The 2012 Republican Primary Field: March 1, 2012

Bre­it­bart has died. OMG! The guy was only 43.

He leaves behind his wife, Susanna, daugh­ter of Orson Bean, and four children.

Idaho(32) — Rom­ney, big LDS con­tin­gent there …

GROG and rgbact,
 
And they are ass­holes with no respect. And hon­estly, shame on the two of you for play­ing directly into their game! Did either I or Mono even HINT at our and  Breitbart’s dif­fer­ences in ide­ol­ogy in our men­tion of him? And rgbact, your “opin­ion” on “some left­ies” is crude and con­demns YOU as badly as the ass­holes you opine on. 

Take a look at the com­ments in Col­lege Foot­ball Talk derid­ing the Pres­i­dent and the reporter for even ask­ing him about his opin­ion on NCAA foot­ball play­offs. They are ass­holes as well. As though EVERY pres­i­dent for the best part a cen­tury hasn’t hosted national cham­pi­onship teams at the White House. Even Nixon stepped into the fray back in ’68 over the real national cham­pion between Texas and Penn State! Damn, EVERYBODY has opin­ions on sports.
 
Hell, I DETESTED Lee Atwater’s meth­ods. He’s, by far, the pri­mary rea­son I did NOT join the Bush 41 advance team and one of the big rea­sons I bailed on the GOP a quar­ter cen­tury ago. But I would never high­light ass­holes’ crit­i­cism at the time of his ill­ness and death. I’d much rather remem­ber his blues gui­tar.
 
One thing Andrew and Lee and I would ALWAYS agree on, regard­less the dif­fer­ences in ide­ol­ogy and polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. It’s that we are ALL proud Amer­i­cans and proud to live in an Amer­ica where we CAN fight tooth and nail over our dif­fer­ences and, every cou­ple of years, We the Peo­ple, not some Putin, or Supreme Leader, or aya­tol­lah, decide how this great coun­try is going to be run the next few years, and we can go back to our bick­er­ing.
 
Lots of times it’s best to leave the pol­i­tics out­side and respect peo­ple and their opin­ions beyond that realm and find those thing in com­mon instead of seek­ing things that divide.
 
This is one of them.
 
 

GROG,
 

But, thanks for illus­trat­ing how ridicu­lous it is to take com­ments from a hand­ful of indi­vid­u­als and try to sell them as being rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an entire mass of peo­ple.  (ie, one or two racists at an entire Tea Party rally, or one or two dumb com­menters on a con­ser­v­a­tive blog)

No, that is NOT what I  illus­trated. I was illus­trat­ing that there are LOTS of ass­holes of all stripes, not just one or two in a crowd by which one may attempt to judge the entire crowd. And your con­tin­u­ing attempts to place ide­o­log­i­cal spin on the back of a hus­band and father who died and left a gap­ing hole in the lives of those chil­dren and that wife is a supreme sign of dis­re­spect and that lack is mak­ing me reassess how I may deal with you going forward.

You owe his fam­ily an apology.

GROG, save your­self the effort. It’s not worth it.
 
No, shiloh. You just stooped lower than he. You just placed your­self in the ass­hole crowd.
 
Congratulations!

Damn dc! You too??? Shame on you as well.

dc,
 

 any­one deserves the same level of respect he or she has shown to others.

I do not have to stoop to another’s level the day they die. Funer­als are not for the dead, they are to ease their pass­ing for those who loved them.

For the liv­ing, we can go ham­mer and tong. Trade like for like. Ask sev­eral here. But should one of my worst oppo­nents sud­denly drop dead, that’s past.

dc,
 
Actu­ally, I’m not! I’m a mean old bas­tard. I’ll crush you with all my power, should you chal­lenge me, and with no remorse. Y’all have seen me in action here. Quick in anger. 
 
But also quick to for­give. Try never to hold a grudge. Why waste time with a grudge against the dead, any­way? They can’t respond and you really have bet­ter things to do!

Just watched the last of Lawrence O’Donnell and Toure and Goldie Tay­lor on Andrew Bre­it­bart, it included the state­ment made by Shirley Sher­rod.
 
I feel quite vin­di­cated in my stated posi­tion today, hav­ing lis­tened to peo­ple who knew, and fought, him directly.
 
As was said, “if you call your­self a lib­eral, then com­pas­sion should be your first name.“
 
If you didn’t see it, try to see if it comes on YouTube. 

dawolf,
 
You are 180 degrees off in the assess­ment. I have NOT said “only speak good”, but the obverse: Speak no ill. I do NOT say to actively mourn, but only to hold one’s fire.
 
Sev­eral rea­sons: 1) You’re fight­ing an oppo­nent who can’t fight back. Most unfair! As I likened it in a ear­lier com­ment, it’s tan­ta­mount to beat­ing a stone drunk, a 9 year old kid, a 100 year old man. Where is the honor in that? Have you any honor?
2) We’re talk­ing a polit­i­cal oppo­nent in a democ­racy, some­one with whom we dis­agree ide­o­log­i­cally. We aren’t talk­ing about a Stalin or an Idi Amin or Hitler. There are maybe as many out there who dis­agree with OUR pol­i­tics, it’s why we vote every few years.
3) Just plain old respect for the liv­ing. Would you wish that your wife and young chil­dren hear such neg­a­tiv­ity and nas­ti­ness about you whilst you are wait­ing to be laid to rest, not even in the ground yet? What have THEY done to deserve to be dis­re­spected?
 
Thatcher cre­ated many polit­i­cal ene­mies. I doubt many Argen­tines will weep on the news of her death. Labour and Lib­eral lead­ers will be more cir­cum­spect, I’ll wager you with long odds, though. And those folks of whom you speak are ass­holes should they cel­e­brate her death. Did they have such neg­a­tive feel­ing about her when she defended and recap­tured the Falk­lands?
 
My her­itage is Ulster-​​Scot, bor­der peo­ple (Scot-​​Irish here in the States), who suf­fered might­ily at the hands of a series of Eng­lish mon­archs and par­lia­ments. Basi­cally ran out of their home and hearth. Twice! Want to dis­cuss the Siege of Derry? How about Edward I and Berwick? Against that back­ground, is it  hyp­o­crit­i­cal for me to ally with St. James Court these days?
 
There is no hypocrisy in rec­og­niz­ing that things change and that death changes things most of all.
 
For all, here’s the O’Donnell piece on Bre­it­bart I wrote about last night, you should watch:
http://​www​.medi​aite​.com/​t​v​/​l​a​w​r​e​n​c​e​-​o​d​o​n​n​e​l​l​-​g​o​l​d​i​e​-​t​a​y​l​o​r​-​a​n​d​-​t​o​u​r​e​-​o​f​f​e​r​-​k​i​n​d​-​w​o​r​d​s​-​f​o​r​-​b​r​e​i​t​b​a​r​t​-​p​r​a​i​s​e​-​f​o​r​-​s​h​i​r​l​e​y​-​s​h​e​r​r​od/

MW,
 
I was going to say “exposed the story on Anthony’s Weiner”, but I thought I’d leave the puns to you!!!!!!
 

da,
 
Not being snide, but did you read my entire com­ment #51? Par­tic­u­larly ¶ 2, begin­ning: “Sev­eral rea­sons”? Just because I left UBL out of the state­ment, don’t think I don’t lump him in with those I did. Note my dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents in a democ­racy, and heinous crim­i­nals who have mur­dered, tor­tured and impris­oned inno­cents. There is a gulf there. I cel­e­brated the death of UBL and find no con­flict in that posi­tion based on what I just wrote! Had I been alive in 1945, I would have cel­e­brated the death of Hitler. We are not talk­ing orders of mag­ni­tude here,different points on the same scale,  but a com­pletely dif­fer­ent par­a­digm.
 
Whilst on the sub­ject, how many British PM’s served more con­sec­u­tive years in the posi­tion? How many elec­tions as party leader, thus PM, did she win? How many other PM’s were elected with the same or more elec­tion wins? Was the rest of the British elec­torate smarter or more stu­pid than those you say will cel­e­brate? Or just dif­fer­ent?  I was cer­tainly NOT a Thatcher fan, but the facts are the facts. The greater num­ber of British sub­jects favoured her over oth­ers for over a decade.
 
And do you agree or dis­agree con­cern­ing hypocrisy in my case, with my her­itage, as out­lined? What is the dif­fer­ence there?