So how many of the 34 were you aware of?

POSTED BY: SoupCatcher
UPDATED: Sunday, January 23, 2005 16:28
VIEWED: 3431
PAGE 1 of 3

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE LAST PAGE

SOUPCATCHER

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 10:20 AM

So I was surfing one of the blogs I read on a daily basis (Eschaton) and saw a link to an article on Salon. The title of the article is, "The scandal sheet" and the author goes through and lists what they think are 34 scandals of the current administration along with the following information: brief description, why this is a problem, and what is being done about it. While I don't think that all of the things the author came up with qualify as a scandal, I was surprised at how many on the list I had heard about. Turns out I was familiar with 28 out of the 34.

I was curious about other fireflyfans awareness. So, quick question, how many of the 34 do you remember hearing something about?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/01/18/scandal/
* you may have to watch a short advert to get a day pass to read the article.

Oh, and for the record, here are the ones that I had NOT heard anything about: 4, 8, 14, 20, 26, and 27.

---------------------
"What sort of raw meat do you people feed your cruiser captains, Hamish?" - Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore

GEEZER

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 3:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
So I was surfing one of the blogs I read on a daily basis (Eschaton) and saw a link to an article on Salon. The title of the article is, "The scandal sheet" and the author goes through and lists what they think are 34 scandals of the current administration along with the following information: brief description, why this is a problem, and what is being done about it. While I don't think that all of the things the author came up with qualify as a scandal, I was surprised at how many on the list I had heard about. Turns out I was familiar with 28 out of the 34.

I was curious about other fireflyfans awareness. So, quick question, how many of the 34 do you remember hearing something about?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/01/18/scandal/
* you may have to watch a short advert to get a day pass to read the article.

Oh, and for the record, here are the ones that I had NOT heard anything about: 4, 8, 14, 20, 26, and 27.

---------------------
"What sort of raw meat do you people feed your cruiser captains, Hamish?" - Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore

I think I can recall all but 13, 25, and 26...although the DeLay and Halliburton ones just sort of blend together in my mind as big lumps. I may not have heard of all of the individual accusations about them, but it's sometimes hard to tell if one violin is playing or not in the fortissimo symphony of blame.

Some of these are hardly earth-shaking - more the "appearance of impropriety" type. Some are only tangentinally related to the administration. And they're almost all being investigated by someone. Salon has their bias and spins the descriptions a bit, but that's to be expected.

Coincidentally, I was just reading an essay "the American Lenin" by L. Neil Smith, the Libertarian Scifi author, about another administration. In part...

Quote:

History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern industrialists who were unwilling to pay world prices for their raw materials and who, rather than practice real capitalism, enlisted brute government force — "sell to us at our price or pay a fine that'll put you out of business" — for dealing with uncooperative southern suppliers. That's what a tariff's all about. In support of this "noble principle", when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no more than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin that butchered more Americans than all of this country's foreign wars — before or afterward — rolled into one.

Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American continent — indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction without regard to age, gender, or combat status of the victims — and oversaw the systematic shelling and burning of entire cities for strategic and tactical purposes. For the same purposes, Lincoln declared, rather late in the war, that black slaves were now free in the south — where he had no effective jurisdiction — while declaring at the same time, somewhat more quietly but for the record nonetheless, that if maintaining slavery could have won his war for him, he'd have done that, instead.

The fact is, Lincoln didn't abolish slavery at all, he nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military conscription upon what had been a free country before he took over — income taxation and military conscription to which newly "freed" blacks soon found themselves subjected right alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was truly fought against slavery — a dubious, "politically correct" assertion with no historical evidence to back it up — then clearly, slavery won.

Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the traditional midnight "knock on the door", illegally suspending the Bill of Rights and, like the Latin America dictators he anticipated, "disappearing" thousands in the north whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. To finance his crimes against humanity, Lincoln allowed the printing of worthless paper

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME

HERO

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 6:54 PM

Hmmm...havn't read the whole article. But lets take the first one: Memogate.

Essentially Senate Republican committee staffers accessed Senate Democratic computers. The article is supposed to be about scandal from this administration. This scandal involves the Senate, not the White House.

Also, what makes a scandal? A man steals cigarettes from the QuickieMart and its just another crime. If the President did it, its a scandal.

Seems to me a scandal is not merely the act, but the actors as well.

H

SOUPCATCHER

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 9:52 AM

Yeah. I don't think anyone is going to mistake what side of the fence Salon is on. As far as Lincoln goes, I've always been surprised that the fact that more American-born soldiers died while he was President doesn't seem to affect his legacy. But I think the author of the excerpt you included stretches things just a bit in terms of what legitimately can be laid at Lincoln's feet. On a side note, whenever the discussion of why the Civil War was fought comes up I always ask myself one simple question: If I was a black man in the south, would I rather live pre-1861 or post-1865? It kind of puts everything else in perspective.

In terms of the Salon article, I really don't care about most of the things they came up with. I was just surprised, more than anything else, by how little press some of them have gotten. It seemed like you couldn't turn around a couple of years ago without being reminded of an investigation into something or other. Maybe I've gotten cynical over the past twenty years, but I guess I just expect politicians to be taking bribes and behaving in all sorts of unethical ways. So I'm pretty numb to those types of things.

What I do have a problem with is war profiteering - even though our businesses have a long history of engaging in this behavior. I don't know if anything that Halliburton is doing over in Iraq compares with what Armour did during the Spanish-American War but if their actions lead to our soldiers getting shafted there should be some serious repercussions (like, carthago delenda est style repercussions).

---------------------
"What sort of raw meat do you people feed your cruiser captains, Hamish?" - Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore

NEUTRINOLAD

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 11:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
The title of the article is, "The scandal sheet" and the author goes through and lists what they think are 34 scandals of the current administration along with the following information: brief description, why this is a problem, and what is being done about it.

I didn't see Bernard Kerik(sp?), the second bogus "news release" recently produced for local news consumption, the Hawaii trip by the Homeland Security staff, or W's staff's claim that the Clintons vandalized the White House before leaving. Remember that last one? I always liked that one.

And so, what can we conclude?

That I spend way too much time paying attention to this stuff. I resolve to read only the sports page in future.

VETERAN

Thursday, January 20, 2005 5:45 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
Yeah. ...whenever the discussion of why the Civil War was fought comes up I always ask myself one simple question: If I was a black man in the south, would I rather live pre-1861 or post-1865? It kind of puts everything else in perspective.

Nicely put.

Quote:
In terms of the Salon article, I really don't care about most of the things they came up with. I was just surprised, more than anything else, by how little press some of them have gotten.

I like how John Stewart addressed this. "How come there aren't any gates?" "Cheney holds energy meetings.. won't tell anyone who he met or what was said ... and oil prices are higher than ever? ... Where's the gate?"

RUE

Friday, January 21, 2005 2:09 AM

Seems to me a scandal is not merely the act, but the actors as well.

So true. A man gets a blow job, and it's no big deal. But if the man is a Democratic President, instead of Republican Senator, it's a scandal.

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Friday, January 21, 2005 2:37 AM

The operative words here being "President" and "Senator." Plenty of Democratic Congressmen have gotten away with as much or more. And it is a special kind of nutty to imply that if a Republican President had had extramarital sex in the Whitehouse and then perjured himself in a federal court, that it wouldn't be a scandal.

NEUTRINOLAD

Friday, January 21, 2005 3:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
And it is a special kind of nutty to imply that if a Republican President had had extramarital sex in the Whitehouse and then perjured himself in a federal court, that it wouldn't be a scandal.

And it would be particularly wacky to believe that a Republican Congress would even consider impeaching him for the offense.

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Friday, January 21, 2005 4:06 AM

Maybe, maybe not. But I’m sure a Democratic Congress would jump at the chance with glee. Of course, that's assuming the Democrats ever manage to get the Congress back.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE LAST PAGE