Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
There's a rule of thumb in political consulting: if you go personal, you lose. Mags, sorry you lose this time.
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< shrug > I'm not a political consultant. Nor am I running for office.
"They sold our kids" is a completely empty emotional appeal, nothing more than a slogan--a Pepsi commercial, metaphorically speaking: indended to appeal to an emotion, but semantically baseless.
If the kids were sold, who bought them? Remeber this must be someone who paid for the privilege...that can't be Edison. Edison is *being* paid, contracted to do a job.
And who *sold* the kids? Remeber that the sellers must have been paid by the buyers. The city isn't being paid anything by anybody, so they can't be the sellers. The only money changing hands is going *from* the government *to* Edison.
This just did not happen...not even "in essence". The claim "They sold our kids" is completely bogus, intended only to enflame. And it works--who could possibly defend "selling children"?
Obviously *some* sort of transaction is going down...but calling it "selling children" is a smear job, trying to equate it to a reprehensible act it actually resembles not in the least.
If the trash hauling hypothetical isn't "personal" enough, let's try this one: a wife hires a hooker to stand in for her in the marital bed. Perhaps the husband might demand "specific performance" in the terms of contract law, insisting that he'd bargained for the services of his wife specifically and not some random subcontractor. But could he accuse the wife of "selling her husband"? No, that is just not what those words mean.