Wish I hadn't already posted in this thread so I could mod you up.

Exactly so. Irrationality can be a valuable competitive trait in a stratified social climbing framework where for one primate to succeed, another has to fail. There is a constant arms race over information and intellect between individuals, generations, and groups. If a person or group behaves in a perfectly rational way (re: perfectly predictable), then it becomes easy to counter that person or group, especially if you are smarter, have better information, or greater resources to bring to bear. Irrationality is a strategy of nullifying these advantages because it means that no matter how you think I might react, and whatever surprises you have lie in store for me, I might confound your predictions and react in a completely irrational and therefore unplanned-for-by-you fashion. As a contrived example, it's how otherwise incompetent leaders can sometimes stay in power, by arbitrarily executing or rewarding people for spurious reasons, raising one group up with favors, and bringing another group down when they become too successful, but with no discernible pattern to either.

Pretty much all non-marxist economics, not just "neo-conservative economics" (whatever that is...which school exactly does that fall into, the Austria, Chicago, Keynesian?), follow the rational market hypothesis. Central control advocates (and marxists are among them) argue that they can "one-up" the market by having so-called experts dictate how much of what gets produced where and what the prices should be. They tend to have equally incomprehensible (and even more unworkable) models than the free-market economists do, and tend to get sidetracked by social justice issues along the way.

Ayers was almost certainly complicit in at least one murder.

He also founded the Weather Underground, which, aside from being a left wing terrorist organization, actually did murder people.

The modern radical left is a direct descendant from groups like the WU. Groups like ANSWER, for example. Hell, Obama had his "coming out" party in Ayer's house for Christ's sake. So, maybe "most of you on the left" don't give Ayers any thought, but clearly Obama did. Ayers wouldn't be such a boogieman on the right if he didn't espouse an ideology inimical to the values of most Americans and didn't have such a strong connection to the people currently in power. But he does.

Yeah, and since they are foreigners, it's not like they are real people, right?

The ironic thing is that this has the potential to result in more civilians getting killed than the civilians the leaker and wikileaks were ostensibly protecting by airing the US military's dirty laundry.

That's because you are still going through the "ridicule stage", ie:

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

Sure. Except for:

Park Place Police Station bombing, February 1970
Main article: San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing

On February 16, 1970 a nail bomb placed on a window ledge of the Park Police substation in the Upper Haight neighborhood of San Francisco exploded at 10:45 p.m. The blast killed police Sergeant Brian McDonnell. Law enforcement suspected the Weather Underground but was unable to prove conclusively that the organization was involved.[62] A second officer, Robert Fogarty was partially blinded by the bomb’s shrapnel.

Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, March 1970
Main article: Greenwich Village townhouse explosion

On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the bombing of a Non-Commissioned Officers’ (NCO) dance at the Fort Dix U.S. Army base and for Butler Library at Columbia University,[2] there was an explosion in a Greenwich Village safe house when the nail bomb being constructed prematurely detonated for unknown reasons. WUO members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in the explosion. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin escaped unharmed. It was an accident of history that the site of the Village explosion was the former residence of Merrill Lynch brokerage firm founder Charles Merrill and his son, the poet James Merrill. The younger Merrill subsequently recorded the event in his poem 18 West 11th Street, the title being the address of the house. An FBI report later stated that the group had possessed enough explosive to "level ... both sides of the street".[72]

The bomb preparations have been pointed out by critics of the claim that the Weatherman group did not try to take lives with its bombings. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is."[2]

Brinks robbery (1981)

Certain members remained underground, joined splinter radical groups, and formed alliances with other radical groups. Some authors argue that years after the dissolution of the WUO, former members Kathy Boudin, Judith Alice Clark, and David Gilbert formed the May 19 Communist Organization. Other authors and the US government state that WUO formed an alliance with the Black Liberation Army and called this alliance the May 19 Communist Organization. On October 20, 1981 in Nanuet, New York, the group robbed a Brinks armored truck containing $1.6 million. The robbery was violent, resulting in the murders of two police officers and a security guard.[15] Boudin, Clark, and Gilbert were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison. A number of media reports listed them as active Weatherman Underground members[112] considered the “last gasps” of the Weather Underground.[113] The documentary The Weather Underground described the Brinks Robbery as the "unofficial end" of the Weather Underground.[114]

* * *

As said, the only reason why Ayers & company didn't go down as mass murderers was because of their incompetence, not their intent. Ayers is whitewashing his own history.

Are you really that stupid that you can't detect mocking sarcasm when it's right in front of your face and on video? Hannity was making fun of the people like Pelosi that referred to the Tea Party movement as Nazis racists and the like. The crowd was applauding him giving credit to the Tea Party movement for holding up the disastrous Health Care "Reform" bill as long as they did. If you're this fucking stupid, no wonder you voted for Obama.

The right doesn't and never has idolized McVeigh...but then again you know that. The only person of note that tried to rehabilitate McVeigh's image was Gore Vidal, and he's a creature of the left, not the right.

Sure you are. That's why you posted as an AC. To give yourself more credibility.

n/t

Dissent is only a threat if it comes from the right. If it comes to the left, it's the highest expression of patriotism. That's why people like William Ayers are iconic on the left, who, at the end of the day, isn't all that different than Timothy McVeigh...except that William Ayers had richer and politically connected parents, and was a Marxist, so even today fellow Marxists go to bat for him and his "legacy". It helps to have a good friend as the President (of the country and political system he was trying to overthrow) as well.

That's an awfully long winded way of saying they bribed several wavering Senators.

That wasn't exactly what I claimed. What I claimed is that this idea of inter-party Democrat dissent vs the monolithic Republican party is largely a myth, and the reality is closer to the opposite.

The interesting thing about the Democrat ability to wrangle votes is that a lot of Democrats that were elected in 2006 and 2008 ran to the right of their Republican opponents, and won in traditionally Republican districts. These were ostensibly conservative Democrats that were tired of the Republican corruption of the previous years and wanted a return to fiscal responsibility. Har, har, har. But the voters still fell for it, and now we $1.4 trillion deficits are the new normal.

Oh, I'm pretty sure Biden has them both beat.

Ronnie didn't use it for every damn speech though. Reagan, as opposed to Obama, really was a gifted public speaker, especially in his governor days.

I certainly am not in the "Obama is dumb" crowd, but his oratory prowess has been grossly overstated. Cult of personality more than capability in this case.

Forgot one other point about Bush (and by extension, Obama). It's easy to be a critic and laugh about how dumb Bush or Obama are is because one constantly fumbles words in a speech or because the other can't give a speech without reading it from a teleprompter. In short, people that make assessments of Presidents based on their perceived intelligence are idiots themselves. It's like the town retard calling the someone else stupid. They should probably look in the mirror before opening their mouth, but it's pile on day, and everyone in the left bought into the "Bush is dumb" meme (which, funny enough, is the meme trotted out for just about every Republican President back to Eisenhower with the possible exception of Tricky Dick).

Ah, a reasonable discussion on Slashdot, what am I to do.

In comparison to Mao, I think Bush was not all that different than Clinton and his father before him...largely a maintainer of the status quo. He certainly was not the transformative character that Mao was and Obama apparently is trying to be.

All Presidents are figureheads to a large degree, by virtue of the demands of the office. Where they influence things is in the people that they appoint to run the country. Sure, GWB filled his cabinet and the rest of the administration with retreads from prior administrations, but these were people largely with a decent amount of policy experience within the mainstream of society. For all of the rancor that was thrown there way, people like Ashcroft really were not that bad. When push came to shove, Ashcroft defended the Constitution.

The economy would be a good start. Obama took a structural $450 billion a year deficit under Bush (which was hardly anything to be proud about) and has turned it into a structural $1.4 trillion annual deficit. This is simply unrecoverable without severe austerity. It ends in ruination. At the end of Obama's term, we will have doubled the national debt at the same time that Social Security and Medicare goes into the red. In my opinion, this is what you get when you nominate a bunch of socialist and marxist retreads to your cabinet. They really have no clue on how to run an economy. Turbo Tax Timmy couldn't even balance his own taxes correctly, but now he's running the Treasury Department trying to fix the entire economy (Turbo Tax Timmy is a good example of where academic achievement doesn't necessarily confer real world success and achievement). Obama's mismanagement of the economy is almost enough for me to really believe he's an adherent of the Cloward-Piven strategy of collapsing the system to bring on socialism at the national level.