flip flop

Submitted by j (United States), Jun 1, 2007 at 13:34

The success in the US of using John Kerry's "flip flop" to win an election was truly a non-thinking episode in US citizen response to thinking human evolution of point of view based on time, knowledge, and changing circumstance, including those circumstances hidden from people who champion a particular political view. (This idea of evolving thought based on the reality of circumstances has actually caused President Bush to become a caricature crying 'stay the course' in the face of realities and actually probably helped the recent year's Democratic sweep).

Emerson's attempt to use this accusation of a flip flop against Ms. Lekovic, did not even have the momentary success that was shared by Republicans in the wake of such idiocy. While using Ms. Lekovic's past politics as a legitimate issue for inquiry, the exchange above makes it seem like Emerson wanted to surprise her with his knowledge of her past viewpoints rather than hear how she has evolved, and perhaps even made mistakes in her rabid loyalty to even the most questionable conduct by those such as Osama bin Laden and the Blind Sheik.

The surprise exposee did nothing but what it was likely to do, make Ms. Lekovic defensive and allow her to publicly embarrass herself by lying, much like a child caught with his/her hand in the cookie jar (which she obviously did). On the other hand, it might have been wiser to seek an explanation rather than an opportunity to embarrass Ms. Lekovic as a quick read of the dialogue indicates, no useful insights were obtained from Ms. Lekovic regarding bigger issues of how she learned from blind loyalty to those with their own version of Islam, how she has tried to weed these violent subscapes out of Islam in terms of her own readership and membership.

Instead, by giving in to the desire to have a gotcha moment, Emerson lost the opportunity to obtain information concerning concrete efforts being made by Ms. Lekovic and her organization to promote moderate Islam. What he got above was a grown up version of "did not", "did so", "did not", "did so".

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