Posting Towards Gomorrah

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
I am sorry. Am I missing something here?

If you have to ask, you have a sense of what the answer is going to be.

Are you saying the transcripts and the video clip don't represent what he really said?

No.

You said if we were privy to the entire transcript that it would be obvious the meaning was different.

To be technical, I said that Chris Matthews and Dick Armey said that. I also said that I don't care enough to bother to look for the transcript myself.

You never said anything about changing what he said to get to the true meaning.

You asked what word was missing. The missing word is "us." See ncs' post -- she put it more succinctly than I did.

You didn't point out which words you were referring to. You just had the general notion that some words were out there and that those nebulous words were misleading compared to some other group of nebulous words that were not misleading. Until I had put up the clip we had no definite idea of what was said. I was I suppossed to read your mind and know exacly what words you though were insufficient and which words were not. I put up the video clip to show the exact words he said (because a transcript could be erroneous and at the time no one had posted an exact quote). In addition, sometimes a video clip shows meaning through inflections and sarcasm that does not come across in a transcript. I put up the video clip to show that the meaning was not changed through infelction etc. In addition, I thought if you listened to the video clip it would be hard to imagine any words before or after that would change the meaning of what I said. In other words, if you listen to the video clip you will realize that there could be no words before or after his comment that would change the meaning of what he said. And I am right. There are no words.

Chris Matthews and Dick Armey may be wrong -- it has happened before -- but you won't be able to tell from looking only at your ten-second clip.

Like usual you had some hearsay about Kerry's clips and you just assumed it was true because it was pro Kerry. Of course if it was an unsubstantiated allegation about something that supports the President you would have demanded a cite and would have immediately assumed it was not true. But since the assertion you bought supported Kerry you just assumed it was true and couldn't believe any one else would assume that the clip showed all the relevent material.

You make a nebulous assertion and I post the actual relevent clip about the statement in question but somehow you believing an unsubstantiated allegation that turns out to be wrong, and me believing the actual video tape makes you in the right and me moronic. Please. Give it up.

You assumed an usubstantiated allegation is true and it blew up in your face.

When Dick Armey says the GOP is hyping a fake controversy, he has some credibility in my mind. Likewise John Derbyshire.

You keep thinking I care about this as much as you do. While I am entertained by your posts on the subject, I don't really care about what Kerry said. He's a poor public speaker, but he's not up for election and I'm reasonably sure that this episode has made it even less likely that he'll get any traction in two years. I don't think the flap has persuaded any swing voters that Bush has a notion of how to make things work in Iraq, and so I don't think it's changing any votes in next week's races. (I understand that you disagree, which means that one of us will be wrong.) It may get conservatives like yourself all excited, which would help turn out the GOP base, but I tend to think that the people who are getting excited by this stuff are the same people who breathlessly circulate the bon mots of Mona Charen -- i.e., Republicans who are going to vote in any event. YMMV.