Thank you. I started on that one, but gave it up as not worth it. I still should’ve posted as you did.
Three, what Kerry stated was fact, not opinion. Politically stupid to say it, but cognitive studies have shown it to be fact.
Four, Russ Feingold did appear at the rally. Yes, he had scheduling conflicts. Things got resolved quicker than planned and he made it.
And that’s where I stopped reading. It’s just not worth it…
You know, the number of truly stupid people in the population is really pretty small. Most conservative voters are just normal people going about their lives in normal, ordinary ways. A relatively small percentage listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and most of those who do have the ability to weed out, mentally, the wheat from the chaff when Limbaugh says something nutty or they see a misplaced “D” under the name of a Republican miscreant on the Fox network. Some conservatives even voted for Obama in the last election.
I think it’s a result of the liberal propensity to regard itself as superior intellectually that leads so many people of a liberal mindset to swallow the idea that every conservative exposed, however minimally if at all, to the shenanigans of Limbaugh or the Fox network fully accept what they hear and adopt it as heartfelt belief.
Further, not that many conservatives watch and/or listen to these programs anyway. IIRC, Limbaugh pulls a weekly audience of twenty million listeners. And if I also remember correctly this is the aggregate of his daily listeners. So in reality he is only reaching four million listeners a day, and many of them only on a hit and miss basis as he is on in the background as they go about their work or daily business.
So he only reaches four million people a day and most of them hear only snippets of his program. And then among those four million are a great many who perfectly capable, like I said above, of separating the wheat from the chaff in what he’s saying. They’re likely to see his point on subjects that they already agree with and to smile and shake their heads when he’s spouting something that has been distorted or what is obviously nonsense.
So when you look at the total number of conservatives in this country, which numbered at least sixty million if you go by voters in the last election and don’t take into account youthful conservatives and/or those who didn’t vote, and you consider that of those who are exposed to right wing nonsense only a small percentage actually believe it, you are left with a large number who are unaffected by it - probably 95% at least.
So the average conservative voter is the small business owner, the small business manager, the busy soccer mom, etc. None of these people are particularly stupid and most of them by far are unaffected by the machinations of the right wing media - a media which is far offset by the more insideous though lighthanded (IMO :D) mainstream media, which has been subtly promoting liberal positions on philosophy and lifestyle for decades anyway.
So when you get right down to it, only a very small percentage of the conservative population actually believes nonsense like Obama is a Kenyan or that some Republican politician is really a Democrat because Fox put a “D” under his name four or five or however many times it was.
But all these criticisms are fairly recent anyway and yet the liberal tendency to label its opponents as stupid and backward goes all the way back, apparently. William F. Buckley railed against it in the early fifties and cited instances of it going back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Thus it’s become apparent to me that whatever it is in the human brain that results in a person’s having become a liberal is also responsible for the liberal propensity to view their opponents as stupid and hateful. But for every stupid or hateful thing a liberal can point to as typical of conservatives, I could show you an equally stupid and/or hateful thing that I can point to as being typical of liberals.
And on preview, Brainglutton, I’ve never heard any conservative make the claim that liberals are evil. That isn’t to say that none ever have, but it isn’t part of the mainstream conservative outlook. Frankly, it’s been my experience that liberals believe that conservatives are stupid, evil (or at least to the extent their stupidity allows them to be) and hateful, and conservatives believe liberals are pie-in-the-sky idealists who favor unworkable solutions that create more problems than they solve.
Essentially, the conflict between conservatism and liberalism is very similar to the conflict between generations. Conservative philosophies, beliefs and ways of life align more with the adults; and liberal philosophies, beliefs and ways of life align more with youth. It’s the generation gap writ large.
And on further preview:
Please point to the part of my post where I said Obama called Republicans stupid.
No, it means that people were tired of the war, politics as usual in Washington, and they fell for Obama’s message of hope and change…a message that has now morphed into such silly and meaningless platitudes as his recent “Reach for hope” speech. :rolleyes:
And frankly, much of the problem for the Republicans is that for the last few decades they’ve been liberal-lite. Limbaugh was correct when he urged Republican politicians and voters to get back to basic and fundemental conservative priciples, principles they had long ago abandoned in the belief that that veering leftward was the only way to get elected in this day and age. If you look at JFK’s “Ask not what you’re country can do for you” speech and contrast it with today where the question has literally become “How much can and will the government do for me?”, and you’ll see how much Republicans have had to move leftward to get elected. Now, with the Dems firmly in control and defying the will of the electorate, and being exhorted to do so by the rise and popularity of the Tea Party, Republicans are finally beginning to see that the correct course of action is to get back to the basics of conservatism rather than trying simply to be not quite as liberal as the liberals.
Yee-haw!!!
And now I’m out for the day. I gots chit to do.
And on yet further preview (dammit! :smack:), I would point out, Brain Glutton, that merely attending college is not any kind of reliable measure of innate intelligence, and intelligence alone is not any kind of measure of judgement, wisdom, self-discipline and things like that. And then you have to consider that a certain number of these students are taking liberal arts classes that are a total waste of time and money in terms of the job market (and how smart is that?), and a certain number are ‘professional students’, staying in school as long as possible to avoid having to contend with the real world.
It ain’t for nothin’ that William F. Buckley once said that he’d “sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty at Harvard University”. 
And besides, how many of these college and university students are being outpaced in income and lifestyle by conservatives who’ve gone into business and worked their ass off and are far outpacing them in terms of homes, cars, retirement programs, college for their kids, etc.
I hate to say it, but having a larger percentage of liberals in college doesn’t really mean anything except that there’s a larger percentage of liberals in college. 
And now, serially, I am out of here.
I’m sorry…I must be losing my eyesight, because that paragraph is the single most contrary-to-fact piece of writing I’ve seen in a long time. “Liberal-lite”? Republicans?! What alternate universe have you been living in? The Republicans have doubled DOWN on crazy right-wing crap. Real-Reagan (as opposed to the Apotheosized St. Ronald) couldn’t get a speaking invitation in the modern Republican party! They’d kick him out for being a California liberal Republican. The Republicans have harried the moderates out of the party. There are 3 in the Senate right now, all from New England and all in danger, the Maine senators from Tea Party challenges from the right and Scott Brown because the only reason he won in the first place was that the Mass Democrats nominated a REALLY STUPIDLY BAD campaigner.
The very idea that the Republicans have stepped left in the last 30 years or so is simply idiotic. When the John Birch Society was talking up charging Eisenhower with treason, the Republican Party of the 50s rightly dismissed them as nutcases. Now the Birchers’ ideological descendants CONTROL the Republican Party! And you’re saying they’ve moved leftward?
Your post wasn’t that long… but I’ll highlight the part where you said what you claim you didn’t say:
Of course your cite didn’t really back you up.
So you disagree with the OP then, that a loss this year means Dems are too liberal for the voters?
Or, is this a correct set of statements in your opinion:
Or perhaps it is this:
I was expecting something like that. Look, I hope you will concede in principle that whether and what correlation exists between intelligence and political views is a pretty damned important question – so, if not general education levels, what measure of intelligence would you propose using? (And please don’t open the IQ test can-o’-worms!)
I’m sorry, but you’ve done no such thing. I’m beginning to wonder if you have macular degeneration or some other eye ailment that prevents you from seeing the part of the sentence that preceeds what you’ve bolded. You’ve missed it twice now. Look again, and think about it, and I think you’ll see that I’m right.
I don’t have time right now to go into the questions part of your post. You asked if I’d answer your original question when no other conservative apparently has, and I’ve done that. It wasn’t my intent to get into a parsing contest.
Let me ask you a question that pretty much goes to the heart of my opinion on the subject. Black people vote Democratic in an overwhelming majority, something like 95% - but white people don’t vote 95% Democratic.
So does this mean that black people are smarter than white people?
I don’t think there’s a whit of difference between liberals and conservatives in terms of intelligence. For every conservative idiot you can show me, I can show you a liberal idiot; for every liberal intellectual you can show me, I can show you a conservative intellectual. Etc., etc.
Of course that raises the question of what does account for the difference between the two, and the best way I could describe it would be that it’s the same sort of thing that make some people artistic and others not, or some people practical and others not, or some people outgoing and gregarious and others introverted and withdrawn. None of these qualities is the result of innate intelligence and yet they are all very significant in determining the way a person lives, what he can accomplish, and, in many cases, how he will vote.
To use the analogy of the arts, the conflict between artists and the businessmen who run the companies that distribute that art is well known, and it isn’t much of a stretch to say that the artists are likely to be liberal and the businessmen are likely to be conservative. Yet I’ve never heard anyone claim that musicians and painters are innately smarter than business executives or finance guys, or vice versa. People just look at things differently and to a certain extent they seem to be born that way. They can be influenced and molded to a certain extent by their environment and life experiences (and university propaganda :D), but whatever it is that determines whether a person will be a liberal or a conservative, it has very little to do with innate intelligence.
And now I’m out! I really am! Don’t talk to me for fifteen minutes, okay? Okay? (Wait, don’t answer that!)
No. The intellectually honest answer is they did not lean far enough to the left, and as a result many democrats felt no urge to go out and vote for the lesser of two evils. That is the honest answer. It may not be the Sean Hannity approved answer, but nearly all the leftists I have met who are disaffected it applies to.
Among registered voters the dems are even or slightly ahead. Among likely voters the GOP wins. So it is more a question of who is going to bother to vote, not what voters in general think.
Not only that but polls show the public don’t like the dems, but they like hte GOP even less. So the concept that this is a grassroots right wing movement doesn’t strike me as true. The GOP is motivated, the dems are not.
Personally I think whatever gains the GOP make will partly/mostly be wiped out in 2012, since it being a presidential election year dem turnout will be much higher. Will that be because the GOP is too far tot he right?
Obama’s health care bill is largely identical to the bill proposed by the GOP in 1993.
But the GOP has move to the right since then. And in 1993 the GOP was already to the right enough that Barry Goldwater wanted nothing to do with them. the overton window keeps moving further and further to the right. I have no idea why.
Of course that’s it. Don’t you see? Most conservatives have the ability to discern when someone is using hyperbole and exaggeration, but liberals have been completely blind to the agenda of the mainstream media.
And it’s the liberals who think the conservatives are stupid. It’s all so obvious.
The thing you’re missing is that you’re really talking about two completely different kinds of persuasion here. Any dentist will tell you that a slow, steady pressure will do a better job of moving teeth than will a hammer. “Hussein Obama was born in Kenya, dur, dur” is more akin to a hammer. But one television show after another, one news outlet after another, and one entertainment magazine after another, portraying liberal attidutes, goals and proponents in a sympathetic and likable way, while portraying conservatives in a skepticas, negative way, is the kind of slow, steady pressure that is more effective in persuading people to the liberal point of view no matter how intelligent they are.
So it’s a hammer/braces kind of thing. Just because the one doesn’t work very well it doesn’t mean the second one won’t either.
So why isn’t everyone a liberal, then? While some folks were led down the primrose path, what made it possible for conservatives to resist this slow, inexorable persuasion of the liberal media?
Or what does your argument say about conservative commentators? If the steady pressure of braces is the way to re-shape [del]teeth[/del]opinions, why do the Limbaughs of this world employ the hammers of birth certificates and death panels? If the liberal method of shaping opinion is so successful, and there for all to see, then the conservatives must be doing it all wrong.
How, you ask? How do morally strong conservatives stand up against the relentless pressures of liberal power? You may well ask, how? How did David defeat Godzilla? Ask yourself that!
Purity of bodily fluids.
(Not, however, their own. It’s complicated.)
I know this wasn’t directed at me, but to answer this question, we would have to control for the state of the economy. Which candidates punched above their weight?
I discussed this issue on another message board in Jan 2009. Bush I creamed Dukkakis: it was ugly. Clinton beat Dole, even after economic factors (and incumbancy) are considered. In fact, recent Democratic Presidential candidates have done ok. Moving further back, Reagan punched above his weight against Carter and below his weight against Mondale (though the latter race was a landslide). Nixon was also a stronger candidate than his opponents.
Anyway if Obama wants to win in 2012, he and the Fed have to pursue economic policies that actually work.
I’d guess that there is probably an equal percentage of stupidity among black and white people. But look at the overall numbers. You’re going to get more votes appealing to the ignorance of white idiots than you will appealing to the ignorance of black idiots.
Who’s the liberal Glenn Beck? Who’s the liberal Ann Coulter? Who’s the liberal Sean Hannity? Who’s the liberal Rush Limbaugh? Who’s the liberal Michelle Malkin? Who’s the liberal Bill O’Reilly?
Michael Moore. Michael Moore. Michael Moore. Michael Moore. Michael Moore. Michael Moore. They always trot out Michael Moore, because that’s all they got.
I’ll give them Moore. He fits into that group. But as you noted there’s only one Michael Moore.
The next response usually is to name somebody who’s either left-wing and obscure or mainstream but not liberal.
Actually, Michael Moore is politically pretty mainstream. He has been accused of some misleading practices in his movies, but other than that I don’t see any comparison with Glenn Beck or the others.
Moore exaggerates, Hannity lies. Looks you right in the eye, and lies through his teeth. Beck is harder to pin down on the truthiness thing, because he’s nucking futs.