I still to this day write programs for my TI-83 to simplify tasks. I used to write games for them a few years ago, and they actually ended up getting circulated fairly well. I think a lot of people would write them on the computer and then use some software to get the programs on to the calculators. I wrote them in the calculator themselves, which took a lot more time. Maybe if I had been able to do it on the computer, I would have written more complicated games.
That being said, I already knew how to program computers in a couple languages when I started writing programs for the calculator. I don't know that this is the case with most people who program their calculators, in fact I doubt that it is, but it certainly does happen in some cases--for example, I really don't think the people who write complicated games and sophisticated programs for their calculators don't have some prior experience in programming computers. Simple programs like finding the slope of a line after entering two ordered pairs, however, probably doesn't come from prior programming experience.
True. I forgot about that. I was just watching "E-mail Surveillance" today, but I stopped it before they got that far.
Do you think viewers really put that much thought into it, associating the Apple computers with characters that they give a lot of sympathy to? If that's so, why did Dwight get the iPod but Pam ended up with the big brick music player from "The Injury"?
There's only one character in The Office who uses a Mac. The temp, Ryan Howard, uses an Apple iBook. He's the guy played by B.J. Novak. In almost every shot, however, the Apple logo is obscured. If I didn't own an iBook, I might think it was just a white laptop. The iBook is not very often shown on camera at any rate.
Almost everybody else uses Gateway PCs. In fact, the Gateway logo is quite visible on the back of the flat-panel monitors in many, many shots. There are also a few IBM PCs that the characters Oscar, Angela, and Kevin use. I wouldn't have normally noticed this if I hadn't read this article and then gone back and watched some of the episodes in iTunes.
The only other Apple product on the show that I can think of is the video iPod from "Christmas Party."
In any case, I won't comment on whether or not Apples are found disproportionately in film and on television. I am a Mac user, a recent "switcher" in fact (summer 2005), and I'm very happy with the overall experience, but not a supporter of the Intel processor decision. I don't particularly care if there's more or less Apples in film or on television than they are otherwise found "in nature," if you will, but to me there are enough examples that you don't have to use The Office, which clearly does not place Apple products in comparison to, say, Gateway.
So who voted for or against the proposal, if the media is holding Republicans responsible for their voting record? They're not; they're just painting with a broad brush because it's easier to play on stereotypes than to report facts.
By the way, Bill Frist didn't resign from anything. Might want to actually know something before you open your mouth next time.
I have seen on many occasions the wonderful folks here at Slashdot completely butcher the facts and place into an article's title or summary certain statements that just don't mesh with reality. In some cases, they don't even mesh with the actual article that's been linked. This is a case where the article's authors suffer from a guilty conscience about trying to paint with a very broad political brush. Of course, no one here who would be responsible for submitting a summary of the story seemed to care that it was not "Republicans" who defeated the proposal.
Some of the more logical among us, who do not as often subscribe to political stereotypes, might have asked themselves whether or not the "House Energy and Commerce subcommittee," which is actually called the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee (but why do research?), would be distributed along 23-8 partisan lines. After all, that's the vote count for the proposal, and both the article title, the post title, and the article summary are quite confident in their claims that Republicans defeated the net neutrality proposal. So it was 23 Republicans versus 8 Democrats, right?
Not really, If you bothered to read on (I know, I know--I'm asking too much), you'd see that one Republican voted for the amendment. Three Democrats voted against it. But just the Republicans defeated the proposal, according to the folks here. Sure, if those three Democrats voted for it, you would have had a 20-11 vote, and then Republicans would have defeated the proposal. But that didn't happen.
And those Democrats, who apparently feel so strongly about this proposal and are so deserving of the support of the Internet community, had no problem going along for the ride and voting 27-4 in favor of the final bill without the Markey net neutrality amendment. Wow! So principled!
Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?
Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?
It also would have been nice if the people at CNet News would have gotten an interview with Fred Upton, the chairman of the actual subcommittee that did all of this, instead of going to the full committee chairman Joe Barton. In many cases, the full committee chair doesn't have nearly the same kind of expertise on the issue as the subcommittee chairman does. Though with the way CNet News framed this whole thing, maybe they did interview Upton, but he made too good of a point, so they just trashed it and went instead with "Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal." Alright, got my mini conspiracy theory of the day out.
People are willing to pay more for that "Made in the USA" label on any other product. Sure you lose some customers from your potential total by having a higher price tag than the products of your competitors, but "Made in USA" means quality first. Consumers are willing to pay for quality.
You might be right about the flags. I bought a Support Our Troops wristband from a store because, besides the fact that I support the troops, the money goes towards the USO. Once I took it out of the little plastic package and looked on the underside, it had "Made in China" etched in it. I also have a USA baseball cap that's made in China as well. So, the flags you are talking about probably are made in China too.
Though some enterprising company might decide that it could get the business of folks who refuse to buy products made in China, potentially including the U.S. government, and manufacture a computer made completely in the U.S. using only components manufactured in the U.S.
Is this possible? I don't know. Has someone already done it? I also don't know. But this is Slashdot, you don't do research before you click Submit. I can say with some certainty, however, that if such a company did go this route, they would be able to make quite a bit of money off of their product based on the "Made in USA" tag that you simply can't find on virtually any other computer (with any sense of honesty, anyway).
Apple certainly has won over some people with their "Designed in California" tag, even if I can track my order and see it being manufactured in Shanghai, for example. If it said "Made in the USA" and it was really true, I'm confident even more people would be won over by it.
Alright. More party involvement can't possibly create a better scenario. The system we have now, while imperfect, is perhaps the best plausible balance.
Voting machines should print human-readable paper ballots, verifiable by the voter, that can also be counted by machine, and those ballots should be put in a locked metal box and then counted under supervision of all the major political parties to produce the official tallies.
I'm quite confident this would not work. After all, in 2004, the DNC/Kerry-Edwards campaign put out a playbook for operatives which suggested "pre-emptive" accusations of voter intimidation even when there is no evidence of such behavior.
Something tells me that allowing them to supervise the counting of the ballots any more than they already do (party operative types are always involved in working the polling stations in some way or another) will not result in any cleaner elections. In fact, I can almost promise you things will only get worse.
It took a while to get used to when I first got my Mac. But, eventually it got to the point where now I feel kind of weird using Windows and not being able to see my other windows (such as chat windows, for example) on the edges. I color code my messages and the messages of the person I'm chatting with in iChat so I can tile the windows over along the edges and see if the bar is red or blue, depending on who's sent the last message, to see if I need to hop over and respond to something. It's very convenient, but I can't say with any certainty I'd rather have this to single taskbar entities blinking like Windows has.
The resolution on the display, by the way, is 1024x768. It's just that my browser window doesn't meet the standard maximized window size for a browser on that resolution. So sites like CNN.com that were designed to render perfectly in that maximized 1024x768 resolution window require horizontal scrolling for me. I don't read anything over on the edge anyway, though.
It might be something with the CSS not loading. It took me three times of clearing the cache and clicking refresh to get the CSS to load, and when it did the only complaint that I have is that the page is designed too wide.
I use Safari, and I don't maximize my browser, but I presume on a maximized window in 1024x768 or greater resolution the page looks rather nice.
Not really sure what you're complaining about, I saw no problems in it with Firefox yesterday morning.
That would probably explain it then. I think the newest hardware on this computer was an older ATI Radeon video card. Either that or the motherboard, anyway.
I've noticed that a major source of instability on XP systems seems to be using the latest and greatest drivers from manufacturer websites as opposed to the "Microsoft certified" or whatever drivers. It's not really pertinent so much to the topic at hand, but your comment about being able to go to the manufacturer's site for widescreen resolution drivers reminded me of it.
I'm not disputing your experiences, but I installed Windows XP Home retail version on a computer that was pretty much thrown together from miscellaneous parts to try to meet a very, very tight budget, and I had absolutely no problems.
Maybe the installation horror stories come with newer hardware.
Barney Frank is a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, not a Senator. Not yet anyway. It was rumored that he would run for John Kerry's seat, however, if Kerry had been elected President in 2004.
Actually, the results you get searching for "Tianamen" are pretty similar to what you get from Google. Then again, if you wanted to get the full story, you might be inclined to spell Tiananmen correctly.
That being said, I won't be using Accoona. I don't like it, for one thing, and I also don't want my search to be influenced too much by the Chinese government if I can help it. I don't mind so much about Bill Clinton being their spokesman, though any time Clinton and the Chinese are working together, you'd better be careful.
Same thing goes for Safari, except that it's arguably harder to change the default search in Safari from Google. There are zero options built into the program for the search bar, and you can't even remove it if you want to because it's attached to the address bar.
I found it much easier to change my search preferences in Internet Explorer. In Safari, I have a bookmark in my toolbar for my preferred search site, which means I have to waste three more button clicks (bookmark, text box, search) to search than I would if I used the Google box built in to Safari. Three clicks might not sound like a big deal, but if it's not then why do we have embedded search boxes in the browser anyway? It makes a difference.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who would like a simple customization of the search engine box in Safari (or at least a way to get rid of it entirely if they won't let me use something other than Google).
I guess to respond to the Bush-Cheney point (which I would certainly still support, though throwing it out there rather casually does come from being insulated in an environment of disdain for this administration).
I kind of thought that's where it came from, which is the reason why I replied. I think it's fair to accuse this administration of any number of things, but one of the unfortunate side effects of being relatively unpopular (especially on the Internet and sites like this) is that it starts to get to the point where people blame them for the sun going down. I think you were still well within the bounds of legitimate criticism with your point though, so I'm not talking about you so much as I'm making a general statement.
But to be more specific, I was referring to the campaigns success in creating an association between Kerry's intellectual nature and speaking style and general sentiments of distrust. They successfully took a president who made a point of avoiding information more than any president in recent memory and acting on his gut and were able to use these traits as selling points.
Okay, this makes more sense to me. I see what you're trying to say now. I'm not sure what it means to you but the Nixon administration was pretty similar to this one in terms of how often the President would hold press conferences and so on. The Reagan administration also seemed to control events similarly to this one. So, it's not unprecedented, but it's a fair critique.
Now, one thing about "nuance," which is a nice favorable word to use describing some of Kerry's positions during his political career and the 2004 campaign in particular, is that it seems to require the audience to have a certain level of understanding and knowledge in order for it to be successful.
Let's take one of Kerry's statements as an example, because I think it's the most common one people think of when they think of Kerry in 2004. "I voted for it before I voted against it," he said in regards to the $87 billion in supplemental funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, that is a nuanced statement. People who don't know the details are going to hear that, and did hear that, and think, "This guy is trying to have it both ways!"
The reality was that the votes on that bill were set up in a structure called "King of the Hill," which means that the last vote is the one that counts. What the Senate leadership did on the supplemental bill is that they scheduled the last vote to be on the bill without the amendments that had been made to it by some Democratic members.
Kerry had in fact voted in favor of the bill with some amendments earlier on in the process. But the last vote was the one without the amendments, which was the one that counted. He voted against it, and so he really did vote for it before he voted against it. Now the campaign presumably didn't think they could or wanted to put together a campaign ad, a brochure, a line in the stump speech or anything to actually explain all of that.
So, it got picked up and spun into this huge "Kerry is a flip-flopper" argument, and the other part of it was that he was a wishy-washy academic who you couldn't trust to tell you the truth and be straight with you. The latter argument is the one that I think really had the most impact. People who never spoke to me about politics before were telling me that they were voting for Bush in 2004 because they couldn't trust Kerry to tell them the truth. Now, you could take that apart all you want and say Bush is a bigger liar or what have you. I'm not really inclined to get into that right now.
In my view, it wasn't his speaking style that was used to create a sense of distrust. For example, what was intellectual about Bill Clinton's down-home, raspy Southern accent? And yet he was roundly criticized for being untrustworthy. "Slick Willie," they used to call it in his campaign. Now, was there a case of anti-Southernism in the Bush 1992 campaign when political
I don't have any problem with the majority of what you said in your post. The only thing I take issue with is the claim about anti-intellectualism. I'll try to clarify.
Anti-intellectualism is, to me, a belief that those who are academics or intellectually-inclined are bad. You'll find this sometimes, I hate to say it, in a lot of blue collar communities across the country. I come from one such community, though I didn't find the sentiment to be as strong as I have seen it elsewhere.
What I think you see from time to time, though I won't be so bold as to attach it to the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, is a similar philosophy that says academics aren't any better than mechanics or any other group of people. This is more along the lines of what I subscribe to, and what I think people from where I grew up tend to subscribe to.
Intellectualism is held on a pedestal by some people. If somebody says that intellectuals and academics are no better than the rest of us, that is sometimes construed as "anti-intellectualism" I think.
To use your Intelligent Design example, some folks out there believe that evolution just isn't so. That doesn't mean that teachers can't teach it in schools, but you would be missing the other half of the story if you didn't see the heavy disdain heaped upon the religious community by the so-called intellectuals for belieiving in creationism in the first place. I'm fairly certain most Intelligent Design advocates have no problem co-existing with evolution. I believe they would argue that it's the intellectuals who refuse to co-exist with their beliefs. Whether any of that is actually true I won't begin to address here.
I've heard people complain that they suffer from anti-intellectualism, and I've heard people make what I think you would consider "anti-intellectual" statements of their own. So I'm not coming at this from one side or the other.
I'm more educated than the average American based on the statistics, but I dislike the superiority complex of some academics/intellectuals as much as the next guy. I don't think I'm anti-intellectual; I just think academics and intellectuals are in the same boat as the rest of us. I'm seriously opposed to the idea of philosopher-kings, and it bugs the heck out of me when professors in particular get their heads in the clouds like that from time to time.
If you are thinking of a more specific example of anti-intellectualism within the Bush-Cheney campaign I'd be happy to address it, but I think you might be projecting general criticisms of conservatives in American politics onto a specific campaign when maybe it's not the most accurate thing in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I still to this day write programs for my TI-83 to simplify tasks. I used to write games for them a few years ago, and they actually ended up getting circulated fairly well. I think a lot of people would write them on the computer and then use some software to get the programs on to the calculators. I wrote them in the calculator themselves, which took a lot more time. Maybe if I had been able to do it on the computer, I would have written more complicated games.
That being said, I already knew how to program computers in a couple languages when I started writing programs for the calculator. I don't know that this is the case with most people who program their calculators, in fact I doubt that it is, but it certainly does happen in some cases--for example, I really don't think the people who write complicated games and sophisticated programs for their calculators don't have some prior experience in programming computers. Simple programs like finding the slope of a line after entering two ordered pairs, however, probably doesn't come from prior programming experience.
Yes, but it was done in a mocking way. Or is it all the same difference?
True. I forgot about that. I was just watching "E-mail Surveillance" today, but I stopped it before they got that far.
Do you think viewers really put that much thought into it, associating the Apple computers with characters that they give a lot of sympathy to? If that's so, why did Dwight get the iPod but Pam ended up with the big brick music player from "The Injury"?
The Office? Nope, sorry.
There's only one character in The Office who uses a Mac. The temp, Ryan Howard, uses an Apple iBook. He's the guy played by B.J. Novak. In almost every shot, however, the Apple logo is obscured. If I didn't own an iBook, I might think it was just a white laptop. The iBook is not very often shown on camera at any rate.
Almost everybody else uses Gateway PCs. In fact, the Gateway logo is quite visible on the back of the flat-panel monitors in many, many shots. There are also a few IBM PCs that the characters Oscar, Angela, and Kevin use. I wouldn't have normally noticed this if I hadn't read this article and then gone back and watched some of the episodes in iTunes.
The only other Apple product on the show that I can think of is the video iPod from "Christmas Party."
In any case, I won't comment on whether or not Apples are found disproportionately in film and on television. I am a Mac user, a recent "switcher" in fact (summer 2005), and I'm very happy with the overall experience, but not a supporter of the Intel processor decision. I don't particularly care if there's more or less Apples in film or on television than they are otherwise found "in nature," if you will, but to me there are enough examples that you don't have to use The Office, which clearly does not place Apple products in comparison to, say, Gateway.
If only we could find a way to typosquat using Ruby on Rails and AJAX, then we would be able to develop a legitimate Web 2.0 application.
So who voted for or against the proposal, if the media is holding Republicans responsible for their voting record? They're not; they're just painting with a broad brush because it's easier to play on stereotypes than to report facts.
By the way, Bill Frist didn't resign from anything. Might want to actually know something before you open your mouth next time.
I have seen on many occasions the wonderful folks here at Slashdot completely butcher the facts and place into an article's title or summary certain statements that just don't mesh with reality. In some cases, they don't even mesh with the actual article that's been linked. This is a case where the article's authors suffer from a guilty conscience about trying to paint with a very broad political brush. Of course, no one here who would be responsible for submitting a summary of the story seemed to care that it was not "Republicans" who defeated the proposal.
Some of the more logical among us, who do not as often subscribe to political stereotypes, might have asked themselves whether or not the "House Energy and Commerce subcommittee," which is actually called the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee (but why do research?), would be distributed along 23-8 partisan lines. After all, that's the vote count for the proposal, and both the article title, the post title, and the article summary are quite confident in their claims that Republicans defeated the net neutrality proposal. So it was 23 Republicans versus 8 Democrats, right?
Not really, If you bothered to read on (I know, I know--I'm asking too much), you'd see that one Republican voted for the amendment. Three Democrats voted against it. But just the Republicans defeated the proposal, according to the folks here. Sure, if those three Democrats voted for it, you would have had a 20-11 vote, and then Republicans would have defeated the proposal. But that didn't happen.
And those Democrats, who apparently feel so strongly about this proposal and are so deserving of the support of the Internet community, had no problem going along for the ride and voting 27-4 in favor of the final bill without the Markey net neutrality amendment. Wow! So principled!
Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?
Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?
It also would have been nice if the people at CNet News would have gotten an interview with Fred Upton, the chairman of the actual subcommittee that did all of this, instead of going to the full committee chairman Joe Barton. In many cases, the full committee chair doesn't have nearly the same kind of expertise on the issue as the subcommittee chairman does. Though with the way CNet News framed this whole thing, maybe they did interview Upton, but he made too good of a point, so they just trashed it and went instead with "Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal." Alright, got my mini conspiracy theory of the day out.
People are willing to pay more for that "Made in the USA" label on any other product. Sure you lose some customers from your potential total by having a higher price tag than the products of your competitors, but "Made in USA" means quality first. Consumers are willing to pay for quality.
You might be right about the flags. I bought a Support Our Troops wristband from a store because, besides the fact that I support the troops, the money goes towards the USO. Once I took it out of the little plastic package and looked on the underside, it had "Made in China" etched in it. I also have a USA baseball cap that's made in China as well. So, the flags you are talking about probably are made in China too.
Though some enterprising company might decide that it could get the business of folks who refuse to buy products made in China, potentially including the U.S. government, and manufacture a computer made completely in the U.S. using only components manufactured in the U.S.
Is this possible? I don't know. Has someone already done it? I also don't know. But this is Slashdot, you don't do research before you click Submit. I can say with some certainty, however, that if such a company did go this route, they would be able to make quite a bit of money off of their product based on the "Made in USA" tag that you simply can't find on virtually any other computer (with any sense of honesty, anyway).
Apple certainly has won over some people with their "Designed in California" tag, even if I can track my order and see it being manufactured in Shanghai, for example. If it said "Made in the USA" and it was really true, I'm confident even more people would be won over by it.
Alright. More party involvement can't possibly create a better scenario. The system we have now, while imperfect, is perhaps the best plausible balance.
Voting machines should print human-readable paper ballots, verifiable by the voter, that can also be counted by machine, and those ballots should be put in a locked metal box and then counted under supervision of all the major political parties to produce the official tallies.
I'm quite confident this would not work. After all, in 2004, the DNC/Kerry-Edwards campaign put out a playbook for operatives which suggested "pre-emptive" accusations of voter intimidation even when there is no evidence of such behavior.
Something tells me that allowing them to supervise the counting of the ballots any more than they already do (party operative types are always involved in working the polling stations in some way or another) will not result in any cleaner elections. In fact, I can almost promise you things will only get worse.
It took a while to get used to when I first got my Mac. But, eventually it got to the point where now I feel kind of weird using Windows and not being able to see my other windows (such as chat windows, for example) on the edges. I color code my messages and the messages of the person I'm chatting with in iChat so I can tile the windows over along the edges and see if the bar is red or blue, depending on who's sent the last message, to see if I need to hop over and respond to something. It's very convenient, but I can't say with any certainty I'd rather have this to single taskbar entities blinking like Windows has.
The resolution on the display, by the way, is 1024x768. It's just that my browser window doesn't meet the standard maximized window size for a browser on that resolution. So sites like CNN.com that were designed to render perfectly in that maximized 1024x768 resolution window require horizontal scrolling for me. I don't read anything over on the edge anyway, though.
It might be something with the CSS not loading. It took me three times of clearing the cache and clicking refresh to get the CSS to load, and when it did the only complaint that I have is that the page is designed too wide.
I use Safari, and I don't maximize my browser, but I presume on a maximized window in 1024x768 or greater resolution the page looks rather nice.
Not really sure what you're complaining about, I saw no problems in it with Firefox yesterday morning.
That would probably explain it then. I think the newest hardware on this computer was an older ATI Radeon video card. Either that or the motherboard, anyway.
I've noticed that a major source of instability on XP systems seems to be using the latest and greatest drivers from manufacturer websites as opposed to the "Microsoft certified" or whatever drivers. It's not really pertinent so much to the topic at hand, but your comment about being able to go to the manufacturer's site for widescreen resolution drivers reminded me of it.
I'm not disputing your experiences, but I installed Windows XP Home retail version on a computer that was pretty much thrown together from miscellaneous parts to try to meet a very, very tight budget, and I had absolutely no problems.
Maybe the installation horror stories come with newer hardware.
Or Office:mac. Why use some second-rate suite when the genuine article is available?
Let's see, would you rather them fight the Bush administration or the Chinese Communists?
Barney Frank is a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts, not a Senator. Not yet anyway. It was rumored that he would run for John Kerry's seat, however, if Kerry had been elected President in 2004.
Mostly unimplemented, huh?
This seems to disagree with you.
It's scary, isn't it?
Actually, the results you get searching for "Tianamen" are pretty similar to what you get from Google. Then again, if you wanted to get the full story, you might be inclined to spell Tiananmen correctly.
That being said, I won't be using Accoona. I don't like it, for one thing, and I also don't want my search to be influenced too much by the Chinese government if I can help it. I don't mind so much about Bill Clinton being their spokesman, though any time Clinton and the Chinese are working together, you'd better be careful.
Same thing goes for Safari, except that it's arguably harder to change the default search in Safari from Google. There are zero options built into the program for the search bar, and you can't even remove it if you want to because it's attached to the address bar.
I found it much easier to change my search preferences in Internet Explorer. In Safari, I have a bookmark in my toolbar for my preferred search site, which means I have to waste three more button clicks (bookmark, text box, search) to search than I would if I used the Google box built in to Safari. Three clicks might not sound like a big deal, but if it's not then why do we have embedded search boxes in the browser anyway? It makes a difference.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who would like a simple customization of the search engine box in Safari (or at least a way to get rid of it entirely if they won't let me use something other than Google).
I guess to respond to the Bush-Cheney point (which I would certainly still support, though throwing it out there rather casually does come from being insulated in an environment of disdain for this administration).
I kind of thought that's where it came from, which is the reason why I replied. I think it's fair to accuse this administration of any number of things, but one of the unfortunate side effects of being relatively unpopular (especially on the Internet and sites like this) is that it starts to get to the point where people blame them for the sun going down. I think you were still well within the bounds of legitimate criticism with your point though, so I'm not talking about you so much as I'm making a general statement.
But to be more specific, I was referring to the campaigns success in creating an association between Kerry's intellectual nature and speaking style and general sentiments of distrust. They successfully took a president who made a point of avoiding information more than any president in recent memory and acting on his gut and were able to use these traits as selling points.
Okay, this makes more sense to me. I see what you're trying to say now. I'm not sure what it means to you but the Nixon administration was pretty similar to this one in terms of how often the President would hold press conferences and so on. The Reagan administration also seemed to control events similarly to this one. So, it's not unprecedented, but it's a fair critique.
Now, one thing about "nuance," which is a nice favorable word to use describing some of Kerry's positions during his political career and the 2004 campaign in particular, is that it seems to require the audience to have a certain level of understanding and knowledge in order for it to be successful.
Let's take one of Kerry's statements as an example, because I think it's the most common one people think of when they think of Kerry in 2004. "I voted for it before I voted against it," he said in regards to the $87 billion in supplemental funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, that is a nuanced statement. People who don't know the details are going to hear that, and did hear that, and think, "This guy is trying to have it both ways!"
The reality was that the votes on that bill were set up in a structure called "King of the Hill," which means that the last vote is the one that counts. What the Senate leadership did on the supplemental bill is that they scheduled the last vote to be on the bill without the amendments that had been made to it by some Democratic members.
Kerry had in fact voted in favor of the bill with some amendments earlier on in the process. But the last vote was the one without the amendments, which was the one that counted. He voted against it, and so he really did vote for it before he voted against it. Now the campaign presumably didn't think they could or wanted to put together a campaign ad, a brochure, a line in the stump speech or anything to actually explain all of that.
So, it got picked up and spun into this huge "Kerry is a flip-flopper" argument, and the other part of it was that he was a wishy-washy academic who you couldn't trust to tell you the truth and be straight with you. The latter argument is the one that I think really had the most impact. People who never spoke to me about politics before were telling me that they were voting for Bush in 2004 because they couldn't trust Kerry to tell them the truth. Now, you could take that apart all you want and say Bush is a bigger liar or what have you. I'm not really inclined to get into that right now.
In my view, it wasn't his speaking style that was used to create a sense of distrust. For example, what was intellectual about Bill Clinton's down-home, raspy Southern accent? And yet he was roundly criticized for being untrustworthy. "Slick Willie," they used to call it in his campaign. Now, was there a case of anti-Southernism in the Bush 1992 campaign when political
I don't have any problem with the majority of what you said in your post. The only thing I take issue with is the claim about anti-intellectualism. I'll try to clarify.
Anti-intellectualism is, to me, a belief that those who are academics or intellectually-inclined are bad. You'll find this sometimes, I hate to say it, in a lot of blue collar communities across the country. I come from one such community, though I didn't find the sentiment to be as strong as I have seen it elsewhere.
What I think you see from time to time, though I won't be so bold as to attach it to the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, is a similar philosophy that says academics aren't any better than mechanics or any other group of people. This is more along the lines of what I subscribe to, and what I think people from where I grew up tend to subscribe to.
Intellectualism is held on a pedestal by some people. If somebody says that intellectuals and academics are no better than the rest of us, that is sometimes construed as "anti-intellectualism" I think.
To use your Intelligent Design example, some folks out there believe that evolution just isn't so. That doesn't mean that teachers can't teach it in schools, but you would be missing the other half of the story if you didn't see the heavy disdain heaped upon the religious community by the so-called intellectuals for belieiving in creationism in the first place. I'm fairly certain most Intelligent Design advocates have no problem co-existing with evolution. I believe they would argue that it's the intellectuals who refuse to co-exist with their beliefs. Whether any of that is actually true I won't begin to address here.
I've heard people complain that they suffer from anti-intellectualism, and I've heard people make what I think you would consider "anti-intellectual" statements of their own. So I'm not coming at this from one side or the other.
I'm more educated than the average American based on the statistics, but I dislike the superiority complex of some academics/intellectuals as much as the next guy. I don't think I'm anti-intellectual; I just think academics and intellectuals are in the same boat as the rest of us. I'm seriously opposed to the idea of philosopher-kings, and it bugs the heck out of me when professors in particular get their heads in the clouds like that from time to time.
If you are thinking of a more specific example of anti-intellectualism within the Bush-Cheney campaign I'd be happy to address it, but I think you might be projecting general criticisms of conservatives in American politics onto a specific campaign when maybe it's not the most accurate thing in the world.
Just my two cents.