without a broader non-partisan emphasis on the evils of nepotistic political dynasties, this is just more us versus us fodder, when it should be us versus the special interests backing all of the political dynasties that facilitate their influence/control.

Bush, Cuomo, Clinton, Daley, Kennedy, Rockefeller

All singled out individually as fodder to fan the flames, but always from a single partisan perspective.

[Woodsman]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Odd. I don't recall seeing mainstream hit pieces on the sitting President's acknowledged marijuana use. Especially in the first election leadup. The marginal right wing press certainly went loco over it and still does. But credible news sources? Not so much.

Google came up with 1.9 millions hits. If one percent of those meets your criteria of "credible news source," that's plenty of coverage. You must have been busy that year.

President Obama's drug use as an issue was very carefully managed in my opinion.

Well, considering he wrote about it in great detail in his autobiography (and said it on tape for the audiobook), I can't say it was managed all that deftly. I think the open discussion was a sort of ham fisted "wink wink" to the left by the neocons running the current occupant. Surely it added to his popularity among key demographics. It certainly did no harm except to the right wingers whose widdle heads exploded upon hearing the news.

Now you want to see a carefully managed story about "past indiscretions" look to the Fortunate Son's cocaine and alcohol abuse.

Never heard of it? It was set to be published by a little fly-by-night conspiracy outfit called "St Martin's Press" but word is careful management by Karl Rove put the kibosh on it at the 11th hour. Or maybe they just changed their minds. You know, just as any publisher would do with a timely, potential blockbuster of a book.

Oh yeah, and the author was smeared to the point of suicide. Is that the sort of management you mean?

Anywho, in my opinion.....ANY hit piece on a political candidate who enjoys the largesse of political dynastic nepotism should include the full spectrum. Otherwise, what is the point? Encourage hatred of the Bush dynasty? To what purpose? To push voters into the arms of another political dynasty in the form of the Clintons?

To tell the truth? To show his hypocrisy? To warn voters? And I don't know, Lake. One would think destroying the last vestiges of republican government, starting a war on false pretenses, ubiquitous surveillance, and tanking the economy for a generation would be enough reason for some to hate the guy?

Besides, it makes little difference who wins. I guess you didn't hear. Wall Street loves Clinton. Say, you don't think these boys would actually risk an election where there were substantive differences between the candidates now, do you? No, of course you don't.

Overall, I reckon these types of articles are counterproductive as it simply encourages divide between the political dynasty I support versus the political dynasty the enemy supports. It's as silly as professional sports. Sports fans/voters go full retard and live for the rivalries, failing to understand the team owners(special interests) and the star players(political dynasties) are focused on counting the money. Without a broader non-partisan emphasis on the evils of nepotistic political dynasties, this is just more us versus us fodder, when it should be us versus the special interests backing all of the political dynasties that facilitate their influence/control.

I'm with you on the horse race. But if we didn't cover the election as a horse race, we might actually have to talk about meaningful subjects and that would be bad for business.

And why would someone have a problem with a candidate who freely used illegal drugs for years without consequence and then turns around and runs on an anti-drug, law and order platform? It must be partisanship. Full retard, no doubt.

Bush, Cuomo, Clinton, Daley, Kennedy, Rockefeller. All singled out individually as fodder to fan the flames, but always from a single partisan perspective.

Other than Jack, I never supported any of those. So from my perspective it's not partisan, but I doubt I could convince you otherwise.

You don't mind if I don't try, do you?

[don]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

we might actually have to talk about meaningful subjects and that would be bad for business.

+1 (though I agree agitating the partisan angina isn't 'productive')

[vt]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

But you did admit to supporting Nixon:-)

But that was in a galaxy long ago and far away so maybe we can forgive.

Why then so much venom against anything considered even slightly towards conservatism. Is reducing wasteful spending that bad? All respect for standing up to the needy and mistreated; we call concur with that, but why not a more nuanced view of differing opinions. We all need to compromise, which I try to do.

I don't want Bush nor Clinton. In fact I don't see any potential candidate from either party acceptable currently.

[Andreuccio]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Moderately interesting, Woody, but surely there are better arguments to be made against Jeb Bush's candidacy than what he was doing when he was 14.

Also, it's not reasonable to accuse someone of hypocrisy for doing something as a teenager and then opposing it as an adult. If he were still smoking pot now, or had stopped only recently, that would be hypocrisy. But in my view 40 plus years is long enough to believe that his change of opinion is real and based on maturity, not necessarily on a desire to have two sets of rules. Imagine how silly life would be if we all were required to forever espouse the opinions we held as teenagers.

[Woodsman]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

But you did admit to supporting Nixon:-)

I was GOP staffer, not criminally insane. Back when there was a difference.

But that was in a galaxy long ago and far away so maybe we can forgive.

Never going to happen.

Why then so much venom against anything considered even slightly towards conservatism. Is reducing wasteful spending that bad? All respect for standing up to the needy and mistreated; we call concur with that, but why not a more nuanced view of differing opinions. We all need to compromise, which I try to do.

That's rich, conservatives arguing for nuance and compromise. As for standing up for the needy and mistreated, spare me. There is no such thing as conservatism without inequality, and more of it the better. Conservatism and inequality are the obverse and reverse of the same coin.

It goes to show that most people who call themselves conservatives have little notion of what conservatism even is. Conservatism isn't about "wasteful spending." It's about power and the premise that some are born to rule over those born to subservience. It is a war by the few against the many.

I oppose conservatism and right reaction because it represents a destructive system of inequality and prejudice founded on deception and violence that seeks the domination of society by an aristocracy. Conservatism and right reaction is the problem. What it seeks to conserve is power and privilege. What motivates it is animus against the agency of those it considers the subordinate classes. It seeks justification as to why those it classifies in the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. To a right reactionary, any demand from or on behalf of these lower orders, no matter how tepid or long overdue, is too much, too soon, too fast. Reform is revolution, improvement is insurrection.

All rightist movements are a reaction to bottom-up democratic movements that seek to broaden political participation with the goal of redistributing power and resources from those who have too much to those who have too little. Its most central feature is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the some people that the aristocracy are better people than they are.

The goal of conservatism is to establish a permanent condition of social and psychological inequality - an aristocracy. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are natural conservatives; democrats (note the small d), by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years before the term "conservative" was ever uttered.

But at the most basic level, I reject conservative and right reaction because it seeks to destroy conscience, reason, language and democracy:

• It destroys conscience by twisting the language of conscience into its opposite and pretending to be the opposite of what it actually is. It represents the destruction of conscience as a type of liberation, continually egging on its denizens to destroy their own minds by punching through one layer after another of their consciences.

• It destroys rational thought by using language in ways that are just out of reach of rational debate or rebuttal. And since reason occurs largely through the medium of language, the destruction of reason requires the destruction of language. To right reactionaries, language is like territory in warfare; something to be held and controlled by one side or the other. Words are used in twisted and exaggerated ways, or with the opposite of their customary meanings. The goal of this distorted language is not simply to defeat an enemy but to destroy the minds of the people.

• And it has forever stood in opposition to democracy. When it cannot attack democracy directly, it attempts to redefine it through deception so as to make the substance of democracy unthinkable.

I will never live to see it, but my greatest political wish is the utter defeat and discrediting of conservatism and right reaction. It's a quixotic struggle, I readily admit, but nonetheless I try do my little part by working to explain what it is and what is so wrong with it. This I do by rebutting their arguments in detail and through the "liberal" use of ridicule and farce. Rebutting their arguments can be challenging and tiresome. Highlighting their ridiculousness is easy and often quite fun.

What I won't do is play ball by their rules or play nice with people who want me disenfranchised, powerless and dead. That some conservatives characterize this as venomous is to me a measure of success.

[vt]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Well I don't want you powerless or dead, and definitely your right to vote is unchallenged. I do get where you are coming from.

Round up all the conservatives and put them in reeducation camps. Then round up all the real leftists, not liberals because they aren't dangerous. Put the lefties in a next door reeducation camp.

Then the independents can finally end poverty and get other worthy things done.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Well there's one good thing about this thread.....and that's the location....in rant and rave.

VT, I assume you're joking?

It's pretty clear Woodsman isn't.

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it's rather enlightening(not in a good way) to read a post where pretty much anything right of center is somehow responsible for all the world's ills.

Instead of yellow stars do people get little blue elephants to wear before you throw them in the ovens?

[vt]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Why are threads like this even started? I did a couple in the past that were mild, and have tried hard to avoid doing so again.

No, I don't advocate reeducation camps.

Let's discuss the important things like was the last Seattle Superbowl play call stupid or not!

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Why are threads like this even started? I did a couple in the past that were mild, and have tried hard to avoid doing so again.

No, I don't advocate reeducation camps.

Let's discuss the important things like was the last Seattle Superbowl play call stupid or not!

I wish I could have seen it. But too busy toiling away on our Monday...as we're from the fuuuuuuture.

Our broadcast down here doesn't include the TV commercials or the half time spectacle.

Katy Perry is a national treasure. Sadly we didn't see her version of a State of the Union Address.

I stopped watching all professional sports(bar the odd All Blacks Rugby World Cup national religion) when the Eagles got destroyed a decade ago.

I tend to look at professional sports the same way I look at CNBC......I like the contrarian anecdotals the most

[vt]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Hey Lake this one at least started out in the political abyss.

It's interesting that threads like this start out as obvious or thinly disguised political hit pieces. Then when someone states a mild what about this? question they are painted like Attila the Hun reincarnated.

We've seen the Ukraine turned from a sovereign state, to seeing incursions of Russian special forces, then forcibly having territory taken to promote the manhood of a former mid level KGB agent trying to start recreating the empire of the Soviet Union. Threads are then started to make it look like a vast western conspiracy.

Same thing with the Malaysian plane that was shot down by Russian separatists.

The common theme of the threads is political in nature, but since it's not coming form the center or right it's ok. But the minute someone says maybe we're taking on a bit too much debt, then it's like hurting the poor.

Many of these threads are planted as news and not political pieces, which they are. It's telling that we don't see hit pieces on liberal candidates, only conservative.
Now Presidential elections do have economic factors, but should be in the political section only.

I'd rather be asking good economic questions of EJ, and posting about technology and health breakthroughs. But it's also an irritant to see the planted political pieces that you feel you should respond to to raise a question.

[don]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

a current example of the damage these clowns can do:

Medical experts responded to zigzag statements by Republican presidential hopefuls on Monday about the supposedly unsettled science of vaccines with a single-word answer: no.

No, there is no link between vaccines and autism. No, the science is not up in the air. And no, people who might very well run to lead the country should not still be saying this, the experts said.

The pushback from the medical community came as Congress prepared to convene an inquiry Tuesday morning on the current uptick in measles cases and the relative ineffectiveness of the 2014-15 flu vaccine. The vaccine this flu season had just a 23% effectiveness rate, compared with 50-60% most years, according to Representative Tim Murphy, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who will chair the panel.

Doctors and academics responded sharply to remarks Monday about vaccines by two prospective Republican presidential candidates, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kentucky senator Rand Paul.

First, Christie kicked off a controversy by saying that in setting vaccinations policy, the government must strike a “balance” between public health and parental discretion.

Later Monday, interviewed about the issue, Paul – who is an ophthalmologist – said on CNBC that he had “heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines”, and argued that “most of them [vaccines] ought to be voluntary”.

The comments came as the Centers for Disease Control counted 102 measles cases in January, after a record year in 2014 for measles cases since its elimination was documented in the United States in 2000.

Dr Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the science was “utterly conclusive, completely conclusive”.

“I think what you can say about science is that truths emerge,” Offit said. “Gravity is not a theory anymore. Evolution is not a theory. Heliocentrism is not a theory. There are truths that emerge. And this is a truth.”

The science is built on an exceptionally strong, internally consistent and large body of experiments around the world, Offit said.

“This has been done now in 14 separate studies, on three different continents, involving hundreds and hundreds of thousands of children,” Offit said. “The answer is always the same. You are not at greater risk of getting autism if you received a [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine than if you didn’t. All you’re doing, by choosing not to vaccinate with an MMR vaccine, is increase your risk of getting measles or mumps or German measles, and not in any way decreasing your risk of getting autism.”

Other medical researchers agreed that one reason the public seemed ill-equipped to make judgments about vaccines and autism is that in the United States, diseases such as measles are very rare.

[Woodsman]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

Well there's one good thing about this thread.....and that's the location....in rant and rave.

VT, I assume you're joking?

It's pretty clear Woodsman isn't...

Do relax, vt. Nobody thinks you want to put anyone anywhere and Lake is just pulling your chain.

Look closely enough at any of our major problems and you will find a right reactionary either egging it on or standing in the way of resolution. Here's a few just off the top of my head:

• Fiscal crises
• Structurally high unemployment/underemployment
• Severe income disparity
• Failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation
• Global governance failure
• Profound political and social instability

And that's before the coffee kicked in.

It's probably too much to ask a subject of the commonwealth to cast off the psychological chains of aristocracy, and nigh well impossible for those who dedicate their lives to the protection of the status quo. I doubt very much such people are capable of enlightenment in that respect.

The democratic culture we Americans have built is truly a monument to civilization and it remains under constant attack by right reactionaries. The American Revolution swept away the entire social system of the gentry and did so with a suddenness and thoroughness that surprised and amazed everyone who lived through it. So completely did Americans repudiate the conservative social system of the gentry that they felt free to mythologize the Founding Fathers, forgetting their ambitions of becoming what Hamilton characterized as a "natural aristocracy" and instead recasting them as revolutionary democrats.

The North repudiated conservatism altogether. Indeed it was the only society in modern history without an aristocracy and the dynamism of its democratic culture was most extraordinary. While in the South the conservative order resembled the oppressive latifundist systems of Latin America. Compared to the South, the North was and remains a more dynamic and successful society. Southern conservatism has had to modify its strategies in recent decades, but its grip on Southern culture is stronger than ever.

Come the 20th Century we see the rise of corporations, allowing a new generation of would-be aristocrats the opportunity to reinvent themselves. In addition to terror, the aristocrats added psychology to their arsenal in the form of public relations. Early public relations texts were quite openly conservative, and public relations practitioners openly affirmed that their profession existed to manipulate the common people psychologically in order to ensure the domination of society by a narrow elite.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

- Ed Bernays, "Propaganda"

Closer to our era, as corporate interests reacted to the democratic renaissance of the sixties, targeted terror and sophisticated propaganda was employed to dispense with popular democratic leaders and begin anew the slow process of re-orienting society towards corporate/aristocratic control. Look to the Powell Memorandum as as the "Mein Kampf" of the era. The 70s and 80s saw the rise of the modern conservative movement, with the bright smile and sunny optimism of Reagan successfully submerging right reactionary overt contempt for the people.

There a strategy was employed to place wedges into the many divides in that era's popular democracy, leveraging the divisions highlighted by the democratic renaissance of the 1960s to their advantage. A mythical working class whose values Reaganites conflated with those of the conservative order was created and set against an equally mythical professional class of liberal wreckers. By the 1990s, right reactionaries institutionalized their methods of politics on a large scale and it used these to savage and delegitimize democratic institutions.

At the start of the 21st Century, right reaction in the form of conservatism reigns supreme. A once vibrant and dynamic democratic culture lies in tatters, with authoritarianism, terror, psychological manipulation, technology and ubiquitous surveillance, political corruption, and centralized economic management on behalf of the 1% delivering a decisive victory to the forces of right reaction and ushering in the "End of History."

It takes an extraordinary amount of self-discipline to avoid the truth that right reactionaries of both parties rule this country and set its agenda. And to deny that the good fellows pulling the strings and writing the checks are anything other than right reactionaries seems to me a superhuman feat of self-delusion. Surely my mealy and timid efforts are no match for such strength.

[don]

Re: Rules for thee but not for me

or to be put another way, has neoliberalism ever been voted out of office . . . .