Yeah, yeah, you talk tough. But when I invite you to a beatdown, you pussy, you retreat into meaningless political jabber. It's all just a bunch of words for you, a simulated personality you strut for yourself to compensate for your cowardice.
I see no reason to believe that the many people in the journalism workflow are any different from the TrollMods in these threads. Collectively they filter away real facts that threaten either their vested interests or just their preconceived notions. Fortunately there's still some diversity in this big world, so different filters allow different facts through. Searching the Web, corroborating and invalidating, is a way to find more of the complete picture.
Who said comments have to be "verbose" or "redundant"? Comments are there to describe the code. Your remark that they should "never describe what the code does" is the most ridiculous possible. What, then, should comments do? Talk about "useless comments"...
Who caress whether you're amused? In 30 years of programming, I've learned how to comment code so it's maintainable by me, a team, or anyone else. You don't even know what "spaghetti code" means - it's when you have too many jumps around too many scopes. If you're not competent to update comments to reflect code changes, that's your major malfunction. I pity anyone who has to work with you. Because your position is the extreme one - why not just eliminate all bugs by leaving out all comments and all code, avoid computers altogether? From the coding insights you've revealed, it sounds like we'd all be much better off if you did.
BTW, the "H" in "IMHO" means "humble" - another programmer buzzword you obviously know nothing about except that quoting it makes you look like you know what you're talking about. Poser.
While modern compilers optimize away most CPU jumps to factored code calls, there are still good reasons to have blocks (especially functions) longer than 24 or 80 lines or so. Most readers find it easier to scroll than to jump to other scopes factored out of a sequence. And some sequences of operations are best read in a fairly long run, rather than "hypertexted" into nested subroutines. It's not common, but when it's appropriate, that's when I label the delimiters. I always label function closes with the name of the function (or its entire signature, where ambiguous). What I'd really like would be an editor that would un/roll subroutine definitions inline on request, so I could look at the called code along with the calling code without switching contexts. Or another pair of eyes for multiple monitors...
I'd settle for more citations of named sources, including references to other articles, especially across publications. The Web is killing print not just by convenience and cost, but by corroboration. Cross-referencing is half the battle in learning whether to trust a published report. The other half includes interactivity, between reader and author as well as among readers. When reporters quote anonymous sources, it's a dead end. And especially with the recent revelations of just how often reporters merely repeat conflicted interest sources, without skepticism, qualification or even a hint that they're not authoritative, those dead ends kill trust sooner or later.
Newspapers are mostly reprinters of others' writing. Standing alone, they've successfully hid the origins of their product, an artifact of the medium. Now people have gotten used to the Internet's exposure of the news reporting process. Newspapers can finally drop their pretense, now that they're forced, and leverage their accumulated wisdom, discipline, and internal communities. Or they can die as dead as the trees on which they're printed.
The design is usually in different terms than the code. When intelligible, the design that accompanies the code would make good comments. But often the design is at a different level of abstraction, or in terms of entities not directly represented in the code, or omits important artifacts of the code or the machine itself. A good project has design documentation, code comments, and code, all referencing each other, each understandable in its own terms (the code by both humans and machines). And of course all maintained in sync with the other, which they all reference.
The need for each of those work products by different people/machines at different parts of the project cycle is one reason I've been waiting for flowchart programming for many years. When we can flip between lexical and graphical representations of the same executable, with attached multimedia documentation, we'll have much more efficient team understanding of the code. Object techniques have brought us a lot closer, but we still have a lot of skills (topological sense, geometrical arrangement) that we can use to work better to make the machines do what we want, not just what we asked for.
Well, that's a way to teach GOTO programming technique. I was just pointing out the problem of a teacher acting like they'd taught a student not to do something, when they'd just omitted teaching that thing. I think penalizing a student for using that thing they'd learned independently, but not gotten instruction not to use, is exactly backwards: penalizing their initiative and creativity (if it was used correctly). Our mutual point is that teaching is not a "gotcha" game, but rather a means of communicating between people, one of whom is responsible for initiating and enforcing the clarity of both parties' communication. Your technique might work for you, and for others like you - other students might respond to different techniques. That's what communication is like among individuals.
Well, of course if subsequent editing doesn't respect the comments, they'll become useless. But that is true of any comment style. My style binds comments to their scope, largely independent of outside context, which makes it much easier to edit the comments along with the code. And their "redundancy" helps enforce the focus of the code. All those other approaches you mentioned are coding conventions - which I also follow, except that I comment everything. I make sure to leave linebreaks between sequences of related code lines, and comment just the "paragraphs", although I rarely follow an esoteric line with a comment clarifying it.
I produced my style after years of working with others. Starting programs, finishing them, jumping in to help - all collaborating with others, and getting their feedback (sometimes unintentional) on what works to keep the same ideas of the code in all our minds. And considering "me, later" as distinct as any other coder. Coders without the discipline to follow a comment style generally don't have discipline to write code that other programmers can maintain. And starting with good comments gives everyone a momentum kickstart in keeping the comments readable. They're not expendable - it's often much easier to rewrite code from scratch, just so it's understandable, than to create comments from scratch to describe the code.
I start a file with a description of what the contained "object" does. I don't put a lot of details in the beginning anymore, because I got tired of updating the comments whenever I changed the API or significant varibles/algorithms. I really wish my programming editor stored every line in its own record in a relational database, with separate tables for blocks, variables, class/function names and comments. I'd like to query for callgraphs, and more easily factor code. And I'd like to query for uncommented blocks. The side benefit of arbitrary indent/CR and other whitespace formatting also seems valuable, if out of the scope of this discussion. Someday.
1.3TB for $1300 is cheap. Just the cheapest 300GB EIDE drives (x4, max on cheap IDE) cost $104, at least $516 - for 1.2TB, 100GB less than the Yellow. The HW for the rest of the machine is probably at least another $500, for $950. If you can put one of these boxes together and install the OS and SW (assuming yours will be as good) in under 3 hours, you probably can charge at least $100:h at work. And there's tech/customer support. This box seems like a good deal, without hassle, with little markup.
Good comments are written first, before the code, describing what the following code does. It is gramatically correct, punctuated, easy for a stranger to read. It says what the following code does in terms of the real world, not just in terms of other code, unless the sole purpose of the code is to connect other code without relation to anything expressible in real world terms. I prefer my comments to be in the present tense, as if they could be directly compiled themselves. I put comments inside practically every block, like function definitions, loops, conditionals. I often put comment labels after block closers, especially complex conditional sets, embedded loops and functions. That labeling makes it easier to keep track of context within which variables, their scope and the "current task" are in operation. I'd rather spend a few more seconds typing up front, and save a lot of scrolling and delimiter-matching later (not to mention reducing confusion and mistakes).
Code gets shuffled around in different order, read by strangers, and reread much later by yourself, often after you've changed by experience (either in programming or in the task being programmed). Writing the code first is a good way to outline the program, and to detect flaws in your approach. It also gets a little bit of the program done, on screen where you can see it. Often coding to support the comments is more like a cleanup task than starting from scratch.
Yeah, crazy me, destroying America with my insistence that only Congress exercise its power to declare war, to make laws, to represent the people of the United States. But why should we argue about the Republican crimes of yesteryear? Your asshole president has now taken the Congressional authorization to protect America, if necessary, from Saddam Hussein, and turned Iraq into an actual threat instead of a Republican wet dream. When we impeach Bush for lying us into war, you and your gang of traitors will say it's a "liberal plot", not enforcing the law or protecting the Constitution, and us, from your favorite tyrant. Why do you hate America, you warmongering fascist? BTW, thanks for claiming Bush for the fascists. I'd like to thank you with a baseball bat. Drop by any time.
3.5G doesn't have anything to do with the weight of the vehicle under acceleration. It means the centrifugal lateral force analagous to gravity, though at a tangent to the curved path, is 3.5 times the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth. So you'd feel like you weigh 3.5x as much, sideways. Not a very useful spec for imagining the ride, but useful in designing a suspension and tires, where the force of friction must resist the force pulling the car into a slide.
The downward force link about driving on the ceiling was cool, though.
If pointing out the truth to a violent gang of ignorant Republicans is "Flamebait", whose fault is that? It's the Republican flamers, of course - to say nothing of the Republican TrollMods.
Democrats and Republicans have each sold out to different corporations. That's the difference between them, and the reason I've never been a member of either party.
You can cite the popular media myth that Carter was a nice guy, but I'm talking about specifics: Carter didn't create the Savings and Loan heist, though the post to which I replied made that up. I never claimed he wasn't a lying, stealing asshole, or a good president - that's your hobbyhorse to ride, your strawman to argue.
Just like your overblown distortion of the facts I presented about Reagan, Bush, hostages and the economy. Your own buyin to the "Carter's decent" media image shows how hard it was to attack him personally. And if you don't think it was worth screwing the hostages for a year, creating a recession to blame Democrats to smokescreen the damage done by Republicans in Nixon's criminal career, and getting 12 years to exploit the country as "Reagan/Bush", then you're just proof of how well it worked. You're omitting Bush's years running the CIA under Carter, ease of making a deal with the Iranians - as demonstrated in the 1980s when they made even more complicated deals to arm the Iranians. You really don't understand anything about politics and covert actions our government commits. You're just in denial, with the "it's too hard" excuse your only safety from the terrible facts.
OK, now that I admit I misinterpreted your.sig as consistent with the rest of your crypto-Republican post, I'll remind you that I disputed their false assertion with links to evidence, describing the truth. You're the one trying to twist reality, if you're pretending that Carter created the Savings & Loan heist. You're such a great "Democrat" that you're falsely attacking your own party's president, as well as me for pointing out the truth about him. You're the one with the twisted reality and pretense.
I'm glad you compared Clinton's indictment for appearing to lie about a blowjob (when it turned out he hadn't, legally). Because Reagan's weapons sales weren't just "technically illegal". He was overseeing an illegal war in Central America, not only without Congress' explicit consent, but against several laws passed explicitly to stop him, including the Boland Amendment, which he violated with the Iran/Contra secret fundraising, too. You can spout your personal political theories about peace, hipness, class division or whatever else. But if you're going to compare a legal, white lie about a blowjob to illegally arming not only narcoterrorists in nearby countries, but also arming our enemies in Iran, you've got nothing worth hearing about politics. Naturally you make a nonsensical point about Wilson and WWI, seemingly to say we shouldn't have entered it, while claiming Nixon was right to lie about both ending the war, and his coverups of the covert wars in nearby countries he waged instead. And his propping up the war solely to help win reelection in 1972, as he admitted. It's no surprise you don't understand that "Watergate" was when Nixon's gang got caught breaking into Democratic Party headquarters as part of their absolutely criminal campaign that year - all part of that victory you claim justifies the crimes they committed to win. That is partisan politics, and your willful ignorance, equating a lie about a blowjob with illegally arming our enemies and rigging wars to win elections, is precisely the partisan payoff, whether you can see it or not.
There's also the conceit that powerful people have, that they can control the dangerous, powerful forces they unleash. They often get short-term gains, and longterm destruction.
Well, I read your ambiguous.sig's meaning wrong. But then, it just pointed at a fact mentioned by hardly anyone but Republicans - your.sig is just part of the chorus of rightwingers who scream that the government spends any money, on the NEA, on art, on anything. So you fooled me, I admit - by being indistinguishable from a rightwinger.
Which fit the rest of the context. I didn't exhaustively compare pros and cons of Democrats and Republicans. I replied to a post blaming Carter for "the Iran hostage crisis, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the horrid handling of the oil shortages, the terrible economic conditions, the absolute failure to accomplish any of his campaign promises, the continuation/reinstatment of the draft programs, and the policy to consider Taiwan as a part of China". To which I replied only correcting only about half those lies. You complain that I linked to "nothing but speculation", when I just linked to a Google search for "reagan hostages". Readers can decide for themselves, as I have, from the available evidence and reasoning. You don't like that, because you're a Democrat who apologizes for Republican crimes. Your kind of Democrat is one of the reasons I don't belong to your party, either. If you're not going to realize the Republicans have been screwing the Democratic Party harder than even America for years, you're the one with a credibility problem. So it was easy to mistake your NEA statement as a complaint it's getting any money at all. Maybe sometime you'll learn to take a strong stand in favor of your politics in an effective way. Not just attacking people with whom you claim to have so much in common politically, to no effect. When your fellow "Democrats" do more standing up, we might have less of the blight your duopoly enables in the Republicans. Meanwhile, I see no reason to go out of my way to point out irrelevant correct actions by Republicans while I make the simple point that they have screwed up so much, on purpose, and we need to get rid of them. Perhaps if you understood that, your party might win elections more often, and I wouldn't have quite as much to complain about.
Let's see, VP Bush oversaw Iran/Contra out of the White House, and that required his flying to Iran on an SR-71. What, you get your history from Stephen Segal or Chuck Norris? TOW MISSILES, just for starters - the "Iran" half of Iran/Contra is so well documented (though certainly not completely) that I'm not going to bother arguing about a NYT story you don't even bother to cite specifically, let alone link to.
Reagan's sale of weapons to the Contras was illegal, as was his covert method of doing it, and his coverup.
As for your "Democratic wars" theory - how about the way that those wars are started by Democrats, then prolonged indefinitely by Republicans (except WWII, which Democrats won)? As usual, the Republicans hijack the government to destroy it.
You're as wrong about me as you are about Republicans and war - and everything else you just make up to suit your demented version of history. I watched Nixon resign on TV, after watching his body bags come home. I expect to see your boy Bush follow suit.
Vietnam was Nixon's war because Nixon took over that catastrophe from Johnson, campaigning that he would end the war. Instead he expanded the war, including covert war on other neighboring countries not otherwise involved. Then he propped up the war in 1972 solely to win reelection. It's Ford's war, because Ford inherited it along with everything else he accepted from the Nixon he pardoned. And WWII was surely Truman's war (as well as FDR's), as he actually ran its ending, along with decisions that ended it more quickly. Your either/or logic is perfectly suited to keeping our moronic president where he can do most harm: in the White House.
Those links are mostly just Google searches on the nouns in the subjects I mention. If there were exonerating facts, they'd be in there, too. You can hide behind your denial, but what's scaring you is the truth: Bush is the worst president ever, and we're (probably) stuck with him for another 3 dangerous years.
If you weren't a Republican apologist who ignores the facts about Reagan/Bush crimes, I might care about what you pay attention to. Instead, you're a lost cause. I mainly just linked to Google searches on a couple of keywords each, which would have turned up some facts defending your boys, if there were any. "The facts are clearly biased against the Bush administration." - The Daily Show (paraphrase)
How about that NEA, huh? At <0.00005% of Bush's budget, it's apparently destroying the entire culture, right?
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Yeah, yeah, you talk tough. But when I invite you to a beatdown, you pussy, you retreat into meaningless political jabber. It's all just a bunch of words for you, a simulated personality you strut for yourself to compensate for your cowardice.
I see no reason to believe that the many people in the journalism workflow are any different from the TrollMods in these threads. Collectively they filter away real facts that threaten either their vested interests or just their preconceived notions. Fortunately there's still some diversity in this big world, so different filters allow different facts through. Searching the Web, corroborating and invalidating, is a way to find more of the complete picture.
Who said comments have to be "verbose" or "redundant"? Comments are there to describe the code. Your remark that they should "never describe what the code does" is the most ridiculous possible. What, then, should comments do? Talk about "useless comments"...
Who caress whether you're amused? In 30 years of programming, I've learned how to comment code so it's maintainable by me, a team, or anyone else. You don't even know what "spaghetti code" means - it's when you have too many jumps around too many scopes. If you're not competent to update comments to reflect code changes, that's your major malfunction. I pity anyone who has to work with you. Because your position is the extreme one - why not just eliminate all bugs by leaving out all comments and all code, avoid computers altogether? From the coding insights you've revealed, it sounds like we'd all be much better off if you did.
BTW, the "H" in "IMHO" means "humble" - another programmer buzzword you obviously know nothing about except that quoting it makes you look like you know what you're talking about. Poser.
I do prefer nongendered pronouns when I don't know the gender. And I like leather clothing - are you volunteering?
While modern compilers optimize away most CPU jumps to factored code calls, there are still good reasons to have blocks (especially functions) longer than 24 or 80 lines or so. Most readers find it easier to scroll than to jump to other scopes factored out of a sequence. And some sequences of operations are best read in a fairly long run, rather than "hypertexted" into nested subroutines. It's not common, but when it's appropriate, that's when I label the delimiters. I always label function closes with the name of the function (or its entire signature, where ambiguous). What I'd really like would be an editor that would un/roll subroutine definitions inline on request, so I could look at the called code along with the calling code without switching contexts. Or another pair of eyes for multiple monitors...
I'd settle for more citations of named sources, including references to other articles, especially across publications. The Web is killing print not just by convenience and cost, but by corroboration. Cross-referencing is half the battle in learning whether to trust a published report. The other half includes interactivity, between reader and author as well as among readers. When reporters quote anonymous sources, it's a dead end. And especially with the recent revelations of just how often reporters merely repeat conflicted interest sources, without skepticism, qualification or even a hint that they're not authoritative, those dead ends kill trust sooner or later.
Newspapers are mostly reprinters of others' writing. Standing alone, they've successfully hid the origins of their product, an artifact of the medium. Now people have gotten used to the Internet's exposure of the news reporting process. Newspapers can finally drop their pretense, now that they're forced, and leverage their accumulated wisdom, discipline, and internal communities. Or they can die as dead as the trees on which they're printed.
The design is usually in different terms than the code. When intelligible, the design that accompanies the code would make good comments. But often the design is at a different level of abstraction, or in terms of entities not directly represented in the code, or omits important artifacts of the code or the machine itself. A good project has design documentation, code comments, and code, all referencing each other, each understandable in its own terms (the code by both humans and machines). And of course all maintained in sync with the other, which they all reference.
The need for each of those work products by different people/machines at different parts of the project cycle is one reason I've been waiting for flowchart programming for many years. When we can flip between lexical and graphical representations of the same executable, with attached multimedia documentation, we'll have much more efficient team understanding of the code. Object techniques have brought us a lot closer, but we still have a lot of skills (topological sense, geometrical arrangement) that we can use to work better to make the machines do what we want, not just what we asked for.
Well, that's a way to teach GOTO programming technique. I was just pointing out the problem of a teacher acting like they'd taught a student not to do something, when they'd just omitted teaching that thing. I think penalizing a student for using that thing they'd learned independently, but not gotten instruction not to use, is exactly backwards: penalizing their initiative and creativity (if it was used correctly). Our mutual point is that teaching is not a "gotcha" game, but rather a means of communicating between people, one of whom is responsible for initiating and enforcing the clarity of both parties' communication. Your technique might work for you, and for others like you - other students might respond to different techniques. That's what communication is like among individuals.
Well, of course if subsequent editing doesn't respect the comments, they'll become useless. But that is true of any comment style. My style binds comments to their scope, largely independent of outside context, which makes it much easier to edit the comments along with the code. And their "redundancy" helps enforce the focus of the code. All those other approaches you mentioned are coding conventions - which I also follow, except that I comment everything. I make sure to leave linebreaks between sequences of related code lines, and comment just the "paragraphs", although I rarely follow an esoteric line with a comment clarifying it.
I produced my style after years of working with others. Starting programs, finishing them, jumping in to help - all collaborating with others, and getting their feedback (sometimes unintentional) on what works to keep the same ideas of the code in all our minds. And considering "me, later" as distinct as any other coder. Coders without the discipline to follow a comment style generally don't have discipline to write code that other programmers can maintain. And starting with good comments gives everyone a momentum kickstart in keeping the comments readable. They're not expendable - it's often much easier to rewrite code from scratch, just so it's understandable, than to create comments from scratch to describe the code.
I start a file with a description of what the contained "object" does. I don't put a lot of details in the beginning anymore, because I got tired of updating the comments whenever I changed the API or significant varibles/algorithms. I really wish my programming editor stored every line in its own record in a relational database, with separate tables for blocks, variables, class/function names and comments. I'd like to query for callgraphs, and more easily factor code. And I'd like to query for uncommented blocks. The side benefit of arbitrary indent/CR and other whitespace formatting also seems valuable, if out of the scope of this discussion. Someday.
1.3TB for $1300 is cheap. Just the cheapest 300GB EIDE drives (x4, max on cheap IDE) cost $104, at least $516 - for 1.2TB, 100GB less than the Yellow. The HW for the rest of the machine is probably at least another $500, for $950. If you can put one of these boxes together and install the OS and SW (assuming yours will be as good) in under 3 hours, you probably can charge at least $100:h at work. And there's tech/customer support. This box seems like a good deal, without hassle, with little markup.
Good comments are written first, before the code, describing what the following code does. It is gramatically correct, punctuated, easy for a stranger to read. It says what the following code does in terms of the real world, not just in terms of other code, unless the sole purpose of the code is to connect other code without relation to anything expressible in real world terms. I prefer my comments to be in the present tense, as if they could be directly compiled themselves. I put comments inside practically every block, like function definitions, loops, conditionals. I often put comment labels after block closers, especially complex conditional sets, embedded loops and functions. That labeling makes it easier to keep track of context within which variables, their scope and the "current task" are in operation. I'd rather spend a few more seconds typing up front, and save a lot of scrolling and delimiter-matching later (not to mention reducing confusion and mistakes).
Code gets shuffled around in different order, read by strangers, and reread much later by yourself, often after you've changed by experience (either in programming or in the task being programmed). Writing the code first is a good way to outline the program, and to detect flaws in your approach. It also gets a little bit of the program done, on screen where you can see it. Often coding to support the comments is more like a cleanup task than starting from scratch.
Yeah, crazy me, destroying America with my insistence that only Congress exercise its power to declare war, to make laws, to represent the people of the United States. But why should we argue about the Republican crimes of yesteryear? Your asshole president has now taken the Congressional authorization to protect America, if necessary, from Saddam Hussein, and turned Iraq into an actual threat instead of a Republican wet dream. When we impeach Bush for lying us into war, you and your gang of traitors will say it's a "liberal plot", not enforcing the law or protecting the Constitution, and us, from your favorite tyrant. Why do you hate America, you warmongering fascist? BTW, thanks for claiming Bush for the fascists. I'd like to thank you with a baseball bat. Drop by any time.
3.5G doesn't have anything to do with the weight of the vehicle under acceleration. It means the centrifugal lateral force analagous to gravity, though at a tangent to the curved path, is 3.5 times the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth. So you'd feel like you weigh 3.5x as much, sideways. Not a very useful spec for imagining the ride, but useful in designing a suspension and tires, where the force of friction must resist the force pulling the car into a slide.
The downward force link about driving on the ceiling was cool, though.
Moderation 0
30% Insightful
30% Flamebait
10% Offtopic
If pointing out the truth to a violent gang of ignorant Republicans is "Flamebait", whose fault is that? It's the Republican flamers, of course - to say nothing of the Republican TrollMods.
Hail to the thief!
Democrats and Republicans have each sold out to different corporations. That's the difference between them, and the reason I've never been a member of either party.
You can cite the popular media myth that Carter was a nice guy, but I'm talking about specifics: Carter didn't create the Savings and Loan heist, though the post to which I replied made that up. I never claimed he wasn't a lying, stealing asshole, or a good president - that's your hobbyhorse to ride, your strawman to argue.
Just like your overblown distortion of the facts I presented about Reagan, Bush, hostages and the economy. Your own buyin to the "Carter's decent" media image shows how hard it was to attack him personally. And if you don't think it was worth screwing the hostages for a year, creating a recession to blame Democrats to smokescreen the damage done by Republicans in Nixon's criminal career, and getting 12 years to exploit the country as "Reagan/Bush", then you're just proof of how well it worked. You're omitting Bush's years running the CIA under Carter, ease of making a deal with the Iranians - as demonstrated in the 1980s when they made even more complicated deals to arm the Iranians. You really don't understand anything about politics and covert actions our government commits. You're just in denial, with the "it's too hard" excuse your only safety from the terrible facts.
OK, now that I admit I misinterpreted your .sig as consistent with the rest of your crypto-Republican post, I'll remind you that I disputed their false assertion with links to evidence, describing the truth. You're the one trying to twist reality, if you're pretending that Carter created the Savings & Loan heist. You're such a great "Democrat" that you're falsely attacking your own party's president, as well as me for pointing out the truth about him. You're the one with the twisted reality and pretense.
I'm glad you compared Clinton's indictment for appearing to lie about a blowjob (when it turned out he hadn't, legally). Because Reagan's weapons sales weren't just "technically illegal". He was overseeing an illegal war in Central America, not only without Congress' explicit consent, but against several laws passed explicitly to stop him, including the Boland Amendment, which he violated with the Iran/Contra secret fundraising, too. You can spout your personal political theories about peace, hipness, class division or whatever else. But if you're going to compare a legal, white lie about a blowjob to illegally arming not only narcoterrorists in nearby countries, but also arming our enemies in Iran, you've got nothing worth hearing about politics. Naturally you make a nonsensical point about Wilson and WWI, seemingly to say we shouldn't have entered it, while claiming Nixon was right to lie about both ending the war, and his coverups of the covert wars in nearby countries he waged instead. And his propping up the war solely to help win reelection in 1972, as he admitted. It's no surprise you don't understand that "Watergate" was when Nixon's gang got caught breaking into Democratic Party headquarters as part of their absolutely criminal campaign that year - all part of that victory you claim justifies the crimes they committed to win. That is partisan politics, and your willful ignorance, equating a lie about a blowjob with illegally arming our enemies and rigging wars to win elections, is precisely the partisan payoff, whether you can see it or not.
There's also the conceit that powerful people have, that they can control the dangerous, powerful forces they unleash. They often get short-term gains, and longterm destruction.
Well, I read your ambiguous .sig's meaning wrong. But then, it just pointed at a fact mentioned by hardly anyone but Republicans - your .sig is just part of the chorus of rightwingers who scream that the government spends any money, on the NEA, on art, on anything. So you fooled me, I admit - by being indistinguishable from a rightwinger.
Which fit the rest of the context. I didn't exhaustively compare pros and cons of Democrats and Republicans. I replied to a post blaming Carter for "the Iran hostage crisis, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the horrid handling of the oil shortages, the terrible economic conditions, the absolute failure to accomplish any of his campaign promises, the continuation/reinstatment of the draft programs, and the policy to consider Taiwan as a part of China". To which I replied only correcting only about half those lies. You complain that I linked to "nothing but speculation", when I just linked to a Google search for "reagan hostages". Readers can decide for themselves, as I have, from the available evidence and reasoning. You don't like that, because you're a Democrat who apologizes for Republican crimes. Your kind of Democrat is one of the reasons I don't belong to your party, either. If you're not going to realize the Republicans have been screwing the Democratic Party harder than even America for years, you're the one with a credibility problem. So it was easy to mistake your NEA statement as a complaint it's getting any money at all. Maybe sometime you'll learn to take a strong stand in favor of your politics in an effective way. Not just attacking people with whom you claim to have so much in common politically, to no effect. When your fellow "Democrats" do more standing up, we might have less of the blight your duopoly enables in the Republicans. Meanwhile, I see no reason to go out of my way to point out irrelevant correct actions by Republicans while I make the simple point that they have screwed up so much, on purpose, and we need to get rid of them. Perhaps if you understood that, your party might win elections more often, and I wouldn't have quite as much to complain about.
Let's see, VP Bush oversaw Iran/Contra out of the White House, and that required his flying to Iran on an SR-71. What, you get your history from Stephen Segal or Chuck Norris? TOW MISSILES, just for starters - the "Iran" half of Iran/Contra is so well documented (though certainly not completely) that I'm not going to bother arguing about a NYT story you don't even bother to cite specifically, let alone link to.
Reagan's sale of weapons to the Contras was illegal, as was his covert method of doing it, and his coverup.
As for your "Democratic wars" theory - how about the way that those wars are started by Democrats, then prolonged indefinitely by Republicans (except WWII, which Democrats won)? As usual, the Republicans hijack the government to destroy it.
You're as wrong about me as you are about Republicans and war - and everything else you just make up to suit your demented version of history. I watched Nixon resign on TV, after watching his body bags come home. I expect to see your boy Bush follow suit.
Vietnam was Nixon's war because Nixon took over that catastrophe from Johnson, campaigning that he would end the war. Instead he expanded the war, including covert war on other neighboring countries not otherwise involved. Then he propped up the war in 1972 solely to win reelection. It's Ford's war, because Ford inherited it along with everything else he accepted from the Nixon he pardoned. And WWII was surely Truman's war (as well as FDR's), as he actually ran its ending, along with decisions that ended it more quickly. Your either/or logic is perfectly suited to keeping our moronic president where he can do most harm: in the White House.
Those links are mostly just Google searches on the nouns in the subjects I mention. If there were exonerating facts, they'd be in there, too. You can hide behind your denial, but what's scaring you is the truth: Bush is the worst president ever, and we're (probably) stuck with him for another 3 dangerous years.
If you weren't a Republican apologist who ignores the facts about Reagan/Bush crimes, I might care about what you pay attention to. Instead, you're a lost cause. I mainly just linked to Google searches on a couple of keywords each, which would have turned up some facts defending your boys, if there were any. "The facts are clearly biased against the Bush administration." - The Daily Show (paraphrase)
How about that NEA, huh? At <0.00005% of Bush's budget, it's apparently destroying the entire culture, right?