Don't know what it was that set me off last night. Maybe the two beers I had before I fired up the computer. Like I said though usually I'm the happy drunk.

I think in the end though it was that Molly Ivin's death was important to me as it seemed to be to Lindy. She was one of the good guys, a brilliant woman that wasn't afraid to speak truth to power. I know that posting in an internet forum carries the risk that people are going to pounce on your threads when you lay your heart out but we seem to have established that the participants here are above average in intellectual capacity.

With that higher intelligence however the assumption should be that the contributors also have basic ethics, common sense, and street smarts. Any human being with a lick of compassion knows that when someone dies and there's a loss, a typical response contains both a denial and an anger stage. In this case the denial presented itself as not wanting to acknowledge that a powerful person succumbed to a stupid disease we are not in control over. That denial wants there to be a reason other than sheer randomness. The anger manifests itself in lashing out at powerful things that you already have animosity for.

Intelligent and compassionate people know that it is healthy to let these feelings explode no matter how absurd they might be, not overanalyze them or attack them for their outburst. I tried to help Lindy through that by slowly bringing the reality back while understanding her motivation and I get blindsided by good old Tom finding some political advantage in my post. It takes an asshole to do something like that. He and Tech are a scourge on this board and whatever good contributions they may have had in the past mean nothing to me now.

I'm not sure I can resist reading other's posts. I've tried but eventually the responses you see to them lead you back into the original posts to see what people are referring to.

Art