Couple of things
- If things like this keep happening, I might be willing to push aside my disbelief and possibly consider that the voting public at large might actually give Democrats control of at least one of the branches of Congress.
- Neither one of these endorsements by the Athens Banner-Herald are terribly surprising. They endorsed Bill Cowsert over Jane Kidd last time around, so it's understandable they'd do so again. Likewise, the editorial staff was rightly critical of Ralph Hudgens during the redistricting efforts earlier this year, so it makes sense to endorse Athenian Mac Rawson.
- Speaking of the elections, the first Athens Press Club debate was last night. I like Doug McKillup's idea of mimicking the federal earned income tax credit at the state level, but I also like Regina Quick's idea of targeting state funding for needy schools. And while what Bob Smith says about responsible parenting is quite true, I don't think teaching kids the Pledge of Allegiance is going to lead to a sudden rise in SAT scores.
- She's playing a big role? Shoot, the number of ads I've seen her in you'd think Mary Perdue was running for governor and not her husband.
- Revealing his love for all things Cal Ripken Jr.-related, Tim breaks down the Hall of Fame classes for the next few years. Though ... Harold Baines? Really?
- Matt Yglesias has a new site, and I think he makes good sense in this posting about personal experience and political determination and how Democrats often confuse the two, much to their own peril. However, I think he doesn't give Sen. Barack Obama much credit in this criticism, and the first commenter notes how Obama fended off attacks from Bobby Rush in a previous election.
- Will Ferrell is funny.
- Neither one of these endorsements by the Athens Banner-Herald are terribly surprising. They endorsed Bill Cowsert over Jane Kidd last time around, so it's understandable they'd do so again. Likewise, the editorial staff was rightly critical of Ralph Hudgens during the redistricting efforts earlier this year, so it makes sense to endorse Athenian Mac Rawson.
Ralph Hudgens, the incumbent Republican in the state Senate District 47 seat, is the poster child for everything wrong with having a single party dominant in the state legislature. Such dominance creates an atmosphere in which legislators can, and will, do things just because they can. In this year's state legislative session, Hudgens proved himself willing to engage in just such shameless partisanship, as he sponsored legislation redrawing Senate District 46 and 47 for no reason other than to make them more Republican-friendly. That he did so with virtually no consultation with the area's local governments or citizens makes his heavy-handed action all the more execrable.
- Speaking of the elections, the first Athens Press Club debate was last night. I like Doug McKillup's idea of mimicking the federal earned income tax credit at the state level, but I also like Regina Quick's idea of targeting state funding for needy schools. And while what Bob Smith says about responsible parenting is quite true, I don't think teaching kids the Pledge of Allegiance is going to lead to a sudden rise in SAT scores.
- She's playing a big role? Shoot, the number of ads I've seen her in you'd think Mary Perdue was running for governor and not her husband.
- Revealing his love for all things Cal Ripken Jr.-related, Tim breaks down the Hall of Fame classes for the next few years. Though ... Harold Baines? Really?
- Matt Yglesias has a new site, and I think he makes good sense in this posting about personal experience and political determination and how Democrats often confuse the two, much to their own peril. However, I think he doesn't give Sen. Barack Obama much credit in this criticism, and the first commenter notes how Obama fended off attacks from Bobby Rush in a previous election.
- Will Ferrell is funny.
posted by Jmac at 7:13 AM
16 Comments:
As the MSNBC article makes clear, Limbaugh said this on Monday:
"Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."
Now, I heard some of Limbaugh's show yesterday, and he referred repeatedly to a passage in Fox's book he wrote a few years back in which Fox admits that when he goes before congressional committees and the like he does not take his medication. He does this so that everyone can be fully shocked of the disease and its effects.
In other words, Fox does what Limbaugh alleged he does. My question is, exactly how is this "mocking" Fox? It is shaming him for using his disease to score political points, particularly (another point Limbaugh made yesterday in the ten minutes I heard) in the Missouri race where the amendment being voted on is about cloning, not stem-cell research.
But I really do think that Rush is the kind of person who would might have benefitted from going to college. I'm not a fan, per se. Honest.
There are couple of ways to address that ...
1. Taking the medication or not is irrelevant to me. If Fox is out there trying to dig up some sort of support for treatment and research for Parkinson's Disease, why wouldn't it be appropriate to show just what the disease does? To illustrate how awful the disease truly is ... that the medication he takes only limits him from having these significant and horrible problems. The disease is an awful disease, so why is it wrong to show just how awful it is?
2. You selectively chose one aspect of Limbaugh's quotation and omitted using the portions where he said that Fox was exaggerating his conditions, and that all he was doing was an act. Now, though I may disagree with the medication-line-of-argument, it's at least a more reasonable one. Accusing a man suffering from such a debilitating disease of faking his symptoms is pretty ridiculous.
3. Regarding whether or not Fox took the medicine in the ad, Fox's advisors have said that he has been taking the medicines and they are working quite well. But, again, I don't think that's at all relevant to the claims.
4. Personally, I think Limbaugh allowed his ideological opposition to stem-cell research to bleed over into a personal attack on Fox. There's really no other rational way for me to think otherwise. It's pointless to say it was 'shameful' of Fox to act the way he did and Limbaugh, being like many talk show pundits from both sides, more than likely holds a legitimate disdain for anything representing the opposition. Rather than argue why he opposes stem-cell research, he went personal and said Fox was faking. Why? What's the point? If it's not personal, than what is it?
I think the point is that if proponents of some particular political proposal are unscrupulous in their supporting methods, then the proposal is likely a bad one. Rush should probably be careful with that one.
Hey Xon, what's next, defending the Harold-Ford-likes-white-girls TV ads in Tennessee?
Darren
[Please note tongue firmly planted in cheek.]
Well, does he?
JMac, in response to your point 4. Limbaugh actually said explicitly that his criticism had nothing to do with his opposition to stem-cell research. The proposed Missouri constitutional amendment is about cloning research, not stem-cell research. Fox's condition seems irrelevant to the amendment, acc. to Rush's argument, yet he's using his condition to endorse the Democratic candidate. Dems will help fix my terrible condition (by giving federal money for morally-controversial research programs that aren't even coming up for discussion in Missouri at this time).
1. Perhaps you are right that there is nothing wrong with Fox not taking his medication to "show" his disease to certain people in certain contexts. But the point is that, when Limbaugh claims that this is what he's doing, and Fox admits that he does it, then why does MSNBC run a headline saying that Limbaugh "mocked" Fox? My concern, really, is mostly about the headline and only to a lesser extent the article itself. If Rush wants to ride this horse, then it will be bumpy for him and that shouldn't come as a surprise. But that doesn't excuse 'the media' from writing articles that misrepresent what was said.
2. I was selective in my choice of Limbaugh quotation from the article, but my selectivity had a rational basis. All of Rush's speculations about Fox deliberately exaggerating his condition (which still does not amount to "denying" that he has a condition as the MSNBC article implied) are later qualified by his disjuntive statement "Either that, or he's not taking his medication..." I jumped on this disjunction because it strikes me as the most important element of what Limbaugh said. He might have gone on a bit too much about the "exaggerating" of symptoms, but in the end he qualified it by offering a second alternative explanation. An alternative explanation which, it turns out, is true!
And, again, to be absolutely clear, I myself don't think that Fox is behaving "shamefully" in any of this. I was only trying to give what Limbaugh's argument seems to be. Scout's honor.
Well, I don't quite agree with that, DawgC. The Repubs do and have done plenty of pandering to people's fears and naive hopes in their own right. Vote for Repub and we will win the perpetual war on terror and make the world safe for democracy just like all those Dem presidents in the 20th century wished they could do but couldn't.
When you're the opposition party, it is to your best advantage to harp on failures and problems and offer yourself as the sacrficing public servant who can fix them. When you're the party in power, it is to your advantage to try to convince people that you are doing a good job (hence, you "trumpet success").
When the electorate goes to the polls and decides it's time to switch sides of the net again (maybe in a couple of weeks, maybe in 2008?), then the Repubs will go back to harping on everything the Dems do wrong and the Dems will go back to being the party of "what a great country this is." Enjoy the drama, if you want, but don't fall for the show.
Reagan certainly didn't get elected that way in 80 or 84. For him, it was Morning in America and a Shining City on the Hill.
OK, with all due respect, that's some of the most ridiculous revisionist history I've seen from you ... and, again with all due respect, you've offered some quality revisionist history. But, Reagan won in large part because of criticism of Carter's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, a misrepresentation of the 'Crisis of Confidence' and the energy crisis. Those were political shortcomings of the Carter Administration and Reagan ran against those, which perfectly supports Xon's point.
You like Reagan, and that's fine. But he said the other guy wasn't doing his job properly and won largely because of that. It wasn't as if Reagan came out all sunshine-and-puppies ... he criticized the other guy and said 'look how bad it is under him.'
Let me put it this way: somewhere in the deep dark recesses of Democrat-dom, champagne corks popped the day Saxby Chambliss beat Max Cleland, because, to Democrats, a defeated man in a wheelchair is of much more use than a Senator from Georgia.
Yes ... that's exactly how it went down. You must have stolen our super-secret memo.
Johnathan, you're just upset that you were invited to those deep, down dark recess parties. I'll invite you to my deep, down, well-lit party, where we celebrate Freckles and Sawyer getting together.
And, weren't the '94 Republican victories about taking up the mantle of victimhood against the Clinton Presidency? I mean, to recycle the conversation, Limbaugh used to open his show during the Clinton Presidencies as "America, Held Hostage", not "America, Awesome and Innovative."
Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. They are the yin to the yang, and no matter who is yinning, the other side will always be yanging...no matter what the topic was. If Republicans were seen to be soft on crime by the general voting population, the Democrats would become the party that is "tough on crime." For the better part of...oh 140 years, these two parties have been more about anti-what-the-party-in-control-is-saying than actually standing for much of anything consistently. That's why I boo both parties, and believe the two-party system is what is holding America hostage. Not Clinton. And not Bush.
Of course, I'm out of my league when it comes to politics.
And I really like Michael J. Fox.
Because of Teen Wolf ... right?
The general feeling to me is that while confidence in Rs is lacking, it's not immediately being transferred to confidence in Ds. Maybe I'm just fantasizing, but the two parties seem to be wearing thin on a lot of people. I predict, based on nothing concrete, that one of them, probably the republicans, will implode into a new moderately liberal party, and the democrats will become more liberal as a result. I say conservatism will be entirely dead within the next couple of decades.
Yeah, Matt, that sounds like a fantasy to me.
A large amount of the fed-uppedness with R's is coming from "grassroots" conservative types, anti-war conservatives, small government conservatives, and the like.
People in the heartland aren't clamoring for a two party system that has moved to the left. Rather, they're frustrated by one that isn't genuine in its occasional ovations to the right. (Unless 'right'/conservative just means war-mongering).
DawgCorleone-
"Let me put it this way: somewhere in the deep dark recesses of Democrat-dom, champagne corks popped the day Saxby Chambliss beat Max Cleland, because, to Democrats, a defeated man in a wheelchair is of much more use than a Senator from Georgia."
Was there some New Deal/Great Society Democrat you beat you as a child, or shot your dog?
Man, you have some visceral disdain for democrats at the evil menace.
Darren
It was Teen Wolf, the whole Back to the Future trilogy, Family Ties, Spin City, cameos galore...I mean, what's not to like? It's Michael J. Fox. I kinda want to change my name to I'm a J. Realist. What do you think?
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