A Note From The Editor
I've been working on this website for a long time. It will be three years this summer. During that time I have rarely taken the step of asking one of my co-bloggers to take down something they have written. It takes extraordinary circumstances for me to do so. Yesterday, I contacted Bob we discussed his post on Tony Snow's cancer and decided it was best to take it down. I want to apologize to our readers who were rightly offended by the content of the post. We are better than that. I hope that you will forgive the poor judgment and stick with us. Thanks.
By Kyle - 3/28/2007
7 Comments:
I think you’ve made an excellent decision by sending a message that there's no place on your site for reveling in another person’s illness. Mencken put it well in his comments below:
“But really what gets me more than anything about this post and some of the responses, is a great sense of disappointment that in the end, some folks here value partisanship and revenge above any real sense of the human condition.”
Even if Snow, Bush, et. al. are guilty of legitimate crimes (instead of doing what they reasonably and truthfully think is best for their constituents), it is only appropriate to wish for their punishment through legitimate legal methods, i.e., within our system. It’s only proper to wish harm on another person if that harm serves a greater good for humanity as a whole. It’s perfectly appropriate to wish for someone to be punished by legal methods within a legal system because that punishment vindicates a moral principle and deters others from violating that principle. Tony Snow’s cancer vindicates nothing, and deters nothing.
Keep up the good work Kyle.
I do agree with Bob on the part how Americans desensitize all of the soldiers getting killed in Iraq and freak out and feel 10 times worse when they hear some one gets cancer. Can you really beat not having any limbs? Can you really beat dying and leaving your wife and kids without a father or husband or vise versa for women? You can beat cancer, you can't beat the results of war, weather it be death, loss of limbs, etc.
I think Americans need to start looking at war injuries and deaths as they look at cancer.
Lets just hope Tony Snow doesn't have mold growing on his walls while he recovers from the cancer treatment in the hospital or at home. Because God knows we don't want him to go through the same pain and suffering all of the troops and their family went through at Walter Read.
It was a funny joke about a bad man. It wasn't someone calling someone else a faggot for no reason.
Good move Kyle.......to keep the integrity of what you do every day is important. The post on Snow
was definitely over the top !! Get with the program Chuck.........liberal shouldn't mean lacking in compassion or embracing stupidity !!
Poor taste(which is in the eye of the beholder) should fall under the protection of the first amendment. Having said that it is also your right to withdraw the post. First Peter now Bob who will be next?
As another anonymous person noted below, I did not start this Snow stuff. i don't even know what was said. So I would like the random people pointing some shame at me to stop it.
I don't even know what was said.
But I did express support for Bob below, simply based on the concept that I don't want to hear that I MUST feel saddness for Snow.
Indeed, no one should feel compelled to feel sadness for Snow. That said, regardless of his culpability in, well, anything (he's the Mouth of Sauron, not Sauron himself), vengeance is not justice.
To take this to it's logical conclusion, consider Osama bin Laden. Clearly, objectively, a bad man. I feel no sympathy for his kidney problems. But it's not justice. Justice is catching him, trying him in a court of law, and sticking him in "the hole" for the rest of his hopefully excruciatingly long life. Hoping he dies a painful death in the mountains of Pakistan/Afghanistan is vengeance.
Not that I blame Bob. Desire for vengeance is part of the human condition. It's why the death penalty is popular. But in the end, vengeance is hollow. I'm certain that if Darth Cheney keeled over tomorrow, there'd be a lot of happy people out there. Not me. He wouldn't have been held accountable for his actions.
I don't know Tony Snow. Is he a lying liar? Obviously. Does that make him a bad person? Hell if I know. It'd be nice if the White House press secretary didn't lie to the people, but if that's what his boss is instructing him to do...
Kyle, this is the nature of a community website. Sometimes you get stuff you don't agree with. Deciding if a line was crossed can be a challenge, since you don't want to stifle debate. I've not read the original post, but you aren't trying to sweep things under the rug; you are being forthright and honest, and that's important. The coverup is always worse than the crime, so to speak. I doubt you lose many, if any, readers.
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