Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Meeting Personalities

I finds different personality interactions during meetings fascinating. In today's meeting we have the:

1. Academic
   Primarily concerned about framework, definitions and process.
   
2. Confidently Uninformed
   Presents opinion with the confidence that because they've uttered it, it then becomes absolute data-driven fact (e.g. Anthony Scalia and the Pope).
   
3. Impatient Pragmatist
   Wants to cancel the meeting and get to work on the first draft, believes that iterative "doing" is far more productive than talking.
4. Demotivated Pessimist
   Those who've given up and are willing to ride a sinking ship as long as possible. Make occasional contributions, but gives up easily due to historical lack of progress.
   

Today, I'm #3. Who wants to define some additional meeting personalities?

Not all Rhetoric is Equal

So the media has decided that "both sides" need to tone down their political rhetoric. Cowards. Afraid to tell the truth so as not to be labeled "liberal".

Fear-mongering and hateful speech have been Republican hallmarks since the Regan era -- and perfected by none other than Karl Rove. Examples you say? Here you go:

"I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for."

- Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95

"Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."

- Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton

"We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."

- Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

- Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

- Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."

- John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

"Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men."

- State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01

And we can end with the brilliant commentary of the Motor City Madman...