Bar talk with Texas prosecutor in Portland, OR last night.

Last night I stopped by a nearby hotel bar for a martini after work. I got into a conversation with an Austin, TX prosecutor who was on a golf vacation and who complained about the difficulty of Pumpkin Ridge as he slurped on his drink. A very nice guy.

On the muted bar TV (CNN Headline) comes the story about the latest dubious Terror Alert. We start talking about that, which leads us into a conversation about the Iraq War. He mentioned that he supported the war.

This sent me into a short monologue about how 920 US troops that we know of and countless uncounted Iraqis have lost their lives over what were at best horrible mistakes on the part of the administration and at worst the most calculated and cynical deceptions on the part of the administration. I went into the litany: no weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq Niger connection was a forgery about which we are learning more all the time (Italian forgery, etc., thanks Josh Marshall), no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam, no PNAC "democracy" being established and no chance of it, and what the hell were we doing there? No justification for the invasion at all, and we have decimated our military, made the world our enemy, and massively destabilized an already unstable region.

I don't want to claim any sort of victory over this man's mind here, because this post is more of a confession than anything. Toward the end of my monologue, I felt my blood pressure rising and I knew I would probably soon be in my loathsome off-putting lecturing mode, so I concluded, paid, slapped the guy on the back, said, "I'm sorry. You're here grabbing a drink on your vacation and you don't need to hear all that. I hope I wasn't being an asshole."

As I got out of my chair he said, "Hey, you weren't being an asshole! I didn't know any of this stuff before!"

and listen to rush and inssannity

:wow:

Good job, swag!! :thumbsup:

to Portland Saturday from DFW.

What are you coming up here for?

Need any recommendations on anything to do?

Good that you enlightened him but sad because you'd think a lawyer would be a little more aware. Jeez!

Helps explain a lot, doesn't it? Seems there are a lot of wordly, educated people out there who might as well be blind moles living underground. Scares the s**t outta me.

More LTTE. More emails to Lou Dobbs. More calls to radio programs and C-SPAN. And more shame on the American press for failing to hold up their end of this great American Experiment.

Maybe we need to dress up in 1770s garb and ride horses through our towns, yelling warnings about what is really going on.

Ah, well, more and more people are coming out of their tunnels and into the light.

If WE don't do it - Faux and CNN sure won't. CALL... WRITE... EMAIL... Here's Calimary's excellent resource: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=106&topic_id=8816&mesg_id=8816

USE IT. OR LOSE... EVERYTHING...

His office is investigating Tom DeLay's PAC, amongst other dirty Republican tricks.

I wanna play Pumpkin Ridge, dammit. ;-)

If he'd had a chance to say "I didn't know that" earlier on, you could have had a give and take conversation that would have left him as well informed and left you feeling better about the exchange.

OTOH, it sounds like you may have woken up one mind. Maybe a speech was what this guy needed.

I think you're absolutely right about conversation vs. speech.

This is my problem, and why I decided to cut it short. I am not a very good conversationalist, and didn't want to turn the guy off by railing any longer.

He tends to launch into speeches, rather than converse. He says that often he's consiously aware that's what he's doing, but can't stop himself, and he seems distressed by it. He seems to have gotten better about it of late.

that's me....a loudmouth, and it's because when educated people say to me, "I didn't know that" or "I hate politics", or "I think * is doing a good job", it just gets me crazy and I tend to get loud. I wish I could just calmly state the Kerry/Edward's position. I'm working on it though.

A lawyer, even a repuke one, who "didn't know any of this stuff before"?!?! I had a similar conversation with a cousin (who is also a lawyer!) whose solution to the War on Terra was to bomb Mecca and Medina. Yeah, that would solve everything. I gave him my (calm) response, filled with many things I have found here at DU, and in the end he had that deer-in-the-headlights look. Sheesh, you would think lawyers would read up a little bit!

Good job.

I hear people spouting RNC tag lines often, but I fear to interject:

1. I don't want to be overzealous.

2. I want to make sure I have my facts straight. It takes one misquote to make me unreliable. And than it's "see they all lie".


But it needs to be done. Word of mouth is more effective than any campaign ad.