State Rep. Charles Murphy, D-Burlington, one of several House members identified by the Herald the other day as having flipped from pro- to anti-casino after being awarded leadership positions by House Speaker Sal DiMasi, provides some details over at Blue Mass. Group.
Murphy says casino opponents plied him with information. “Like most of my colleagues, I read it all,” he writes. The fiends!
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A day later, and still no snarks from the peanut gallery!This is instructive. Look what happens when a public official squarely faces controversy (Obama) rather than shrinking from the fray (Gore, Kerry). The previous thread on DiMasi and the casino vote, “Bare-knuckles do-gooder,” accumlated 41 comments. But all is quiet here.
Fascinating. The wingnuts like P. Porcupine continue to post in the “Bare-knuckles” thread, but are apparently uncomfortable doing so here. Is it because they fear even a virtual confrontation with an elected Democrat who is actually willing to calmly stand up to them?And, am I wrong – isn’t that all John Kerry and Al Gore needed to do – stand right up to them, rather than listen to advice like, maybe switching to earth tones?(I’m the same Anon. as at 3:53 p.m. today.)
anonymous commands, wingnut (despite craven nature) obeys… Dan’s post:Murphy says casino opponents plied him with information. “Like most of my colleagues, I read it all,” he writes. The fiends!Murphy’s actual post:On the casino issue it was not terribly difficult to do the homework due to the amout of information we were inundated with on both sides of the issue. Like most of my colleagues, I read it all.Both sides inundated Murphy with information. Nothing fiendish there. Presuming the research page at casinofacts.org to be part of the information casino opponents plied Murphy and his colleagues with, the page includes a link to this document: An Annotated Bibliography: The Social and Economic Impacts of Indian and Other Gaming”. It contains more than 100 pages of references. I’ve gone through and read the summaries of most of them. Mostly they’re disappointingly inconclusive. As is this one, at least according to its abstract. Do you think Murphy (or anyone else) has read all those studies?Depending on what your definition of “all” is, Murphy is speaking figuratively. If Hillary had made the remark of course, it would be a lie! What he presumably means is, my position was originally X, then at a certain point, after reading {some burdensome amount of material dumped on my desk by both sides, or links sent via email}, I changed my mind and took the position anti-X.That’s of course perfectly legitimate and I respect his conclusion. However from that you cannot imply:1. P (implication: unlike you) has read “all” the information.2. P concludes X.3. X is the legitimate conclusion, based on all the information.For two reasons:* P didn’t, nor has anyone, actually “read it all”.* Different people exposed to the same research can legitimately come to different conclusions in good faith.If no such implication is meant by the posting, then the only point being made is, Rep. Murphy denies submitting to partisan pressure and claims instead to have come to his own conclusions which is, a.) fair enough, and b.) a “dog bites man” story.