Hole in the Resume.

You are sitting at the desk, conducting an interview. Nobody likes job interviews. They are tedious and awkward, for all parties involved. Yet they are the best method we have evolved to try and elicit some measure of the abilities, talent and character of those seeking a position. It is stressful for the applicant by design.

Back to our interview. You are the interviewer, you have a terribly important position to fill. The future of your company actually depends on the right person filling this job. You have already interviewed one candidate who has experience at this position and has demonstrated competency, and now you are looking at the next candidate. This candidate makes a good first impression. Attractive, well groomed, nice smile. What's not to like?

As you complete the introductions and sit down to begin some informal chit-chat, you begin going over his resume. You see; this candidate was picked for you by a committee, elsewhere in the company. As you are going over his resume a few things stand out.

First thing you notice is the interviewee is a vet, right out of college. Good, a Navy guy, served overseas for four months. As the idle chatter glides along, you do the math in your head, 16 weeks. Not a long time by workaday standards, but certainly impressive if it was combat related duty. The candidate has listed on his resume an impressive current position. A rather exclusive position he has held for almost 20 years.

The interview begins in earnest and right away the candidate swings into action. As you begin a series of questions you notice an odd pattern developing. Everytime you ask a question of the applicant about the vexing and complex issues that your company faces in an increasingly hostile environment, he answers with a war story. Gosh, you look at the resume and confirm that his military service was rather brief, and it was a long time ago.

Odd, so you ask the candidate more pointed questions regarding his current position and how he has addressed various issues. Now it gets interesting.

When you can get an answer out of him at all, that is not a war story from 30 years ago, the answers are all over the board. You're an experienced interviewer and you have a few tools at your disposal.

You pull one these out. It is a standard interview technique that virtually everyone who has been to an interview has had to look-out for. You ask a question about the same issue in a significantly different way. You are looking for consistency here. You are looking to see if there is a set cognitive schemata this individual uses to analyze and approach problems.

Now we have a problem; the candidate starts misfiring on these questions. Answers that should be consistent on pretty basic issues, aren't. If they aren't war stories from 30 years ago, they are completely inconsistent. Flat-out contradictory. You try to help the guy out a little, because you really need to fill this position. It is terribly important. You begin asking the questions in a more similar fashion to one another when you are looking for consistency in approach. No luck. Again with the war stories.

This is really perplexing, as the candidate has a pretty decent position now, but it is starting to look more and more like the guy is a chair warmer.

If you haven't caught on by now; I'll spill the beans for you. The job applicant across the desk from you is none other than one John Kerry. And you are the interviewer. This political process we go through before an election is like an interview, tedious and awkward. It is designed to be that way. To elicit what we can about abilities, talent, and character of the applicants.

In our daily lives, most of us find ourselves on the interviewee side of the desk, but our unique system of government puts us on the interviewer side of the desk every four years. It is an awesome responsibility, remember the future of the country is riding on who fills this position.

Frankly, it looks like Kerry has a huge hole in his resume, a gap that begs explanation. But when you ask him to explain some of his accomplishments, he won't. He can't.

If you were being interviewed for a job , don't you think it would be a fair question to ask? What you have been doing for the last 20 years? Would you be surprised if- when you didn't answer this question -the interviewer assumes the worst. Out of the country? Working for the CIA? Prison? Or worse, France?!!

John Kerry will not answer questions about his record in the US Senate, because he can't. He hasn't done anything of legislative significance in almost 20 years in the Senate. The best predictor of future behavior, is past behavior. Hence the nature of questions at job interviews, and political campaigns.

So, should we expect John Kerry to suddenly explode into a fury of accomplishment in the next four years if he begins warming seat in the oval office? It's not going to happen. John Kerry is not going to single-handedly defy all models of predicting human behavior. Kerry has been droning on and on about health care recently, in an attempt to divert attention away from the Swift-Vet scandal, but he has had nearly 20 years in the Senate to do something about it.

He has had 20 years in the Senate to address job creation.

He has had 20 years in the Senate to address terrorism. He even sits on the Senate intelligence committee, 24 percent of the time. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=241

He has had 20 years in the Senate to address the environment.

20 years in the Senate and not a single piece of legislation with his name on it. He recently had eight years with a Democratic President in office and didn't do anything about health care or any of these other issues. Nope, the guy is a seat warmer and he's just looking for a different seat to warm.

So now you're sitting on the interviewer side of the desk, and you have a decision to make. A terribly important decision. You have a candidate for the position who steadfastly refuses to answer questions about his positions in anything resembling a consistent manner. As such, he has a huge hole in his resume. Do you hire him? Would you expect to get hired under such circumstances?

-SpinDaddy

"Fisking" Definition Of

fisking: n.
[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment. See also MiSTing, anti-idiotarianism

Fisk

Fisk verb. To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere (qv).
Usage: "Orrin Judd did a severe fisking of an idiotic article in the New York Times today..."

Before I started this BLOG, I used to torment people with emails in which I offered my opinion and commentary, often interspersing said opinion and commentary into the body of works by other authors. I have discovered that this process is called fisking.

Apparently, one Mr. Robert Fisk of the Independent had his knickers in quite a twist while reporting from Bahgdad during the early days of Gulf War Two. He seems to have been expecting a much different outcome than what actually happened. Of course BLOGgers were letting him have it with both barrels, rhetorically speaking of course.

I don't claim to be reformed, so the "fisking" will continue here rather than in my friends emails and they can peruse or not at their discretion. I never knew this had a title. In the future I will do better about keeping up and henceforth all "fisking", friendly and hostile, will be properly acknowledged. -SpinDaddy

Definition reference 1
To fisk or not to fisk?
-->To fisk or not to fisk?
[-->Posted 4:31 PM by Roger Kimball]
In this week's Spectator, David Pryce-Jones explains the ins and outs of a new contribution to the English language--and journalistic perfidy:
In the www arena where the world speaks invisibly to itself, a new word has appeared: ‘fisking’, meaning the selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices. Just as cardigans or mackintoshes are named after an inventive individual, so fisking derives from the work of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, stationed these many years in Beirut. The catalogue of mendacious absurdity that Mr. Pryce-Jones catalogues is as impressive as it is depressing.

From mid-March to the end of April this year, Fisk was in Baghdad. He took proper precautions to equip himself with flak jacket and gas mask, and to buy stores for the coming emergency, imparting reassuring news about his candles, biscuits and 25 loo rolls. He further informed us that he was reading a biography of Sir Thomas More, a man so self-righteous that he went to the stake for it. The implicit comparison was not lost.

And then, on 19 March, the Americans began ‘acting out their rage’. Just five days later, he was quoting an Iraqi general already speaking of quagmire. For Fisk, ‘Things are going wrong. We are not telling the truth. The Iraqis are riding high.’ Cruise missiles were falling in all the wrong places. On 1 April he was wondering ‘Where, for heaven’s sake, is all this going?’ The siege of Baghdad would need a quarter of a million men, and it was ‘fading from the diary’. Next day he was even more distraught. The Iraqi army was prepared to defend its capital. ‘How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences?’ It was an amazing performance Fisk gave--and no doubt will continue to give. "Fisk seems to have left Baghdad for the present," Mr. Pryce-Jnes notes, "but no doubt he will return, or from a distance continue to corrupt the Independent with his hysteria and disinformation." Even Paul Krugman could learn a thing or two from Robert Fisk. Read all of Mr. Pryce-Jones's excellent article here.

Definition reference 2
November 13, 2003
Fisking The Definition?
Also from Armavirumque today...they reprint a definition of "fisking" that originally appeared here:
In the www arena where the world speaks invisibly to itself, a new word has appeared: ‘fisking’, meaning the selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices. Just as cardigans or mackintoshes are named after an inventive individual, so fisking derives from the work of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, stationed these many years in Beirut.
Well, not exactly. "Fisking," as used around the Blogosphere, actually refers to the practice of offering a point-by-point (and usually quite damning) rebuttal to an article or quote guilty of incorporating the evidence and reasoning described above. This is usually accomplished by offering the text being fisked bit by bit, with specific rebuttals after each part. Kind of like this post, actually...except the criticism involved in fisking is usually quite a bit more harsh.Posted by Bobby Allison-Gallimore at November 13, 2003 10:59 PM

Glass-Jaw Kerry

As we've seen the last few weeks, John Heinz-Kerry has a political glassjaw and cannot take a punch. Not without dropping to his knees and whining to the FEC to in essence, "...make them stop it".

The left, funded primarily with Billionaire George Soros' money for 527s like move-on.org have slammed Bush for over a year, spending upwards of 80 million dollars with nary a peep from the President. This doesn't include propaganda hit pieces like Michael Moores F911, and countless books.

Yet for all this; the best they have been able to do, is tie Bush in the polls, and even that is slipping. I would bet money that the internal polling at the DNC and the Heinz-Kerry campaign shows this, and now we are seeing the manifestations of their panic.
It is also very telling as to how he would handle conflict and aggression directed against the US. What has been his response to the swift-vets ?? http://swift1.he.net/~swiftvet/index.php Before their first ad ever went on the air, lawyers from his campaign and the DNC were threatening television stations with LEGAL ACTION.

Kerry's campaign has written the publisher of Unfit For Command asking that they cease publication of the book. Does this attempted suppression of dissent rate any concern amongst the big boys in the mainstream media? Why is Kerry seeking to hide his book from 1971 The New American Soldier? Instead of his Stalin impression, how about just rebutting the questions raised by the swift-vets?

Be sure that al Zarqawi, Bin Laden, and Kim Il Jung are rolling around in gut-wrenching laughter on the floors of their respective caves and looking forward to 21JAN05 so they can come back out of hiding to torment us and kill our countrymen again. The swift-vets have spent a little over a hundred grand on their ads and Heinz-Kerry is squealing like a stuck pig. I ask you; if he can't handle these guys, what makes you think he can handle real aggression? Aggression directed at you or your family?

Hey, maybe Heinz-Kerry can send Jimmuh Carter back to N Korea. Only this time with the firm admonishment to the Il Jung regime to stop shooting their mouths off, and keep their Nuclear arsenal quiet this time. At least until it is complete. This time instead of promising to build them a nuclear reactor with which to make their own plutonium, we'll just send them the plutonium, it's a lot less trouble. But, they have to promise to be nice and not hurt us. With 11SEP01 we saw the fruits of Clintons speak-meekly-carry-a-large-checkbook foreign policy approach. Kerry-Heinz would revive this failed approach.

Yes, Heinz-Kerrys response to this little pin prick by the swift-vet guys is very telling. Just as he has dispatched his lawyers to stifle the swift-vet guys, is surely telling of how he will respond in the face of some real aggression. I can see Warren Christopher (Clintons 1st sec-state) right now; putting everyone to sleep at the World Court in the Hague, droning on and on and on about how utterly contemptuous and disdainful it was for the N Koreans to have nuked Seattle into a glass crater.

"You guys better leave us alone or I will send Warren Christopher to bore the Hague to death, I mean it!" Yeah, that oughta' show 'em John.

This may sound like I am being overly sarcastic here, but Heinz-Kerry is the one who is on record as having said he favored the "law-enforcement" model to combat terrorism. It was Heinz-Kerry who just last week lamented that, were he the president, he would wage a more "sensitive and thoughtful war". What in hell does that mean?

What Heinz-Kerry does not seem to grasp, is that politics is the last resort before violence. It is far better to have violent and vicious political exchanges than actual violence and viciousness. It is far better to have political power struggles than revolutions to change power. Our founding fathers foresaw this, even hoped for it. The Islamo-Fascists prefer actual violence. Heinz-Kerry does not understand this. Heinz-Kerry prefers "sensitive and thoughtful".

I suppose the hacks at the Dept of State think that is very nuanced and sophisticated (from the Greek roots sophist and sophistry).

I have a news flash for you citizen; Osama doesn't do nuance or sophistry.

-SpinDaddy