Otherwise expect me to continue calling you and your Republican lifemates on your hateful shit.

Wow, so either you are some bizarre plant or you really believe this crap you spout? Cole rips righties new ones on a daily basis. Too bad you don’t get it.

Embrace those willing to change. Don’t be like them and try to make everything “pure”.

Yes, he had homophobic tendencies, but don’t a lot of men from that era? Not excusing it, just sayin’.

As for the guy telling me to fuck off and I don’t get it? Sorry dude, I don’t play well with people who call names and can’t back up their points.

To my fellow Dems who get what is being said here and don’t want to march down the path of what the right is doing (scorched earth hatred), amen.

It’s time to move on and fight for what’s right people. Calling out a dead man who isn’t evil, just wrong on many things is pretty low.

When Karl Rove inevitably dies of some horrible disease that stem cell could have helped him fight off, I will gladly say my peace because a-holes like Rove deserve the scorn and vitriol of smart people who see the damage he and his ilk have done to this country.

Mr. Cole, what with the horribleness and all, I was about to say that you could be forgiven for skipping the moderate Republican obits from now on, but then I realized it’s a moot point since both of ‘em are perfectly healthy.

Sorry those of us on the “let’s not be a bunch of fucking ghouls” side of the argument got shut down so hard. Makes the place look a lot less hospitable than it is.

And like I said, you are invited to leave and never come back. No operating system that I am aware of boots up, opens a web browser, and types http://www.balloon-juice.com automatically.

You are just a poor hostage of my “enabled ideology,” aren’t you. Moron.

I never enabled any sort of “ideology” that involved crapping all over dead people.

ETA – No, you crapped all over them while they were alive. When it really mattered. The dead suffer no ill will.
Fuck you.

For someone who thinks so little of me, you sure spend a lot of time here. Piss off.

I’m embarrassed for you, I really am.

Yep, you’re the perfect arbiter for embarrassment. You enabled ideology like this Cole, and I pray to whatever God exists that you will never live it down.

You are a damned embarrassment to the human race. Even if every one of these unsourced rumors you are chucking around is true, basic human decency dictates that when a man dies, you either say nothing at all or issue a polite goodbye. For christ sakes, his family includes 17 grandchildren. They have internet access and google, and the last thing they need is to look for their grandfather’s obit and find degenerate scumbags like you all trashing his memory. I have deleted several offending comments and shut down the rest of the comments.

I’m embarrassed for you, I really am.

Did he ever repent of an economic policy that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer? No. Was there obvious evidence that the trickle down horseshit doesn’t work? Of course there was. And there is one hell of a lot of evidence that 95% of the Republican focus is bullshit, too.

Maybe we shouldn’t doubt that Jack Kemp loved his grandkids and his kids, and that isn’t a bad thing in itself, but there are a hell of a lot of other people in the world besides his kids and grandkids, and some of them are gay, and all kinds of other things that he disapproves of, and he never caught on that they were just as human as him, his kids and his grandkids.

So, Jack Kemp: a nice slow (very slow) man. The best the Republicans had to offer on the national stage, and only behind that grumpy old fart, Bob Dole, and as kind of a quiet apology for what a grumpy, old, pissant fart Bob Dole was.

I’m with Common Sense on at least part of his comment…

Hold Kemp accountable for his homophobia, his silence on HIV AIDS - definitely.

Throw around unsubstantiated rumours that he liked a bit of man on man action back in the 80s – crossing a line. I mean, really, so what if he was a hypocrite? Does it make the actual effect of his actions worse in any practical way?

However, CS, while I have believe that nothing less awful than the actual Holocaust should ever be compared to the Holocaust, it is worth remembering that AIDS in the gay commmunity in the 80s and 90s was truly, awfully devastating… friends of mine lost quite literally every friend they had. One of my ex partners said quite truthfully that by about 1995 every gay man he knew in 1985 was dead. This was in Sydney, where we had progressive governments who actually tried to deal with HIV properly – the situation in places like SF and NY must have been worse (somehow).

Sure, the anger needs to be expressed in an appropriate way, but don’t underestimate the depth of the justified anger there still is in the gay community against Reagan and his enablers, including Kemp.

Yeah, except for the whole passing of unsubstantiated 30 year old rumors on the day the man died, he’s dead on. Oh and the whole comparing funding of AIDS with the freakin’ Holocaust. Drama Queen much?

I had cancer. I watched friends that I’d made die, and there is a chance their lives could be spared had the clueless God freaks actually given a damn about human suffering and allowed funding for life saving research. It’s one of the primary reasons I could never vote GOP. But I never ran around claiming that their suffering was the equivalent of 6 million people put in forced labor camps. Which medical experiments did Kemp perform on gays? How many gold teeth did he steal from cremated corpses? Anyone who compares Kemp’s treatment of gays with Nazi Germany clearly needs to research what they did to gays in 1940’s Germany—Kemp may have well have been wearing a pink tutu when compared to those guys.

Dude’s running around accusing Kemp of being a closet gay because he co-owned a business with gay men. He sounds like my 90 year old virulent homophobe grandfather.