Timex
4604
Uh, yeah. But that didn’t happen.
Again, these are little kids. There’s a reason why we don’t punish little kids as adults.
Nesrie
4605
Your excuse would still work wouldn’t it. You give them no responsibility what so ever.
These are the Boy Scouts not the Cub Scouts. You know the difference, right? Boy scouts go to 18, and the leaders were there. There is a problem if you have bunch of kids chanting whatever someone says on stage.
Holy shit. They’re still kids. Granted the Boy Scouts organization is a lot more slanted to the right than Girl Scouts, but these are kids watching the President of the United States at their Jamboree. If POTUS says something in his speech and encourages the kids to cheer, how can you blame the kids?
Nesrie
4608
Yeah this is not the first time the Boy Scouts have gotten themselves in a bit of a political problem, and their non-apology doesn’t really do much either.
Timex
4609
They are kids.
And in a crowd of 40,000, you’ve got some powerful mob psychology at play… especially powerful for kids. And even then you didn’t have all those kids chanting… but with that many people, the response is still gonna be loud.
Seriously, you’re directing your outrage inappropriately.
I agree with Nesrie that these are not “little kids”. You are definitely formulating internal political positions shaped by your surroundings by age 13 or so IMO.
Boy Scouts as an organization are all over the map politically because they’re from all over the map geographically when it comes to the actual participants, but when they come together they’re definitely ripe for this kind of rhetoric from a sitting President. I’m not blaming kids for cheering, but I’ll bet there were a number of them in attendance who weren’t so keen on it and looking around at their fellow Scouts wondering WTF was going on.
Presidents have never done this before for good reason. It shouldn’t happen.
I’m not defending the organization. I’m saying the kids did what kids do in front of POTUS.
I have literally seen soldiers talk mad shit about a sitting president, but when that president showed up for a rally those same soldiers cheered and hooted for that president without being prompted to do so. I’m not going to hold kids (yes, even up to 18) to a higher standard than adult soldiers.
Quaro
4612
Half of Trump’s speech was typical Campaign rally stuff about how terrible Clinton did and how amazing everyone feels watching the map turn red. But even the half was probably the pre-written non-political speech was centered around the concept of ‘momentum’ and how important it is to keep it. And Trump was like, “Once this guy was rich, then I saw him at a party later in life, he was poor and sad. A party where all the hottest people were! He lost his momentum! Don’t do that!”
OOOOOOKKAAAAY.
“You’re boy scouts. You know life. Oh you know.”
Timex
4613
The kids at the jamboree are as young as 10.
Again, it’s not like they’re infants… but they are EMOTIONALLY undeveloped.
If you put those kids into an environment where you just said some of that stuff (although honestly, he wasn’t saying objectively terrible stuff like, “Fuck black people!” He was saying politicall charged rhetoric.) they’d likely act differently… but in a mob of 40k, it’s different. Hell, a ton of those kids didn’t know what any of that political crap was about. They didn’t know what the hell Tom Price had to do with the healthcare fiasco. They have no real political positions. If they have any grasp of politics at all, it’s on the simplistic notion of teams.
Kids, thrown into a mob like that, are gonna act like a mob.
The adults, especially the President, are responsible for being grossly inappropriate.
I’m as outraged as anyone about this. I called the scouts myself and told them I thought it was horrific.
But I’m not gonna blame the kids for it. As adults, we’re supposed to protect kids from this kind of crap.
Oh wait! Good news everybody!
The vote was 230-196. Republican leaders avoided voting directly on the divisive issue Thursday. Instead, they tucked the wall provision into a broader procedural vote.
Nesrie
4615
Yeah telling a crowd of boys about a guy fucking women on yachts and NY Parties… not that bad, not at all for organization that normally flips out when Christian values aren’t being pushed because of how many of their troops are sponsored by churches. That part of his speech, about the rich guy, wasn’t that short.
I am horrified, not outraged, at the idea of a bunch of boys mindlessly chanting whatever some adult tell them to do. I guess that was part of the motto I missed.
I mean I knew that Republicans were bad when I was Boy Scoutin’ age.
Then again I came into adolescence in the era of W. Sort of colors your perceptions, one might assume.
Scuzz
4617
Come on, we all know that when we go home we take our political points from our teenagers because junior high and high school are where you learn everything you need to know about the political world.
Scuzz
4618
That kind of depends on your parents and where you are. I was a scout during the Vietnam years and we used to hike to Country Joe McDonald and the Fish (1-2-3 what are we fighting for) so not all scouts are the same.
Wait … back the truck up. Why are we blaming the actual scouts at the Jamboree for anything here? Can we ditch that line of thought and just keep throwing shade at Trump? Because that’s who deserves it. Not the actual scouts.
To be clear, I dropped out of the Scouts pretty quick at least in part because they were of the Gun Totin Local Yokel Good Ol Boys variety where I was living at the time.
My political views were probably heavily influenced by just how obnoxiously Hypocritical Dick Christian my parents were, though. . .
Scuzz
4621
I left the scouts when I was about 15-16, when partying and girl chasing became more important than camping out. Come to think about it, that’s about the time I quit going to church as well.
I was a Scout when I was 12 or 13, but I wasn’t much good at it, and lost interest after a year or so. Once when I was wearing my uniform at home before going to a Scout meeting my brother sarcastically commented about my membership in a neo-Fascist organization.
Our Scoutmaster was Tom Jaworski, a jolly overweight fellow whose brother Paul (an acerbic, rather unpleasant science teacher to whom I am indebted for introducing me to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos) had applied to the ‘Teacher in Space’ program and, after the Challenger exploded, wrote an editorial in the Berkshire Eagle entitled “There But For The Grace of God Go I.” He wouldn’t have passed the physical, anyway.
ANYhoo… carry on.
Menzo
4623
Yeah, pretty much this. The Scouts have a standing invitation to the President to speak at their big event. It makes sense. They don’t get approval over the President’s speech and I’m sure they didn’t even see it ahead of time. I would imagine they were just as horrified about it as anyone. This is the same organization that has allowed transgendered adults to be scout masters. They are making progress and they would not want to alienate half (or more) of their customers.
