This forum is so good because FR has developed a terrific balance of wide open debate without allowing Dadaists to degrade the forums by posting nonsense and throwing bombs for the express purpose of destroying debate.
I know a lot of the Pat Buchanan followers have left, and are frequently the people most upset with FR later. Unfortunately for Pat, he is now less relevent to American politics than Ralph Nader or the Constitution Party. The election this fall will be between two people, George Bush, and most likely, John Kerry. One of these people will be President. The most pressing issue facing America and the rest of the world is the War on Terror. Kerry will surrender. Bush will fight. That's the truth, and we will either be united on this issue, or we will watch another faker enter the White House. I was born in 1954, and John Kennedy was the best Democrat President since my birth. Lyndon Johnson. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton. Possibly John Kerry. Compare to Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush (41) and George Bush (43). This country cannot afford John Kerry in the White House. He makes Bill Clinton look classy, and Bill Clinton makes Barry Switzer look classy.
Thanks, Jim. For someone I've never met, you've been an awfully good friend over the last five years.
This forum is so good because FR has developed a terrific balance of wide open debate without allowing Dadaists to degrade the forums by posting nonsense and throwing bombs for the express purpose of destroying debate.
Like any creation from the mind of man, this place is imperfect, and as with any gathering of Americans with varying experiences, there are differing opinions about how those experiences, good or bad, should influence our future policy as a people and as a nation...and what backup plans we should have in place in the event of the failure or misfire of any of the hopefully ambitious ones. This place is not so vain about itself that it can't spot warts and flaws and correct them; instead of coverup, improvement and repair rules around here. Once a national trait, we may see the pendulum swing back that way again...and in part, perhaps, because we've set the example.
But my grandfather's dictionary defined politics as a plan or structure designed to influence future events; and so if some, maybe most, public officials often get a bad rap nowadays, those who remember the body politic and heed the thoughts it offers generally do a little better. I personally know of at least one fairly prominent congressman who's not a freeper, but who surfs here regularly. I'm very pleased to admit that he contacted me with some requests for information about a technical matter of concern to him, and I did my best to fill him in. I'm sure there've been many other and better examples of the same sort of thing happen.
So Jim Rob created a garden; and like any of its kind, it has its weeds, and sometimes crows come to peck at the blossoms. That which grows here is a particularly hardy plant, poisonous to those who try to devour it and thorny should they try to uproot it. It's better that those who would attempt such actions try it here than where more delicate folwers bloom that might more easily be eradicated. We won't be.
And if Jim Rob were to be run over by a bus tomorrow, he'd be missed and mourned by those here, of course, but the garden he planted would bloom on, offering flora both decorative and nourishing...as well as self-propagating, and expanding. That is not at all the only legacy he'd leave behind, of course, but it's certainly a major one. And it's even more than at least one former President of the United States, the 42nd one, can claim.
Not bad. Not bad at all.