I could be wrong, but, what you described here sounds just like FR's evolutionists to me.
Posted on 04/03/2005 4:15:09 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Anyone would think it was the Republicans who'd lost the 2004 elections, and the 2002 elections, and the 2000 elections. From every corner, concerned "friends" of the party rise to offer "friendly" advice. Norman Lear, who produced all those critically acclaimed issue-confronting heroine-gets-an-abortion '70s sitcoms that seem a lot more dated than ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' these days, has now produced a People For the American Way ad in which a man who identifies himself as a "common sense Republican" objects to any attempt to end the Democratic filibuster of Bush's judicial nominees. As things turn out, the "common sense Republican" has so much common sense he's an official with a union that endorsed John Kerry.
Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:
"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."
Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.
Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.
The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.
The notion, for example, that poor Terri Schiavo will cost Republicans votes in a year and a half's time is ludicrous. The best distillation of the pro-Schiavo case was made by James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, responding to the provocateur Christopher Hitchens' dismissal of her as a "non-human entity." "It is not wise," wrote Lileks, "to call people dead before they are actually, well, dead. You can be 'as good as dead' or 'brain dead' or 'close to death,' but if the heart beats and the chest rises, I think we should balk at saying this constitutes dead, period."
Just so. Once you get used to designating living, breathing bodies as "non-human entities," it's easy to bandy them ever more carelessly -- as they do in the eminently progressive Netherlands, where their relaxed attitude to pot and prostitution led to a relaxed attitude to euthanasia which looks like relaxing the Dutch people right out of business. It's all done quietly over there -- no fuss, no publicity; you go in to hospital with a heavy cold and you're carried out by the handles. (By "handles," I mean a coffin, not a ceremonial phalanx of Monteagles and Princetons.) But that's not the American way. This is a legalistic society, where grade schools can't have kids knocking a ball around without getting a gazillion dollars worth of liability insurance. I was in Price Chopper the other day and they had a little basket of Easter samples on display accompanied by a page of full print outlining the various sub-clauses of the company's "tasting policy." That's America. In Holland, you can taste a cookie without signing a legal waiver, and, if you get food poisoning from it, the doctor will discreetly euthanize you to avoid putting your family through the trauma of waiting six hours for the stomach pump to become available. That's not how the American cookie crumbles. Euthanasia here will be a 10-year court culminating in slow-motion public execution played out on the 24-hour cable channels.
The Republicans did the right thing here, and they won't be punished for it by the electors. As with abortion, this will be an issue where the public moves slowly but steadily toward the conservative position: Terri Schiavo's court-ordered death will not be without meaning. As to "crack-ups," that's only a neurotic way of saying that these days most of the intellectual debate is within the right. If, like the Democrats, all you've got are lockstep litmus tests on race and abortion and all the rest, what's to crack up over? You just lose elections every two years, but carry on insisting, as Ted Kennedy does, that you're still the majority party. Ted's quite a large majority just by himself these days, but it's still not enough.
You're thinking of another group OR you are intentionally bearing false witness. It is not the WPPFF that is vicious, but your post typifies why the thread started.
I think Mr. Steyn is correct. I think that the only significant decamp we will see based on Mrs. Schiavo's case will be Democrats who leave their party because of revulsion at its handling of this case. Republicans will recognize that their party took the right side, particularly at the national level, even if their stance did not prevail.
Why are you maligning a group of freepers knowing what you say is false?
How sad.
You take two issues and smoosh them together and falsely call them one and the same.
Stop it.
I could be wrong, but, what you described here sounds just like FR's evolutionists to me.
Seems to me most of us stand the heat just fine and that seems to bother you a LOT.
LOL
Hey..I'm still here. Heat is what I live for..go for it. :^)
My main problem in addition to the massive bearing of false witness against others (calling pro-life freepers pro-death) is/was the wholesale rejection of documentation about certain aspects of the saga in favor of vicious rumor-mongering and ever escalating exchanges on the evilness of certain players vs the sainthood on the other side.
After 15 years, somebody comes along and says she reacted to stimuli?
So what....so does my peace lilly.
You mean we don't have any?? Long overdue move! LOL!
Oh yes, characterizing someone who has been vilified (falsely and baselessly) who then arrives to present facts as engaging in a pity party is so "right".
LOL
WPPFF = Witness Protection Program for Freepers.
Heed your own words and stop lumping the WPPFF as of one mind on the subject.
You're right -- as the facts seep out to those who depended on the MSM.
You're here, we're here. You're the one who threw out the "if you can't stand the heat" comment.
You're a great freeper, cyncooper. Thanks for all your input and support on this topic.
bttt
Some of us landed on a thread about how Terri Schiavo was going to die on Good Friday and it was part of a Satanic plot when a good freeper posted a sensible post that many of us were pinged to about how FR looked and felt at the time.
From there a discussion of the prevailing emotional atmosphere on FR ensued and many of us were in agreement that it was different than usual. While we were not in agreement on the Terri Schiavo case (many were against removing the feeding tube, some were for the court decisions, some a mix) we all agreed the discussion could take place without the vitriol and baseless attacks we all had witnessed.
So, somehow this civil discussion that developed got thrown in the Smoky Backroom. It was fine, we decided, because many of us agreed that venturing out to the main forum was just plain weird at that time.
Then someone coined the phrase Witness Protection Program For Freepers because many felt like persona non grata in Freeperland, relegated to a smoky backroom and conversations with freepers we thought we "knew" out in the main forum had entered the Twilight Zone.
So, after a couple days on the original bizarrely titled thread a freeper posted another thread in the SBR and there it is.
Now the "group" (hundreds of various minded freepers on the whole range of the Schiavo matter) are constantly mischaracterized (in the fashion that drove the formation of the thread) as "pro-death" and anti-Republican,etc.
It is simply an effort to engage the discussion on the level we are used to and not the DU tone that these threads unfortunately have a tendency to take on.
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