Sigh. It's like I'm slapping around Jesus. Or MLK, or Ghandi, or some shit.

Hey, I spent all friggin' weekend at the airport, selling flowers for Ace. Stop dismissing his contribution to humanity, dammit!

nostrils? I see you are trying to clean up your language here. Good boy!..;-)

"Next week, a very special Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation: Riding the Bus with 41, starring George W. Bush as Andie McDowell, and Bill Clinton as a retarded Rosie O'Donell."

Ace, I assume your strategy is to get this person to pay more attention to his own blog so he spends less time at yours. Let's hope it works!

Later,
bbeck

I will say this. Clinton can be friends with anyone. When he was running for President in 92 my husband's family had won "farm family of the year' in Arkansas that year. (Now THAT, my friends, is a BIG deal in Arkansas) Anyway Bill spent a day hunting with them.
The cousin told me later that when he got dark, they were a bit tipsy from the beer and Clinton joined in "spotting." And in case you are one of those citified people that don't know squat about redneck life...that's illegal. Not that the media cared then of course. But if Clinton can do redneck, he can do upperclass Texan baby. (And please, no one say they are the same thing, mmkay?)

"You'd better put some ice on that."

We called it jackilighting in Missouri.

Y'know, that soulless SOB every once in a while does some shit that makes me wonder why I wouldn't piss in his ear if his brains caught fire.

I strongly recommend George H. W. Bush's book "All the Best".

It is a compilation of letters he has written throughout his life, and he published it in lieu of an autobiography.

I hesitated to pick it up because a book of letters didn't sound as interesting, but WOW, it is good! He is such a kind, good man.

I actually read it again several years later and enjoyed it just as much.

Rightwingsparkle, I'm sorry but I don't speak Redneckesian. What is this "spotting"? Inquiring minds want to know.

Bill, you have to remember Ace has been around the block when it comes to internet flame wars like the rest of us kiddies. Like SunTzu said, find your opponent's weakness and exploit it*. As you admit, he's nailed yours. I must say, well played, well played indeed.

*Or whatever the quote is. I'm too dumb to read, that's of course a given.

Re: Spotting, all I could find on google is plane spotting. Don't think that's it. =\

Clinton can only be friends with me if he gives me a shit load of money first. And never touches me. And never exposes any of his genetalia to me.

shine a high-intensity light on a deer to make it freeze up, then blast away

Both guys

1. Hate Jimmy Carter
2. Are gifted with people skills...they can get along with an audience.
3. Both have their sleaze liabilitities. Clintons are well-known. Bush is a boot-licking toady boy for any corporate interest with money. Which explains why he keeps the Borders open to unchecked illegal immigration despite the homeland security risks, allows industry after industry to fall to the Chinese, his pandering to Israel & the Religious Right, and his 700 billion Big Pharma drug subsidy.
4. Bill Clinton also gets along well with Bush Senior, even better after the Tsunami trip, plus he didn't like Kerry enough to help him. Both Bushs and Clinton are Yalies but like to thinkof themselves as "regular guys" - unlike Kerry.

I liked the story about Clinton and his instinctual fitting in with the Arkansas hunting culture. He is very good at that, and as Gov, was well-liked for his ability to mesh with Arkansans of all strata. That is a positive.

". . .all up my nostrils"?????

Sheeeesh. I get back from vacation and Bill is up your nostrils?

Good lord, can't I even take a week off without this blog making a half-assed attempt at respectability?

All evil things have an attraction like that of gravity.

I wonder if GHWB has indoctrinated him into MYSTERY BABYLON yet?

Just what the world needs. Bill Clinton and the freaking Masons, together at last.
If your looking for Star Wars analogies here's your real example of Anakin and Senator Palpatine. The twisted young Billy meets the evil Emperor (Grand Worshipful Master)Bush.

And the angel opened the first seal...

Are you like Cedar's kid brother, Wayne?

This puts a real bizarre twist on the Bush dynasty, don't it?

Michael Savage climas that the Bush's want Hillary to win the pres election, why I can't imagine.

But his point is well taken: this "relationship" w/ the Bush's helps Hillary by removing some of the "stain" Bill put there by his treachery, his cowardice, and his crimes.

Bush senior is a nice old guy who is incapable of guile and he should listen to Barbara. Clinton is a sociopath. And so is her husband - he's probably trying to get next to the twins. Come to think of it, maybe so is Hillary. (EWWW!)

{barf}

Brak (OH how I love that screen name!) got it right on the spotting.

Clinton is still a wanker.
Bush the Elder is still naive.

And NO i'm not going back to Bill's blog.
or Jeff's.
Not after their meanspirited behaviours towards you and your readers, Ace.
Sorry, but I've lost all the respect I used to have for them.
Sure, the flamewar they incited had some funny moments...but no thanks to Bill and Jeff.
They acted like hysterical sullivanesque gobshites. What a waste.

I'm already anxious for the day Jeff becomes readable again. Or at least wakes up and takes a long hard look in the mirror and admits that pretending to be all cool like Andy Kaufman after blowing up like a tittie baby isn't the way to go through life.

Sure, maybe Jim Carey will play you in a movie and REM will write a song about you someday, but Jeff deserves so much more.

Plus, there's the part about Andy Kaufman not being funny, either.

Well, Jeff did accept a truce and attempted to be funny in the thread after a short amount of animosity.

Bill was angrier, but whatever. He seems over it now as well.

I don't know what made them so mad, but I think it was a couple of things.

1) Terri Schiavo. Both found themselves on the "wrong side" of the issue, by the lights of most of their readers, and they're defensive and angry about that. Andrew Sullivan got similarly defensive and angry when he drifted off the conservative reservation (caveat: I never thought he really was on it) and many readers told him they weren't interested in reading him anymore.

They also, I think, believe that people like me took the conservatively-correct position out of cowardice or as a way to pander... which isn't true. As I've said, I've been talking up the Schiavo case --just as I've talked it up here --for two years.

Those "reasonable people" I kept mentioning who disagreed with me? I can put Jeff or Bill on the phone with them to prove this, if they so require it. (The number will be blocked, natch.)

2) Both feel the need to respond to attacks made on them, both on their own blogs and on others. And they're especially annoyed at attacks on them on other blogs.

I don't know if I'm much better at this... I don't know how much I'm ragged on. I do know when DL called me a homophobe on Karol's site I told him off, but then that was pretty much it.

I'm thin-skinned myself, but I've also been slammed so much on-line that I hardly care anymore. Maybe if there was a big anti-Ace brigade on someone else's blog I'd find myself less blase. But so far there's not...

..which kind of pisses me off, because you aren't anyone until people send you hate mail or rip on you on a blog. I'm lagging in this. I guess I need to get the word out that I'm a prick.

Anyway, they're annoyed at me for hosting a site in which a lot of people rag on them, thus forcing them to come over and defend themselves.

3) I think there's a certain amount of competitiveness going on, and I don't think either is happy I'm joining them on Rightalk. Just a feeling I get...

Maybe they thought it was funny, but I got the impression that their interview with me was basically a hostile one, though done through the veneer of politeness. I never for one second got the impression I was being asked to join in with them in discussing issues or anything. I didn't feel like a guest; I felt like a target. Questions like 'What makes Ace of Spades so damn special?" are a bit off-putting... and as Bill's remarks here attest, that wasn't just joking-- he really was pissed off I would only give my number to his producer.

Why? I don't know. I don't see how it could possibly matter. But he took it as an affront.

4) I think both are questioning the conservative movement generally. There's a spectrum of libertarians to conservatives, but I think they're both finding they're really more on the libertarian side and are increasingly hostile to mainline conservatism.

I mean, the interview with Michele from ASV was a joke and all, but the jokes were all about the libertarian-"theocon" split, and they seemed pretty annoyed at the whole "God" thing. Joking or not.

So, there's that, too: an ideological split from readers like the ones here, and blogs like this one.

5) I think that bloggers who go under their real names feel superior to anonymous bloggers. This always just sort of comes up, eventually. Neither one of those guys have mentioned it, but most real-name bloggers I know of eventually write a post in which they call anonymous bloggers cowards, in so many words, unwilling to put their names behind their opinions.

There's something to that, of course. But then again, some of us just don't feel like being stalked. Or being blackballed from Hollywood, say.

But whatever. Controversy over, flame war over.

And they still have good blogs, for what that's worth.

I really haven't been confronted with a similar situation, with people ranking on me on an ideological ally's site, so I don't know if I'd behave much differently.

They scream and yell and insult commentators on their blogs because, according to them, we demand that they agree with us all the time. Sorry, apparently, it's the other way around. They became very defensive and down right shitty over Schiavo, Magouerik, and the morning after pill debates. And if I hear that phony argument one more time that, if you believe in X you must also believe in Y, otherwise you are a hypocrite blah blah blah, I will vomit.

People aren't going to be "ranking on you," as you put it, because you believe that reasonable people can disagree.

Controversy over, flame war over.

Heh, until the NEXT time someone dares to expel a breath of criticism in that direction.

Be ready, Ace. I'm guessing your upcoming show is going to face more than its fair share of poor reviews.

A suggestion: I would re-read some of the threads with this stuff in it and think carefully about how "responding" to critics makes a radio host look.

Later,
bbeck

Ace, have you ever taken a course in broadcasting?

Nope!

No idea what the eff I'm doing.

Maybe there's a 'For Dummies' book on that.

I totally agree with you on being anonymous. Too many wierdos out there.

Not on this blog, of course...