That column notwithstanding, O’Rourke isn’t above blasting Republicans for some of their faults. After speaking before a group of Republican leaders to boost their spirits during an election year, O’Rouke did say, “We need to get more minorities involved, that meeting looked like a gathering of the Hitler Youth, there were so many white people there.” (Quote’s from memory, so it might not be 100% accurate.) And in truth, O’Rourke is more Libertarian in many of his thoughts than Republican.
Of course it is. The GOP turned to the dark side just as soon as Lincoln died and it was cooped by New York money, Pittsburgh industry and the advocates of centralized power. By the same token the Democrats made the same turn at the same time looking for ways to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. The Republicans have had a number of men and a number of movements that have tried to wrench it back from the abyss–notably Theodore Roosevelt and Wendel Wilkie. It was to no avail and the final slide into perdition took place with the civil rights movement in which the Dixiecrats, e.g., Strom Thurman, became Republicans and the liberal consensus was ruptured in the Vietnamese War. The party reached the nadir of its malevolence when it managed to place a man in the office of President whose sole qualification was an ability to read a script, whether he understood it or not. This was confirmed when the party secured the inauguration of a President who can’t even read the script. The Democrats, who atoned for Jim Crowe with Johnson and Carter, now find themselves faced with an apathetic electorate which has been persuaded that both parties are the same and doesn’t much care that it can seen the strings controlling the marionette who is the President. Doom! Doom! Doom!
There, December, is that what you were looking for?
O’Rourke is a comic. That column is supposed to be so exaggeratedly nasty as to be funny (although I didn’t find it funny.)
You know, it’s funny. A few times in the past I’ve made the observation that Republicans tend to think that Democrats have bad ideas, but Democrats tend to think that Republicans are bad people.
Every time I say it, I get lambasted with a chorus of “How ridiculous!” from various Democrats and other liberals. Yet, threads like this pop up repeatedly.
When’s the last time someone started a thread called, “Are Democrats evil?”
Seems to me there is genuine evil in the Republican Party…and the Democratic Party, and the Green Party and, dare I say it without calling down hellfire on myself, even the Reform Party. So what else is new?
The choice isn’t between good and evil, IMHO, but between parties that contain elements of both, just like always. Questions like this don’t really mean much.
Geezer
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race.
– P. J. O’Rourke
Just thought I’d throw in the O’Rourke quote to stir things up. I’m a Democrat, but I think he’s pretty sharp…for an evil one. 
**Sam Stone wrote:
When’s the last time someone started a thread called, “Are Democrats evil?”**
Well, if Ann Coulter were a poster here…
To be fair though, the occasional “Are Democrats stupid?” threads do pop up, so we have our revenge for these threads, as it were. Of course, those threads are almost always properly placed in the pit.
“Who cares what you think?” GW Bush July 4, 2001 to a woman in a receiving line
Certain members of this board may want to aquaint themselves with the concept of hyperbole.
Some helpful exercises are provided here: http://volweb.utk.edu/Schools/bedford/harrisms/hyperbole.htm
Note that I’m not advocating the use of hyperbole -I prefer irony myself- I’m just suggesting that those engaged in political debate should learn to recognize it.
Maybe we can rescue this thread.
I don’t usually participate in the “which party is better” threads because both sides tend to lose their minds in partisan demagogy. However I do see a pattern that consists of “the left is stupid” and “the right is evil” in these arguments.
So as not to make sweeping, unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable a word I’ve just made up claims, let me say that I’ve heard Republicans called stupid and Democrats called evil. Yet – and this is totally my perception – Reps get called evil and Dems get called stupid more often than the other way around. Why?
I have high hopes that there can be a rational, non-inflamitory another word I’ve just made up discussion as to why this is so. O.K., I’ll be honest. I have absolutely no hope that this can be discussed rationally. When it comes to discussing political alignment both sides become evil and stupid.
Full disclosure: When it comes to civil liberties, I am way over to the left. Economically I am a centrist. Just so you know.
Which proves my point. When Republicans attack democrats, they attack their ideas. Democrats attack the people. Democrats are stupid, but Republicans are evil.
Sam how does calling one stupid not an attack on a that person? Calling some one evil or stupid is a personal attack.
I don’t think I’m posting here again. I feel bad, opening up the can of worms and then running away in squeemish fright. But damn it-- when it comes to politics people really do turn evil and stupid.
ISTM that Republican pundits more often attack Dems for paying more attention to certain theories, and less to how their approach works in practice. In short, I’d say Reps more often attack Dems as being naive.
Frankly, it’s obvious that both sides have some very smart people, e.g. Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Richard Goodwin, to name three awfully smart Dems.
Um, I guess that you are completely ignoring what is commonly known as reality Mr. Stone. Republicans attacked Bill Clinton as a person, not his ideas. As Mr. Clinton’s ideas were all Rockerfeller Republican ideas, this is not too surprising. Virtually all the attacks directed at Mr. Clinton were personal. The same can be said for Al Gore, who was labelled a pathological liar for claiming he had “invented” the internet, when he had never made any such claim. (He claimed he had helped to create the internet with legislation he sponsored in the 1980s, which was absolutely true.) So in the instances of the Democratic party’s nominees for the past three Presidential elections, the three most prominent such opportunities, the Republicans chose attacking personally over attacking the ideas of the Democrats. In fact, the initial post is so opposite of reality that most people would think it is parody, except for the posting history of Mr. Stone. The quote does tend to prove the opposite.
Sen. Byrd spent a long time over the past two months attacking the merits of the attack on Iraq proposal, the biggest issue to come up recently. He was the most prominent and outspoken Democrat on the issue. He spent virtually all of his time discussing the merits, and I cannot recall a single instance of him attacking personally the character of the Mr. Bush.
That is not to say that nobody attacked Bush’s character on the subject. I certainly did. But the character attacks were related to Mr. Bush’s lack of knowledge on the subject, his personal cowardice in the face of drug testing while serving with the Texas Air National Guard, his lack of exercising even basic diplomatic options in the face of the grave “danger” posed by Iraq, his disingenuous (that means lying) silence about the danger he knew and withheld from Congress about North Korea during this period, his refusal to acknowledge the opinions of all the rest of the world’s leaders who think his course of action is foolish, a violation of international law, etc. etc. etc.
Personally, I feel that Republicans dish out about 5 times the amount of personal abuse that they receive because Democrats don’t want to get down and wallow in the mud the same way. I feel that Democrats understand the issues much better, by a similar ratio, as performance of the economy under Democratic Administrations and Congresses would indicate. Personally, I feel that this is wrong. I feel that Democrats should dish out more personal attacks than they do, because that is what the public understands better and as a result.
The Republicans have called for the assassination of Chealsea Clinton (In a National Review article). Here is an example of what I think Democrats should do: The Bush family is immoral Jeb and W have raised immoral, criminal daughters who flaunt the law, at least one of which is addicted to crack. W is an unrecovering alcoholic, who is endeavoring to dramatically increase world tensions so that we can get back to a military industrial economy, which would be very beneficial to his family and the family of Mr. Cheney, both of whom have large financial interests in defense contracting companies (Halliburton and Carlysle). Heck, I suppose that Halliburton could even rebuild Iraq again.
Well, there was that simpsons where the Republicans were creating acid rain to keep people inside. Bob Dole was also Reading from the Necronomican.
Yikes! Who wants to be close to the mainstream media?
Do any of you know any liberal Republicans? The last one that I can remember was Senator Percy(?) from Illinois. He wasn’t evil.
Hey! It’s a start!
Michael Medved When guest hosting Limbaugh’s show: “conservatives love their children more than liberals do”.
Rush Limbaugh “Liberals want to destroy the country.”
Any valid examination of the question must reflect modern advances in the nature and practice of theology.
Ancient “mud and stick” religious principles, as evoked by such avatars as Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha, centered around quaint notions as “compassion” and “sharing”, rather as if God were Big Bird but with the power to inflict leprosy. In an age of “enlightened self-interest”, as propounded by such deep religious thinkers as Ayn Rand, these primitive views are largely discredited. Or, as Rheinold Neibhuer, the brilliant, unspellable German theologian remarks “Mine! Mine! That’s mine, and you can’t have it! Das grubbenmitten bist verboten! Mine!”.
Others point out that Jesus’ remarks at the Sermon on the Mount were misinterpreted, and that they largely center on the paramount importance of property rights. Understood in the proper context, certain maxims have somewhat different connotations. The “fishes and loaves” incident is seen as an expression of the miraculous effect of compounded interest.
And the oft-quoted rubric about it being easier for “a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” than for a rich man to enter Heaven needs be examined as a practical matter: it would be considerably easier if said rich man owns both the camel and the needle, and is free to alter thier dimensions according to his needs. Further, if the “rich man” is assumed to already be in Heaven, the point is moot. As Jesus said, if correctly translated from the Aramaic, “My Father’s house is in a gated community, and the angels provide security.”
Of recent note, just as some persons purport to follow a revived “ancient” tradition, such as Wicca or Druidism, so also do Republicans honor traditions that pre-date the Socialistic Yahweh, and place thier faith in Moloch and Mammon. The time-honored traditions of human sacrifice are updated, with special care as to precisely which humans are so utilized.
We would be remiss if the insights of Sigmund Fraud were not properly considered. Suffice to say that the mental hygiene embodied in the concept of “anal retentive” might be crudely rendered as “keeping the good shit for yourself”. Naturally, it follows that the practitioner of such psychological maxims must, over a lifetime, become quite full, stuffed, as it were. Hence the admiring cliche “He is full of shit” as often applied to Republicans.
Thus we see that any defintion of “evil” must depend on who owns the dictionary.
Well of course no one has started an “Are Democrats evil?” thread. It’s not the Democrats that the right wing claims are evil-bad-wrong-dumb-insane, it’s the liberals!
Apologies for the hijack, I know this has been done to death, but I just had to nail down my monitor due to the spin imparted by I am Sparticus.
Gore specifically said “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” (CNN Transcript). No mention of “helping” or any other such thing. Plus, it shows a staggering lack of perspective, given that the Internet had started back in the late 1960s: Gore’s statement is a little like saying he “created” the interstate highway system because he sponsored legislation to build additional interstates.
Now, Gore probably only meant that he had helped the Internet to grow, which is true. But that certainly isn’t what he said, and when a candidate says dumb things, that candidate can expect to have those dumb things hung around his neck for the remainder of the campaign.
Consider Dan Quayle. The man certainly knows how to spell potato. But at one spelling bee, at the end of a long day of campaigning, he was handed a card with that word spelled “potatoe.” When a student spelled the word correctly, Quayle looked at the card and said she was wrong, and thus lauched a thousand late-night standup monologues. That one slip-up has been a monkey on Quayle’s back for fourteen years now.
So Al Gore said something dumb and now has to reap the consequences. Cry me a river.**
Please. Ever watched James Carville for any length of time?