LEST WE FORGET
Comparisons are Said to be Odious
True or False?
Saturday, March 9, 2013
35 comments:
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Only if misidentified FIRST as something "desirable".
ReplyDelete....and later "discovered" to NOT be a fair or adequate comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe pictures you posted are not "odious" because I could immediately identify their dissimilarities.
example.
ReplyDeleteI have no idealized fantasies about EITHER couple. I accept them for who they were. I still "like" and admire only one of the four.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, the comparison is not an "odious" one?
ReplyDeleteI certainly could not "misidentify" Bill Clinton as someone "ideologically akin" to Ronald Reagan at THIS point in their lives/careers, could I?
ReplyDeleteNow, perhaps if Hillary or Bill were to become "President" again and "closer" to having an impact upon MY life, youre comparison at THAT time might strike be as a bit more "odious".
ReplyDeleteIs yours a "mature" or "immature" love? ;)
ReplyDeleteQuite a stark comparison.
ReplyDeleteDid Nancy Reagan ever wear a paisley print?
Now you could still claim that Bill Clinton was an "odious and disturbing stain" upon the American presidency...
ReplyDelete... but I say that there have been many others, as bad, if not WORSE (Obama, Carter being two).
Presidents are men, not gods. To believe otherwise is to be ideologically blind.
btw - I still plan on honoring my prior oath to "p*ss on Bill Clinton's grave" before I die, but that's besides the point. ;)
What I see in the "comparison" is an absolute justification for the Constitutional "separation of powers" and need to LIMIT government.
ReplyDeleteFT, HOW DARE YOU place those Radical Idiots together on the same page as that WONDERFUL President and his First Lady?
ReplyDeleteWhat ever that sleazy Rapist and his LYING wife are selling, I'm not buying!
This is a country of laws, not Liars.
TPC,
ReplyDeleteWhat I was hoping to elicit was an observation something like this:
The Reagans look like a couple you'd love to get to know -- neat, clean, trim, fit, pleasant, wholesome, attractive, but modest.
The Clintons appear unkempt, dissolute, abnormal, bordering in the grotesque -- rather like a smelly unmade bed whose linens haven't been changed in many weeks harboring lice, ticks and fleas.
In short the Reagans look like the America I knew as a happy child. The Clintons perfectly symbolize the slovenliness, self-indulgence, insolence and treachery that took over the land in the Sick-sties.
All I can say to your comment above is AMEN
ReplyDeleteDARTH BACON! I always enjoy your visits. Wish we could see more of you 'round these here parts.
ReplyDeleteI want you to know, FT, I spotted the symbolism right away in the Reagans' appearance in red white blue and pink above the Clintons' in many dismal shades of brown. Frankly, I don't see how anyone could have missed it.
ReplyDelete----------> Katharine Heartburn
FreeThinke said...
ReplyDeleteDARTH BACON! I always enjoy your visits. Wish we could see more of you 'round these here parts
Thank, I'll keep that thought in mind.
By the way, Is it my good looks or my comments that you enjoy?
Free Stinker, I saw the comment you left on Shaw's blog yesterday and I n must say that I always thought you were a Pompous idiot and now I also think that you are a Prick as well.
ReplyDeleteWell, well, Anonymous, I usually get rid of gratuitous insults such as yours, but I'll allow this one to remain, because it provides such a clear example of the mentality that is bringing this once-great nation to its knees and making us ripe for conquest.
ReplyDeleteYou need to take good long look in the mirror before cast any further aspersions at others.
Most of us do. There's always much room for improvement in every one of us. Unfortunately most are unwilling to face their shortcomings.
Why not give it a try? The truth may hurt, but it always heals. Our world is moribund, because so few are willing to face the truth.
Thanks, Katharine. You were one of the reasons I decided to restore anonymous posting privileges. I wish you'd get yourself a blogger ID. I like the occasional doses of P&V you provide.
ReplyDeleteYou know, FT, that Study in Brown actually frightens me. There's something as misshapen about those people's features as the twisted thoughts they've kept in their heads. Bill Clinton has always had a dissipated, bleary-eyed, untrustworthy look about him. She, I have always felt, is even worse. No decent woman would have put up a husband like that. A treacherous, deeply unpleasant couple.
ReplyDeleteHelen Highwater
I think the Clintons are scary; whatever pact they supposedly have (it's been said that they promised they'd do what they had to to get to high places and pay each other back for it), it's scary that WE have to live their "dream" out. Odd I'd have put that CLinton post up today, FT, huh? (below the Hagel one I added this evening!?)
ReplyDeleteAs for the Reagans ; you're right, it's almost painful to see that wholesome, attractive pair who does symbolize what WE remember as presidential.
FT,
ReplyDeleteI was going to say something along the lines of your comment @ March 9, 2013 at 9:35 AM, but, instead, went back to reading the book that I've had my nose in the past few days: So Much for That. I'll be posting a review of that book in less than a week.
I personally liked one Presidential couple while finding the other rather off putting.
ReplyDeleteIt could have been pre-hand bias, or not. Who knows. It was what it was.
In the end both were effective, ideology aside.
It's hardly enough to be "effective," Les. It is the WAY in which one is effective that matters.
ReplyDeleteMarx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were VERY effective.
The Frankfurt School was even MORE effective.
The dirty bastards who designed and produced the UN were effective.
Great villains all.
Effectiveness is no proper measure of worth.
Seriously? You've put up a post on two couples' looks? Mrs. Reagan may be a a nice person. I don't know her except for her public persona, which may be completely different from what she is privately. You don't know her either or what she's really like. The same goes for the Clintons and you probably didn't know Mr. Reagan personally either.
ReplyDeleteBut for you to take a deliberately unflattering picture of the Clintons and place it next to a flattering photo of the Reagans as some sort of proof of their value as human beings is just...well, beneath you, and reminds me of what 7th grade adolescents do to each other to humiliate those they dislike.
I just don't understand why you resort to this silliness.
It makes you and your pals feel superior, perhaps, but it demeans you all as adults.
But that's just my opinion.
I just heard parts of a lecture by Robert Watson, Ph.D, of Lynn University about the campaigns surrounding Andrew Jackson;s ascent to the White House. Talk about DIRTY POOL! Ye GODS! Before that I have heard lectures and read a bit about the way our revered Founding Fathers -- with the exception of George Washington, who magisterially remained aloof from the rough and tumble of politics all his life -- treated one another. VICIOUS is much too mild a word for it.
ReplyDeleteApparently, they had much thicker skins in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than we self-absorbed mollycoddles devoted to a whiny, increasingly bilious and acerbic Culture of Critique, Complaint and Legal Challenge do today.
I, myself, learned the admittedly dirty trick of publishing the most unflattering photos and reporting the most scandalous, obnoxious, and embarrassing tidbits about opponents from the way the enemedia treated Richard M. Nixon throughout his entire post-Vice-Presidential career -- which started long before Watergate by the way.
I will NEVER forget Gloria Steinem maliciously claiming in print after an interview with Pat Nixon that Mrs. Nixon "confessed" to Gloria that she and the president had not had sexual relations for over seventeen years.
Of COURSE Mrs. Nixon said that to one of her husband's most virulent political opponents.
Of COURSE she did -- NOT!!!
So, offering legitimate, undoctored photographs of two couples -- one so attractive they never needed to be flattered -- the other so ill-favored, so desperately unattractive they could not successfully be flattered -- no matter how hard all the king's horses and all the king's men tried -- seems a mild enough tactic in the great scheme of things.
The photos speak for themselves. I cannot help it if the Clintons happen to be hideous.
The camera doesn't lie -- does it? ;-)
There are a lot of Leftist knuckleheads out there.
ReplyDeleteYou probably would never have wanted to get to know Mr. Einstein, since he wasn't a physically attractive person.
ReplyDeleteBut on the other hand, you would probably be enthralled with Justin Beiber. He is an attractive person, and I'll bet he's just brimming with interesting subjects to discuss.
I know nothing about the Reagans, personally, nor the Clintons.
Except I respect both Mr. and Mrs. Clinton's educational backgrounds.
Look them up and compare and contrast them with the Reagans.
It appears you put more value on peoples' looks and not their intellects.
But I could be wrong...
I put most of my faith, Ms Shaw, in what I read in people's eyes, their tone of voice, their boy language and their overall deportment -- and what I read "between the lines" in written communication.
ReplyDeleteAs an artist, lover of good music, and fellow poet I know you are aware that intuition - insight - vision -- whatever you want to call it has greater bearing on the quality of those things than any cut and dried assemblage of data someone memorized and learned how to rewrite to suit his or her own purposes.
You mentioned Einstein. An original thinker if ever there was one. From all reports he did poorly in school as a boy, and -- as you said -- he was anything but prepossessing. However there a LIGHT -- a SPARKLE -- in his EYES that was far more alluring than the meretricious, manufactured glamor of Rock Stars and "products" of the old Studio System.
It was Einstein by the say who said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
The kind of thing that protean figures like Newton or Shakespeare or Beethoven -- or Edison -- gave us cannot be taught cannot be manufactured. It could only come from what-could-be-called INNER LIGHT.
All very lovely thoughts, FT, but essentially, the gist of your post is to judge people by what they look like.
ReplyDeleteYou've judged the Clintons, of whom you have zero personal knowledge, and you've judged the Reagans the same way. And you put up a post so people who share your political ideas can come here and reinforce your biases.
I still would rather spend an eveinging chatting with Hillary, a Wellesley College honors graduate and Yale Law School graduate, and Bill, a alumnus of Georgetown University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Kappa Kappa Psi and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. from Yale Law School and who also received a degree from Yale Law School.
You, on the other hand, have a man-crush on two B-movie actors who spent a good deal of their lives in Hollywood? A place so repugnant to conservatives, unless it produces politicians they approve of.
It's all so amusing.
"It's all so amusing."
ReplyDeleteIt is that, Ms Shaw.
It certainly is that.
"I put most of my faith, Ms Shaw, in what I read in people's eyes, their tone of voice, their boy language and their overall deportment"
ReplyDeleteIt is easy to be fooled through these channels.
"From all reports he did poorly in school as a boy, and -- as you said -- he was anything but prepossessing. However there a LIGHT -- a SPARKLE -- in his EYES..."
Not from his school reports(!) -- certainly Einstein clashed with authority at one of the schools he attended, but he maintained fairly good in grades, (he excelled in his subjects, but outside physics he was "only" moderately bright.)
Now he is dead and cannot be our friend. Einstein's posthumous value has nothing to do with his twinkly eyes but everything to do with what he could prove or demonstrate. That is to say, we appreciate the content of his arguments (what you would probably grumble about as a mere "assemblage of memorized data" written "to suit his purposes" ie demonstrate the effect in question [this is where Einstein's creativity shone forth]), not his deportment.
Newton may have been a complete shit -- it doesn't matter. His proofs have outlasted his shitty personality, and we who appreciate him now don't even have to overlook his personal faults, as those who knew him would have.
Meanwhile, Clinton's deportment, body language etc. is magnetic. His incredible charisma as a politician is what allows him to get away with so much. Wouldn't you have preferred a president who couldn't fall back on such vacuous charms, who was instead forced to rely on substance?
I want politicians who are ugly and personally off-putting. Only then might we judge them by what really matters.
Jez,
ReplyDeleteYour opacity is exceeded only by your arrogant assumption of superiority.
Good day.
This would be your trademark patience and curiosity would it?
ReplyDeleteI don't assume superiority, but I don't tend not to comment unless I think you might be wrong somewhere, as in this case. If you can't take disagreement in good spirit I shall trouble you no longer.
Good day.