Sunday, January 6, 2008

On the Awesome Level of Discourse...

...in our blogland community.

As I mentioned previously, Craig Gernhardt asks"Has Joe Moore created a hate in Rogers Park towards military personal?" No word from Joe on whether or not he has stopped beating his wife. However, in the mean time, I'm sure if a gnat farts in the Amazon rain forest, Craig will help us to understand how it's the fault of the local political machine.

As a follow up, Thomas Westgard takes Craig to task for publishing the Grodner police report with the names and personal information of witnesses left intact. Makes sense. Until the bit where Tom calls Craig "an irresponsible drunk."

I took issue with that in comments, and was rewarded with this from Tom: "Oh, now I think I understand your point, Al. You're saying that I should have gone after Craig on the point about the witnesses, but the attack on his drinking habits was gratuitous."

Tom agrees. "That might be true," he says, but then he goes on to call me a "lackey" because I dared to raise the issue. As he seems to have misused the word, I'm not quite sure what he actually meant.

Tom and Craig have a strange, synergistic relationship.

On another note, maybe I should try to ride the #96 bus one last time before it disappears in the doomsday scenario. I moved here from Minneapolis, which is a very, very small town as far as public transit is concerned. They don't have anything like the El, Metra, or the amazingly broad and wide bus coverage that we are lucky to have here in Chicago. I love it, as it has meant that I've had to drive barely once every few weeks, instead of daily, like I did in Minneapolis. And here we are, to the point where Illinois is about to throw away big chunks of the Chicago transit system. It's just amazing and sad. Mass transit is one of the things that makes the Chicago area special, and apparently not enough people realize it.

5 comments:

The North Coast said...

When I moved here from St. Louis 20 years ago, the transit was peerless. The service was extremely frequent, and there was much more owl service.

And more: Chicago never, never, ever, ever had budgetary problems. No matter who was mayor- Washington, Bloom, Byrne, Bilandic; this city was always solvent and its infrastructure was reasonably well-maintained.

Daley's regime has decimated the wonderful transit here, and has been unspeakably stingy with this essential service while throwing billions at his monument-building projects and fostering over 160 TIF districts that are decimating the city's tax base and diverting hundreds of millions of dollars away from essential services and into the pockets of favored developers.

This is a mayor who drops major $$$ on drapes and knick-knacks while the furnace is broken and the roof leaks.

Knightridge Overlook said...

I did a search for "don gordon nazi" and found that your site is the #1 search result on Google. I'm not sure what that means, but I will note that nothing I wrote about him is in those results, because I have archived them all. If you feel that protecting Don Gordon is a worthwhile activity, you might do so as well.

While I was perusing your blog, I found this analysis of Craig's attack on the witnesses to the Grodner debacle. You took me to task for putting that shot in there, but you don't mention what I consider the heart of my retort: That Craig tangled the Grodner witnesses in his web of foulness due to a character flaw, which includes excessive drinking.

There's a difference between a person who makes an isolated slip-up, versus a person who suffers from a severe character flaw and thus isn't able to make good decisions. Being an angry drunk puts Craig very deeply in the second category.

With this Amy Carlton debacle following closely on the heels of the Grodner witness debacle, I'm inclined to think that my analysis of Craig remains as accurate and justified now as it was then. We need to stop enabling this human blight, and start holding him accounable for being the destructive force that he is. The next attack shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, because that's what angry drunks do.

Al Iverson said...

Yeah, Craig's a tool, but forgive me if I have no plans to hand out gold stars for fighting angry and stupid with more angry and stupid. We need less of it, not parity or an arms race.

I agree that Amy Carlton deserves none of the angry and stupid aimed at her. If it wasn't for her (and maybe a few others?) we wouldn't even have known what was going on. It felt weird to her, she questioned it, it led to the issue being exposed. All good, in my book.

Knightridge Overlook said...

And who knows? Someday I might spell "accountable" correctly.

Al Iverson said...

Oh! You truly wound me, sir.