On cheating

Badly beaten small town police chief
taken from home to hospital. All
guests were too drunk to testify.

Was Hillary cheating? Hillary's campaign was reportedly caught cheating because one of her aides apparently suggested a question to a young lady that she should ask Hillary. I find this an interesting situation. First, of course, they claim Hillary didn't know about it and would not have approved it. One might well suspect that is not entirely true. But what if she did? Consider the question which asked her about global warming and what she might do about it (or some approximation of that). This seems to me a perfectly legitimate question that she could have been asked by anyone at anytime. I fail to see how this gives her any particular advantage over any other candidate. Perhaps her aides felt that it was an important enough question that it needed to be asked and feared no one would ask it. I don't approve of planted questions but I'm certain Hillary's campaign is not the only one guilty of such things. She could have planted questions like: Did you know that Giuliani's great uncle was a Mafia hit man? Or, are you aware that Obama's grandmother had an affair with George Wallace's father? Or, did you know that Senator Dodd's mother wore army shoes? Or any one of a number of ridiculous questions that would hint that something was wrong with one or another of the other candidates. But no, the question was an important one: What about global warming? Granted it was probably wrong but think FEMA or planting Gannon/Guckert as a member of the White House Press Corps. As usual, in this case, I think much ado about not much. Hillary promises not to do it again, and perhaps she really didn't know about it. An interesting case. It does seem to me that planting a fake reporter on the Press Corps or arranging a totally false Press briefing are, in fact, cheating. Planting an important question that gives you no particular advantage is at least murky.

While on the subject of cheating I will tell you about my ethical dilemna when playing solitaire. Sometimes when I want to escape other things and/or rest my weary mind, I play a game of solitaire (otherwise known as patience). The variety I play is very tough to beat and you only rarely manage to win. As a result of this, and as I am too lazy to always want to start all over again, I have developed a couple of new rules of my own to augment the original rules of the game. These augmentations make it somewhat easier to win but by no means insure that you will win. I want you to know that I follow these rules (even though I made them up) scrupulously. I never cheat on them. So if I follow these rules am I cheating? It's true I made them up, and it's true they give me a slight advantage, but if I follow them religiously is it cheating? I have pondered this for a long time and so far have failed to find what I believe to be a satisfactory answer. It is like searching for the ultimate real while raking leaves.

If Rudy Giuliani manages to get the nomination, or even worse, manages to become President, we will know that Big Juju up there is really, really mad at us. If any of the other Republican candidates win we'll know he's laughing at us. What a bunch!

LKBIQ:
"God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life...They all dipped in the water but their cups were different."
Digger Indians (quoted by Ruth Benedict).