No one requested evidence. It was only the now former supervisor that had the habit of providing “evidence” without request.
At School no one mentioned anything regarding Obama and the Antichrist, the reference of “evidence” is referring to all other items like Obama being a terrorist, or his family being involved in crimes, much to their credit, the staff at school found about Snopes.com on their own. So Obama got their votes once they found out how out of it a good chuck of McCain supporters really are.
Yup. The Presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 were both squeakers. Bush actually lost the popular vote the first time around and might have lost the electoral college if Florida had been recounted.
But the Republicans didn’t act like they were in power by the thinnest of majorities. Instead they acted like it was the Reagan years all over again and they had a huge mandate to do whatever they wanted. The last eight years have been full of the Republicans telling the Democrats: “You don’t like it? Who cares? Suck it down, bitch!”
I don’t even know what Republicans stand for anymore. It seems to me that I once did, but the things that have happened in the past eight years are not in keeping with what I understand conservative ideals to be.
Last week, I explained to a co-worker (older lady, sweet, Republican) that none of the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq, and Hussein didn’t have any WMDs. I explained the same thing to my grandparents earlier this year. My other grandparents are stocking up and food and ammo, because when the liberals take over the country, they want to be prepared. I guess they think they’re going to star in their own version of Red Dawn. I don’t think any of these people are fully in touch with reality.
Modern conservatism is a merging of market and social fundamentalism. Social fundamentalists are aging. Market fundamentalists, who believe tax cuts to be always and everywhere a universal elixir, are having a difficult time as their economy craters.
This thread matters, because post-election some share of the Republican party will remain obstructionist, and receive support from those in their own bubble. Put another way, they won’t be able to conceive of a liberal President as legitimate.
Sure, you can find unhinged members of the left, some of them on this board. But Fox News simply has more reach than the Nation. More to the point, modern conservatives have tenderer dispositions than ultra-liberals. Media bias - or exposure to unfamiliar information - is something that the modern conservative can’t handle. Liberals, OTOH, tend to focus on accuracy. Ultra-liberals didn’t like the framing by the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, but they were perfectly capable of filtering out the spin. Modern conservatives lack a similar fortitude. (Admittedly both sides like to report on the nuttiness in the opposing camp.)
Obama has conciliating instincts though. The problem is that the moderate wing of the Republican party has been hollowed out by DeLay, Buckley, Gingrich, GWBush et al. Sensible conservatives deserve better.
Right. A very large number of people apparently cannot discern editorial content from actual news, or simply don’t care about the distinction, and have no idea that they might need to obtain information from several, sometimes opposing, sources in order to make an informed judgment. I thus can easily imagine a person who gets most of their ‘news’ from the several hours per day of the pure hatred expressed by Rush Limbaugh, or the various FOX commentators, indeed believing that ‘liberals’, whatever they happen to be, for some bizarre reason want to destroy the country.
I can’t help thinking that there is at least some potential for violence in increasingly belligerent rhetoric coming from elements of the right wing in the US, yet I see nothing particular in the politics of the Democratic party, or in Obama himself, that is all that wildly different from what has come before, and that has clearly not caused the downfall of the country previously.
It’s not just the uninformed consumers of Fox and Rush though. Over at The Corner of The National Review, the right-wing pundits are debating whether Obama is a closet radical leftist. Frum to his credit has a grip. Jonah Goldberg, Mark Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru do not. Andy McCarthy explains that Obama is a Maoist. Nutty, nuttier, nuttiest!
John McCain was forced to explain to a doddering old lady at a town hall tonight that Obama in fact is NOT an Arab. She seemed genuinely confused to learn this.
She did? That’s really incredible that you could decipher that in the three seconds of her turned back you got to see before the shot cut away. :dubious:
Here’s a link to a vid of 3 examples (including the above) of McCain trying to reign 'em in. If I understand it correctly, they are all from this afternoon. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/223572.php
McCain hesitates, stammers. The crowd boos, gets its bearings, then cheers. It’s a sad spectacle. But I’m glad that a few well placed individuals have apparently had words with the McCain campaign.
I would just like to point out that if it were possible to watch/listen to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC or read Newsweek or Time and get information that was genuinely fair and balanced, far fewer conservatives would be getting their information only from Fox. As it is, it’s virtually impossible for many conservatives to watch or listen to these programs or read these magazines without being pissed off at almost everything they say.
A secondary problem is that because of this bias, conservatives don’t feel they can trust or believe the information they’re getting. If Bush or the Republicans get blamed for problems with the economy, we feel there’s no way to know whether that’s really the case or just typical liberal bias at work. If the MSM touts a problem with global warming, we immediately dismiss it as just more leftist fear-mongering so as to create more government regulation. If the MSM says things are going badly in Iraq, we have no way of knowing whether that’s actually true or just typical leftie negativity when it comes to military action, especially when conducted by a Republican administration. Etc., etc.
So the MSM is itself responsible for the existance of Fox, Limbaugh, etc. If it had actually practiced the objectivity and unbiased journalism it has so long professed, there would have been no doubts as to its credibility and no decades-long groundswell of pent-up conservative resentment for Limbaugh and Fox to capitalize upon.
Nonsense; the last thing conservatives want is for anything, media or otherwise to be either fair or balanced. Or truthful. They are all about bias and unfairness, and dogma.
That’s what happens when you spend your life in a bubble where you hear nothing but people who agree with you.
That’s their problem. The “mainstream media” is ALSO conservatively biased; just not as much as Fox. They’ve simply reached the point where they can’t tolerate the slightest shred of reality without frothing at the mouth or going into denial; they needed more right wing bias than they were already getting.
No; that’s just a matter of them being ignorant or delusional, or both. Or simply malicious. As they say, “reality has a well known liberal bias”; when the MSM tells the truth and conservatives refuse to believe it because they hate the truth, that’s not the media’s fault.
Oh, garbage. Fox and Limbaugh are just propaganda tools of the Republicans; an imaginary liberal bias in the media has nothing to do with their existence.
I would attribute this to the cognitive dissonance created when ideology smacks into reality. Conservatives cannot accept anything which contradicts their world view; so any news source which presents a critical view of their candidates or issues is seen as biased, even if the same news source is critical of both sides equally. Their definition of fair and balanced is no criticism of conservative views.
It would be nice, for once, to see a conservative actually practice that individual responsibility that they profess to love so much. When they can do nothing but blame others for everything that happens (even the existence of Fox News), it’s clear that they do not actually practice individual responsibility.
So, if I understand your point here, conservatives didn’t believe they got the straight scoop from “the MSM” on WMDs in Iraq, Iraqi participation in 9/11, Abu Ghraib, the Katrina reponse and the ineptitude of Michael Brown, the corruption headlined by Abramoff and DeLay, the growth of the deficit, the impacts of climate change, and on and on. Are you saying that reports on these events were so biased that conservatives have to turn to those paragons of objectivity and truth, Fox and Limbaugh? That the realities of these events are completely different than what was reported in “the MSM”?
Fox and Limbaugh et al. exist because the conservative base does not like the news from “the MSM.” Because the “MSM” news does not support their view of reality, they deem it biased and turn to people who tell them what they want to hear.
I have had this discussion with my brother numerous times. He keeps telling me the media is biased, and I ask him how he knows this. His response is that he knows it because that’s what Fox News says. I ask him how he knows Fox News is not biased, and the only thing he can say is that he believes Fox rather than the rest of the media.
I recognize that there are studies that have been done to support the bias claims, and that my anecdote does not constitute a “study.” But I’ve heard this argument time after time, and it all comes down to the point that conservatives don’t like what they hear, which has nothing to do with the facts of any given situation.
