Good evening again, Bill!

Bill Anderson wrote to Frank Reichert...

> Maybe because you are confusing dealing with "real people" with being
> emotional? IMO emotion belongs where it belongs. Political decisions
> based in emotion are often bad for liberty.

"Often", or "always", or 'almost never often'?  What's the
point?  Politics, including LP politics, is always filled with
emotion. It seems to be a huge selling point that every political
party tries to capitalize on whenever the opportunity arises.  An
'emotionless' dead meat monologue of ideas never seems to find a
way of reaching the average individual.  When you deal with 'real
people', whether in the supermarket or in most other
circumstances, the lack of emotion often comes about as
lackluster at best, and hardly ever finding a convincing subject.

Perhaps that is why the proverbial 'one liner' still is a key
ingredient in the success or failure of a lot of political
campaigns.  Good campaign ad managers know this very well, and
target audiences are given priority, and one-liners seem to be
the venue of choice in terms of direction. That goes for both
positive and negative ad campaigns.  At this point I don't want
to get into the morality or question of whether negative ad
campaigns produce the best results versus a positive one.

But there does seem to be a "sporting mentality' as such in any
political campaign.  Sports events are usually emotionally
charged, and for the average voter today, the emotion-packed
advertising seems to attract the 'home front' or supporters
particularly within the two major parties! The candidate that
scores the best one-liner, or the best catch phrase, usually it
seems wins the debate depending upon those chronicling the debate
event. Most of the major news networks thought John Kerry won all
of the debates during this election year -- but 'personally' I
believed the message from both the Presidential debates, as well
as the one Vice Presidential debate, went to the GOP.

But I'm likely one who didn't look heavily in favour of the
'emotion' aspect of the debates, but rather at the background for
the messages being given by the candidates themselves and shifted
through the emotion. Unfortunately, most people probably can't or
won't do that, because they are essentially on one 'team' or the
'other team' going into the debate in the first place.

Another possibility too... I wouldn't have voted for either one
of 'em, so I wasn't on either team, since the LP was also
fielding a candidate.

This is also, by the way, the problem in real polemical political
politics in America today -- we're divided as a nation with this
idea of two teams, the GOP on one side, the Democrats on the
other.  It's a false dichotomy of tremendous sorts, since both of
the two Parties are essentially not addressing the concerns of a
lot of people, and people have tremendous difficulty looking at
any other alternatives whatsoever.

I previously wrote:

> > Guess I have to ask.  I have had three wifes. One who died in
> > 1995. One other one who divorced me.  And my present one.  I also
> > have five children in all of this.  Don't know exactly how you
> > wish to relate any of this to your reluctance at best, to dealing
> > with all of the personalities, included Ed Fischag that still
> > grace our presence today!

To which, you replied:
> I don't fit your square hole, so the question is void.

Maybe not, really.  You had a difficult time, as I recall, with
the late Roger Erdman, and others simply because you failed to
understand that at least some of their concerns might have
possibly mirrored your own. Maybe that might be because you had
never met Roger.  I don't know.  

I will admit, as I knew Roger well, that he and I tended to agree
to disagree on some things, but to suddenly (as in Iraq or
Afghanistan) or the WTO protests in Seattle, find common ground. 
Roger and I had very intimate phone conversations going on just
prior to his murder. Some of what HE was concerned with, was with
the pro-Isreali bent of Douglas Friedman, Lowell Savage, Robert
Goodman and others, taking over the Liberty Northwest conference.

In that vein, as I pointed out to Roger personally, he was pretty
much on line with the Libertarian Party's position on not
meddling in the affairs of other countries, Israel, Egypt, and
other states, but maintaining a neutral foreign police based upon
the real interests of this country.

So, the ONLY point I'm making right now is that Roger and I
seemed to have some ideological differences on a lot of things,
but we both knew when we had some common ground issues too.  We
could support each other when that was the case, and agree to
disagree on various other things and still, at the same time,
remain friends!

> I don't understand why you think your three marriages have anything to
> do with mine, or my preference for reason and login in a medium that
> expresses emotion poorly on a subject matter that emotion serves poorly.

Well, somehow that came up in this thread, and it seems to me at
least, you might be making far too much of this than ought to be
the case.  

To show you what was 'probably' said, I believe I wrote something
earlier to the effect in answer to someone over marriage becoming
a compromise, and asking me how that might work in my present
marriage.  That's how the context of this arose, and now you want
to make that somehow into something it was never initially
intended to be at all!

So, ferret this out as you will.

Fact is however, Roger and I could and did work together on
various issues and things, and you cannot. Roger and I were
personal friends, you and I are obviously not. Fact is, the
Libertarian Party all the time joins in court battles and other
venues with other groups that are likely diametrically opposed to
each other, on various one-time issues. The LP has even joined
with the likes of neo-conservatives on issues in which the LP has
taken a compatible position.

This post isn't intended as a 'salute to Roger' although I have
no problem at all with that. But one of Roger's favourite
reminders was: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I guess the point in all of this is, we have personal enemies on
all sides of each and every issue, and we have so many issues
taking place in front of us each day, from ballot access, to
court challenges on civil liberties -- and we often are
confronted in such challenges by sudden allies who might not see
everything exactly on other issues that we do!  By "we", I mean
the Libertarian Party, and that 'we' gets pretty meek results
when you consider we fight light alley cats on a lot of these
issues between ourselves, from abortion on demand, to open
borders.

Kindest regards,
Frank



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