"I know it's terrible to say," barfed up a beaming, paunchy Chris Matthews to a reliably docile Jay Leno, "but this has been a great thing."

I guess, seeing that psychos like Tom Delay, who hold elected office, have said the same thing, it shouldn't shock us completely. Even given the whole, you know, moral insanity and crazed barbarity thing.

Matthews phony, working class rationale for such a statement is that it has brought glory to firemen, who now are getting the props that used to go to Donald Trump. Funny, I would have thought few accepted Donald Trump as someone to look up to; despite his glorification by the media hierarchy that gives us the likes of "Hardball."

But of course that is hogwash. For Matthews, those terrified Americans hurling themselves out of fiery windows was a small price to pay for Bush's 80 percent approval rating. For dinosaur-brained white men bent on recreating a World War III movie version of World War II, the knives drawn across the throats of those unarmed flight attendants were peanuts. This has brought us together.

Facing this appalling truth, however, will be slow process for most looking at Matthews's "great thing." It is less troubling to believe such pornography is all about looking up to firemen. Some people really did learn everything they needed to know in kindergarten.

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), November 25, 2001

Answers

What kind og personlooks at what happens on 9-11 and looks for "the good that came from it?"

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), November 28, 2001.

AAAKKK! I've reverting to my old habits!! gotta get out my speel chacker... (and get some sllep too)

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), November 28, 2001.

IMO, Cherri, Chris [He's called "Chris the Screamer" in liberal circles] has such a grating voice that even if MSNBC is on in the background, I turn off the TV if Hardball comes on. He reminds me of a sports broadcaster or an auctioneer. I've never listened to him OR Limbaugh. From reading what they've said, I didn't miss anything.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), November 28, 2001.

Cherri:

While I can understand your rigid determination to avoid any semblance of perspective, and even applaud it, you still lack any perspective. The mortality rate in the New York standard metropolitan statistical area during the 2001 calendar year is probably going to be within the normal range -- not to mention for the entire country, for which those deaths will be lost in the noise of ALL deaths during the year. The main difference is, the others happened out of your sight, which means out of mind as well.

It's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that when the dust settles the WTC event will wash out as a net global benefit. Terrorism will no longer be a tolerated background event, the military will get some deserved glory (and weapons systems will be tested), the economy may end up reacting positively, and hey, maybe firemen will get more nearly the admiration they deserve.

Anyway, you may now resume your "any excuse to knock Bush" normal programming.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 28, 2001.

"The mortality rate in the New York standard metropolitan statistical area during the 2001 calendar year is probably going to be within the normal range..."

Um... probably not in the 25-45 age bracket, sir.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), November 28, 2001.

Nipper:

Hard to say. The population of that SMSA was about 16 million, 1990 census. Let's say the average age at death is 70. These are both conservative numbers. This comes to somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 250,000 deaths, total, per year. Now, let's be generous and say an extra 3500 in the 25-45 age cohort died, and lets also say that none of them would have died of any other cause during the year. So perhaps the terrorists caused a 10% variation in the death rate of this cohort. I suppose this could be significantly outside normal variation for a population that size.

But of course, Cherri wasn't trying to gain any perspective, nor engage in these demographic exercises. Instead, she was seizing on the terrorism as a golden opportunity to call those she dislikes "phonies" and "psychos", leading up to YES! RELEASE! AHHHH! an opportunity to find *some* way to knock Bush, who has handled these events with sufficient skill that Cherri was unable to find any direct or honest way to do so. So, she falls back on guilt by association with people whose opinions must first be denigrated enough to MAKE them guilty so that the association will work as intended.

I'm as appalled as anyone at the terrorism. But I'm only amused at Cherri's acrobatic contortions trying to find some way, ANY way, to derive her fixation out of what has been quite the opposite. I don't find Bush's record so far to be particularly admirable, it seems fairly uninspired on the whole. But Cherri's focused hatred is astonishing, and apparently shapes her entire worldview. Pathetic.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 28, 2001.

Flint, you contend that Cherri "was seizing on the terrorism as a golden opportunity to call those she dislikes "phonies" and "psychos", leading up to YES! RELEASE! AHHHH! an opportunity to find *some* way to knock Bush" and that Cherris' "focused hatred is astonishing, and apparently shapes her entire worldview. Pathetic."

Yet, I read and reread what Cherri posted and the only reference I find in it to President Bush is this (italics added): "For Matthews, those terrified Americans hurling themselves out of fiery windows was a small price to pay for Bush's 80 percent approval rating."

No matter how I read this, it doesn't even begin to match your characterization of it as "focused hatred" against Bush, or even as a "knock" against Bush. It is a statement purely about Mr. Matthews and his beliefs.

What I do find astonishing is your inability to correctly derive the plain meaning from this statement. It is about Matthews. Entirely about Matthews. As a statement about Bush it is entirely neutral, or by extension, somewhat laudatory, in that it plainly credits Mr. Bush with his undoubted popularity.

I can't find any justification for your derogatory statements about Cherri's motives in this thread. The evidence just isn't there. You've imagined it.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), November 28, 2001.

Nipper:

Why, you are absolutely correct! Cherri produced a post which had absolutely nothing bad to say about Bush at all, pay no attention to the actual words. Cherri might just as well have quoted someone saying something wonderful about Bush, since all she was doing was simply deciding who to quote, and had no personal motivations that you can see, though you read and reread and search your very soul.

Uh, do you really think you're kidding someone?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 28, 2001.

"...pay no attention to the actual words."

I can only wonder which "actual words" you think I overlooked. You keep saying this post was about Bush, not Matthews. You insist it is about Bush and that it was derogatory about him. You say I am trying to 'kid' people into believing otherwise.

I can't think of any way to change your mind, since your mind appears to be as concretely set and unmovable as you say Cherri's is. But perhaps you could humor me by trying an experiment:

Print out Cherri's post. Take it to whatever room your wife is in and read it aloud to her, word for word. Do not tell your wife your opinion of the poster or of her motivation. Feel free to use the most venomous sarcastic tone of voice you can muster as you read it, but do not diverge from the "actual words" and do not comment on them.

Then ask her, "In your own words, what did this article have to say about President Bush?"

Come back here and tell us precisely what your wife says in answer to this question. I know this is a lot of trouble, but it is an experiment I cannot do. Only you can do it correctly. I think the results, whatever they are, will say a lot about our two positions here.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), November 28, 2001.

Where Cherri went wrong was not in attacking Bush, which she did not do, but in attacking Chris Matthews as an idiotic Bush supporter. Matthews, to the extent I can stand to listen to the guy, has always struck me as a knee-jerk liberal. I think Cherri would have been on solid ground just settling for idiotic.

-- Peter Errington (petere7@starpower.net), November 28, 2001.

Peter:

Matthews, to the extent I can stand to listen to the guy, has always struck me as a knee-jerk liberal.

Liberals aren't fond of the guy. He's seen more like Maureen Dowd, who hates whoever it is to hate at the moment. They both flow back and forth like the wind.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), November 28, 2001.

Very interesting comment, Anita, and I certainly have wondered about Ms. Dowd. I liked her at first, since she was agreeing with me, but have since come to wonder what if anything she really believes in.

-- Peter Errington (petere7@starpower.net), November 29, 2001.

I don't enjoy Mathews' TV personna. He is too strident, too discourteous (always interrupting). Politically, he strikes me as expedient. He positions himself as a sort of an O'Reilly (who irritates me also) but his background is pure Democrat---he was a staffer to former Democrat Senators Muskie and Moss and a top aid to former Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill.

-- (lars@indy.net), November 29, 2001.

Lars: I seem to remember Cherri once saying that she'd been a lifelong Republican. Wasn't Strom Thurmond ALSO a Democrat for too many years to count? I'm also thinking that was true of the guy liberals call "Helmet head". His name escapes me at the moment.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), November 29, 2001.

Nipper:

I absolutely love your admonition that I carefully avoid letting any reader know the extensive background Cherri has posted, almost as much as I love the way you very carefully characterize this as my opinion of that background. HooWhee, talk about treading carefully!

Now, what is Cherri trying to say? Well, DeLay is a Bush supporter, and he is called a psycho. Uh, no opinion there that you can see. And Matthews, spouter of hogwash, dinosaur brained and phony, is somehow justifying "terrified Americans hurling themselves out of fiery windows" in order to "pay for Bush's approval rating". Is that really his motivation? Might it be possible that Cherri is appalled at Bush's approval rating and this post is an attempt to smear it? You have to look VERY carefully the other way NOT to notice this, but in all innocence you can't for the life of you *imagine* what's happening here.

In any case, Cherri is up to her usual tricks. YOU sound like a lawyer who refuses to concede that the sun rises in the morning, because (just like that lawyer) your entire position rests on artificial conceits and depends on stonewalling. Ah well, as Porter says, I love you man.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 29, 2001.

Well, Flint, you're pushing me into Cherri's corner to some extent. DeLay is an absolutely miserable piece of shit. I heard him on the radio blaming Columbine on the teaching of evolution in the schools. "I don't suppose", he snarled (and boy he can snarl!) that this has anything to do with teaching these kids that they're descended from slime."

-- Peter Errington (petere7@starpower.net), November 29, 2001.

You try so hard, Flint. You really do. but as far as I can see, your argument amounts to this:

Cherri hates Bush and everything he does.
Every article Cherri posts about Bush is an attack on him.
Cherri posted this article.
This article mentions George Bush's 80% approval rating.
Therefore, this article is an attack on George Bush's 80% approval rating.

As arguments go, this one is pretty decent. Except it's wrong. The article says nothing much about Bush at all, except that he has an 80% approval rating. Just read the "actual words". Instead of examining what the article says about Bush (the evidence) to see if your conclusions about Cherri are reliable, you start with your conclusions about Cherri and examine them to find what the article says about Bush. That is backwards. You may retort, "C'mon Nipper, these conclusions are amply justified by the evidence. Cherri always posts attacks on Bush. We've all seen it. It is all she ever does! Certainly you won't deny she hates Bush? That would be silly! This was an attack, too. If you can't see it, you're blind or evasive." Maybe, but I'll take evidence over a real good argument any day. And you say I'm the one who sounds like a lawyer? LOL!

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), November 30, 2001.

Nipper:

Good start, but you got off track. So let's try to focus in. Maybe you're right here, but I'm not yet convinced. So I read:

[For Matthews, those terrified Americans hurling themselves out of fiery windows was a small price to pay for Bush's 80 percent approval rating.]

Now, does Matthews actually SAY this? Not that I know of. DOES Bush's approval rating derive from those jumpers, or rather from his response to events? It is certainly NOT clear to me that Bush somehow "paid for" his approval rating by causing (or assisting, or applauding, or politicizing) people to jump out of fiery windows. Bush seemed just as genuinely appalled as you or I or Cherri. Allow me to suspect that Matthews was appalled as well. Allow me to suspect that Cherri *thinks* that Matthews would be willing to see fiery deaths if this would boost Bush's approval rating, despite no direct nor even indirect evidence for anything of the sort. In all sincerity, I think Bush's approval rating was entirely beside the point of the entire interview. I think Matthews overdid it and trivialized something more profound, but I genuinely see no compelling or even secondhand reason for Cherri to pull in Bush's approval rating. YMMV.

I believe the statement I quoted in brackets above is both false, and *knowingly* false. Nobody was "buying" an approval rating! Come on! Maybe Matthews was trying to find some silver lining in a very large and dark cloud, but by every indication we know of, NOBODY is trying to use this terrifying image to boost approval ratings.

I know part of my reading of this is based on Cherri's known, extremist track record. But Bush's approval rating had nothing to do with this disaster.

Oh, and I agree with Peter, DeLay is a joke and a fool. A psycho? Well, he's a politician. He says what his voters like to hear in preference to his beliefs IF there is any difference. FWIW.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 30, 2001.

As I read the piece that Cherri posted, it seemed to bash the idea of supporting our firemen and policemen. It supposed that nothing good could come out of this tragedy. It mocked Mathews for saying something so stupid.

I think too what he said may be somewhat stupid but I understand it completely. In a tragedy we always try to make some sense of it, some reason for it to happen. (Ok maybe not all of us, but most humans don't like to accept a senseless act.) Mathews was simply trying to find a positive in all the grief. I can't help but feel the same. We'll never be able to explain the loss of thousands of lives but if we can find comfort in seeing a positive, then that's how we cope.

My brother just lost his daughter in a car accident (which I still haven't recovered from). He never believed in the spiritual world or the here after. But now he does. People need a way to cope with loss and it shouldn't be made into some playground for political posturing.

Hi guys! I know some of you just gave a big groan but I found this place and Unk let me in. Ok so now you can blame him. I promise to be good (at least for a little while :)

-- Maria (maria947@hotmail.com), December 04, 2001.

Maria, so sorry to hear about what happened to your niece.

-- Pammy (pamela_sue57@hotmail.com), December 04, 2001.

Maria: I had similar thoughts when I read it. Mine were more like, "If life throws you a lemon, you make lemonade."

Good to see you here. Sorry to hear about your niece.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), December 04, 2001.

Pamela, Anita, thanks, much appreciated.

-- Maria (maria9470@lycos.com), December 05, 2001.