That Other Board

According to TOB, Trump & Putin must have conspired to skew this poll.

"Thry’re Like those Bible interpreting millenialists who predicted the end of the world on January 1, 2000. When nothing happened suddenly it was “Well, we went back and realized we miscalculated the secret code. Now we know the world will actually end on............”"

Yep, like the end of the world according to GORE has been extended by AOC another 12 years...! Bwahahhaaaaa!

Guys, let's at least give them credit for being half right.  The end of the world is an undeniable fact.  They're just a little off on the date.

And speaking figuratively, the world will almost surely end on the day AOC is elected president.

What's most amusing about the usual suspects on TOB is that they are taking exactly the same position they so vehemently criticized after the Benghazi and email investigations -- refusing to accept the results and insisting that what they really want will be discovered if we just keep looking.  Instead of being happy and relieved that their president did not collude with a foreign enemy to impact an election, they are disappointed and petulant about it.  It takes a special kind of American to find joy in the prospect that their president might be a traitor.

I know we like to think of ourselves as somehow better than the usual suspects on TOB, not so much because of our beliefs, but rather because of our behaviors. And it's true, we spend a lot of time actually discussing things, while they have been reduced to nothing more than belittling and insulting Trump and his supporters in every post they write.

But I recently read an essay by presidential biographer and TIME contributor Jon Meacham on the subject of intense partisan differences, and he used three quotes that I think are worth thinking about:

The first is by Walter Lippman, a writer and political commentator who wrote in 1922, "We can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact."

The second is by Jane Addams, one of the great American progressives in the first third of the 20th Century. She wrote, "We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics."

And Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798, "In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords, and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."

The bolded section of Jefferson's quote proves that he should forever be memorialized as the anti-Wabash.

SK, where did you live in Europe?