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Republicans: Political Party, or Apocalyptic Cult?
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Which is funny, considering she only has a 4% mindshare at the moment, with Palin (who isn't even running) getting 3 times more votes than her in polling.
Agreed, media is certainly not off the hook on this. There are these things called facts, and even when those facts clearly suggest one side is correct, the media will still twist the narrative to suggest that the other side still has a point.
In other news, this thread is awful. Let's see, in the first few paragraphs, Republicans are compared to KKK members and terrorists, Oh, neat, you found ONE GUY that soured on his party and this must be taken as the ultimate truth. Don't make me point out all the southern democrats that defected their party. Hell, there's a wiki article about party switching right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_switching_in_the_United_States.
This guy's beef stems from the blocking of the debt limit, like that should be something we do nonchalantly. With as much debt as we have, I don't know, maybe we SHOULD start talking about spending limits? "Don't worry guys, if you pass this thing we promise we'll figure it out by next time. Trust us." [Cue 87 times later...] If Republicans are "terrorists" for slowing down the process, that would make Democrats a Ponzi scheme. Let's spend money we don't have indefinitely! Everything will be AOK!
Listen, the whole setup of government was supposed to be a slow, obstructionist process that eventually farts out law that benefits all citizens. It's a grind only MMO players could appreciate. I can point to a whole set of reasons why the federal government is broken, but Republicans aren't even on the top five (oh, for example, the 17th Amendment). Then the "solution" is voter manipulation? Make PACs that confuse the voting public into funding candidates they would normally vote against? Ugh.
Please, stop the flame war stupidity over the Repubs. They're not anti-democracy, nor are they anti-republic. I know this message board is highly Dem, but this crap is just too much.
PS: There's a lot of people making six figures on Capitol Hill. I know LA's making 85K, and that's barely a position at all. I also know several people who work for the opposite side of the isle that they vote. With the way the beltway swings political parties, you have to be able to work for whoever you can whenever you can if you want to be a career politician.
Wii Code: 1040-1320-0724-3613
I am just completely baffled that Palin is getting any attention at all, much less being polled on. "I'll make a decision by the end of September". Who the hell gets into the primary that late? Are we going to be sitting by our TVs before Super Tuesday with pundits going "Well, this is Palin's last chance to enter the race. We are camped outside her mansion in Arizona on this beautiful February afternoon waiting to see if she will make a stateme... OH THERE SHE IS! no, wait, that's just Piper taking out the trash."
Maybe in some hypothetical future, the republican party will be on the side of the working man, will keep their noses out of social issues altogether, and their concept of conservatism involves spending a little money on the federal level to save a shitton of capital through intelligent investment in health and education. At that point, I might switch teams.
That said, right now, some people who were Republicans in the 70s and early 80s may be having a hard time identifying with the post-moral majority, post-neocon movement that bears almost no relationship to Reagan's legacy except to use his name as some sort of religious screed.
I double dog dare you to find some footage of the Democrats... even on the fringes like Kucinich, getting cheered for sending hundreds of people to their deaths, or crowds of far left voters cheering to let someone die because they couldn't pay their medical costs.
It's fucking inhumane and needs to be pointed at and said is inhumane by thinking people on both sides.
There is a tumor that has been allowed to fester in the republican party and nobody has had the balls to excise it.
Aside from you saying it, where is it writen that government is supposed to be slow and obstructionist?
This is what Jon Stewart caught Chris Wallace on during their kerfuffle a few weeks ago: Fox News, as an entity, believes that all news outlets have an inherent liberal bias, and as such, it is their directive to find the right-leaning angle and expose the "real truth."
Which, given how watered-down and passive those other outlets' coverage is, it only concentrates the wrongheadedness further.
To be fair, if the founding fathers didn't realize their system was destined for gridlock, we give them way too much credit on the intelligence front.
They developed a system that would produce compromise. Gridlock happens when that compromise takes a while to happen.
Right now the GOP's stated goal is gridlock, wherein no compromise happens and no legislation is viewed as being better than any legislation.
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. " - Thomas Paine
Ugh, did nobody talk to you about the American government in high school? Things meant to obstruct sweeping changes: a first-of-its-kind written constitution, separation of executive, legislative and judicial power, division of legislative power, and the staggering of elections for representatives and the president. Plus, it was originally written that the states would provide delegates in the Senate, so that if federal law directly impacted state government, there would be a voice from someone in the federal government who was directly involved with specific state lawmaking.
Wii Code: 1040-1320-0724-3613
Actually, no, it wasn't something to be done nonchalantly EVER, including with Bush. You make the mistake in lumping everyone together.
Wii Code: 1040-1320-0724-3613
This hasn't been true since the Civil War. The federal government grew in response to the states collective inability to either change positively or get their shit together enough for the nation to modernize. It happened quietly and sometimes undemocratically, but the late 19th and 20th century saw the federal government get a ton of shit done.
The Civil Rights Act led to a reversal of this, as enough white Americans benefited socially and, perhaps more importantly, economically from keeping the black man down. The entire Southern economy was built on twin engines of exploitation of blacks through Jim Crow laws and poor whites through violent anti-union suppression. The South really did hire half the poor whites to kill the other half - and the blacks and Mexicans in the Deep/Texas South. Enough benefited that their children and grandchildren harbor huge resentment for what was taken from them. Namely, the ability to take from others while the law looked away or knocked the heads of any unruly victims.
So, we've got the beginnings of a rebellion of the state-level fuck-ups on our hands. It's not the first time. As a nation, we can let them drag us down, at a time when there are a lot of global actors who would more than like to see us end up as a backwater, or get realistic. Being realistic means that we have to accommodate ourselves to the same realization that our forefathers made in wake of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and Civil Rights era - sometimes the fuckheads coalesce into a rebellion and you have to shut that shit down hard.
If American history is any guide, we're about 20 years from federal troops on Southern streets again.
Remember, everyone but the modern conservative is a fool. Their super special insights into the way things work are far greater than those of the men and women who kept this nation strong through world wars and the greatest economic expansion in the history of the world.
Just politely ignore the fact that the parts of the nation that the conservatives get to run are backwards shitholes with economic and social statistics that would shame parts of the Third World. That's totally irrelevant, unless you actually think that Texas, Alabama and Mississippi are models that you'd like your community to follow.
Politics in this country have always been a bloodsport. Several times in our nation's history, different political factions were actively shooting at one another. Complaining that the GOP are a bunch of meanies who won't play nice comes off as petty whining, frankly.
Rigorous Scholarship
The group I'm lumping together is Congress, and I suppose anyone who didn't throw a fit previously and has now decided to throw the most massive of hissy-fits and become concerned about the debt. Congress raised the ceiling 7 times under President Bush's administration without so much as a peep, and certainly without taking us to the brink of default.
And conservatives don't get the fact that the shit they're doing has led to people shooting each other, and that this is a really bad thing. Just don't go around whining when you or someone you care about gets a modern assault rifle round through their head in the future thanks to your little game of "hardball."
No, many of the complaints are that the modern republican party is not opposed to using race, religion and regional distrust (see "real america") to drive their political agenda... a political agenda that at its extremes has people cheering for people to die if they can't pay their bills.
If "playing hardball" to you means feeding into bigotry and xeonophobia to achieve your goals, then maybe you are right.
Democrats made a pretty big stink about it.
Just... they didn't have the political clout (nor probably the will or desire) to hold a gun to the country's head in order to get their way on the issue.
Rigorous Scholarship
The thing that makes me more than a little furious about this is that we know what happens when you build a movement on these things. People die, often in huge numbers.
Republicans are not master strategists, they've just discovered that feeding the lizard brain works really well to build up political support. It's no great ability. Assholes in Rwanda used the same tactics to get their supporters to massacre hundreds of thousands of innocents. Hell, they even did it through talk radio.
Conservatives are basically pouring gasoline onto fire and congratulating themselves for their mastery of physics. My one consolation is that these movements have a short lifespan. You can't get that many people aroused without release forever. Trouble is, the release usually happens and has a body count in the six+ figures.
Dude, you wrote this - "Politics in this country have always been a bloodsport. Several times in our nation's history, different political factions were actively shooting at one another. Complaining that the GOP are a bunch of meanies who won't play nice comes off as petty whining, frankly."
You do realize that you both, in one sentence, downplayed and justified conservative rhetoric with an offhand comment? Those factions shooting at each other ended in a Civil War that had the largest American body count in history. You support this - the idea that your side is playing games that get people killed - and are somehow trying to take the high ground.
The difference between you and me is that this stuff freaks me the fuck out. In other places and times, this is the kind of "bloodsport" that ends in mass genocide. I'm just not snarking and smirking at it, probably because I don't secretly enjoy it like you seem to in your posts.
Which really got me thinking, what is it that the GOP field actually stands for? Opposing Sharia law? Being against whatever Obama is for?
That's not a platform. That's ridiculous.
The ridiculous keeps on truckin'
Right, "You dislike us because we are better at this than you". How very republican of you: ignore the main point of the argument, ignore all the specific examples being made, summarize the point into something vaguely condescending, and try to turn it around and attack "teh libruls" with accusations.
That part actually makes perfect sense. They want a small government that allows them - white people with money and the correct religion - to do whatever they want, while maintaining a large enough military to keep other countries out and a large enough police force to keep everyone else down. If they can make that permanent underclass pay for through unequal and punitive taxation it at the same time, more the better.
It's not some out there idea. It's how much of the world, outside of the developed nations, works. There's a large section that wants to go back to the past. It helps when you realize that the idealized past looked and worked a lot like any number of modern Third World shitholes.
I must say that it's curious happenstance that the Republicans found relgion on the issue first during a Democratic administration. What are the chances that they'll threaten to drive the economy off a cliff during a Republican presidency?
You make the mistake in thinking that a debt ceiling is a good idea. All it does is provide an opportunity to periodically grandstand, with the risk that the economy will implode if you don't raise it in time.
Pretty decent, actually. Revolutions eat their young, and a large part of the Tea Party actively hates the GOP leadership and institutions.
While I do think that it's true that the Tea Party is mostly just a rebranding of the GOP base, I also think that this rebranding has lead to a lot of realizations about how far apart the base and the top are on a lot of issues.
There are a lot of Republican voters who are sick of being promised red meat. They want their leaders to come through and end abortion, kill the federal government and put the minorities/gays/liberals/foreigners back in their place.
I do not recall that, but will take your word for it. I'll guess that you're correct in that they probably also weren't willing to watch the country burn to get their way. I'll also posit that the media didn't roll with the narrative, nor did they make sure to place the blame on Congress as a whole, rather than the people making the stink.
If you think today's political environment is in any way comparable or incendiary as the period leading up to the Civil War, your understanding of American history is sadly lacking. The last real political riot we had in this country occurred back at the Democratic national convention in 1968.
You do realize that the term "bloodsport" is just a figure of speech, right? American politics today is nothing like the Weimar Republic, where brown-shirts and communists were battling in the streets.
Rigorous Scholarship
People(liberal) are distressed by the current power base in the GOP because it's a wholly irrational, untenable, and hateful construct that's being endowed continued credibility. Nobody wants to make a godwin, but the kinds of ideological manipulations going on right now are(or could be) veering towards a socially dangerous or threatening path. I'll agree that it would be alarmist to make any grander conclusions about what's going on now, but the impetus is forming, at the very least. It serves the rational minded to be wary and analytic about these affairs. 'Haters gonna hate' isn't really conducive to this. You say politics has always been a blood sport, a fellow above mentioned how things have supposedly always been a certain way(though as others have pointed out, he's likely incorrect or misinformed), let's say these things are true to some extent. Wouldn't it behoove us to improve, or at least entertain the thought of improving upon destructive(or at least stagnant) aspects of our society?
I think the complaint is that they're playing Prisoner's Dilemma with the "always defect" strategy. Yes, they get a small benefit, but everyone else loses. What happens if the Democrats try that as well? If you wake up tomorrow morning and find that the GOP congressional delegation has been shipped to Guantanamo, will you praise Obama for his hardball tactics?
Do any of the posters here honestly believe that's even a possibility?
Rigorous Scholarship
I'm sure everyone in 1920s Germany would have been completely shocked at horrified if they learned what was going to happen in 1930s/1940s Germany. There's a reason that right wing reactionaries have gotten a bad name in history. This type of rhetoric is seriously dangerous. It gets people killed, usually a whole lot of people.
And fuck Godwin, you have to talk about the last time a modern, industrialized democracy went batshit insane when discussing the possibility of another right-leaning modern, industrialized democracy going insane. I know way too much about American history to think that we're some special and unique people endowed by God from protection from the political manias that have plagued our history since, well, forever.
Rigorous Scholarship