Well, that’s good enough for me. Republican scum.
I don’t disagree with you about the latter. Both sides engage in this sort of behaviour. One man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. It depends on what side you’re on. One man’s thug is another man’s saviour who unfortunately has to make hard decisions to save his country.
Or more commonly, thuggish behaviour from ‘your’ side is ignored by partisans because to admit it is to give an inch in the ongoing war against the hated opposition. The attitude becomes, “Concede nothing. Admit nothing. Oppose at all costs.” Because that’s what the other side does, and therefore being ‘reasonable’ basically means giving ground and putting yourself on the defensive.
You just watch. If the Democrats get elected in the next election, and engage in a scandal similar to one which would have gotten Republicans excoriated on this board, there will be a strong tendency to either ignore it, justify it, or rationalize it away by blaming the other side. If a Democrat screws the pooch on terror, liberals will be saying that it all started with Bush and it’s the Bush administration’s fault - and Republicans did the same against Clinton.
This is one reason why Measure for Measure’s equating support for Bush with ‘lack of character’ is wrong. It’s not that they lack character, it’s that they support Bush because they refuse to admit wrongdoing because doing so would give ammo to the real enemy - the Democrats. And if you thnk Democrats don’t do the same thing when their own is in power, well…
I’m going to hand it over to you, Strat. My head hurts. Best wishes.
Actually, arguing on the same side as a person without character makes me feel dirty all over. And not in a good way.
I’m on my second martini and will be retiring soon. I’ll do what I can.
So Dems did somewhat stick with Truman, albeit significantly less so than Republicans have stuck with Bush and less than Pubbies stood by Nixon even just before his resignation, and the Dems didn’t stand by Carter at all.
Impression confirmed. The Republicans do seem to stay with their guy moreso than the Dems do.
Carry on.
That’s precisely what ‘lack of character’ is, Sam.
I for one was hoping for a Kerry victory in 2004 in part to test whether the hypocrisy you suggest would be evident. Disappointed.
All right. Since nobody can bother themselves to click the links I provided, they show that it is about character. From the first study:
From the second:
Well people used to use the IRS to attack political opponents, but after Nixon the IRS is no longer very politically driven. Maybe after this adminsitration, people will stop trying to use DOJ as a political pawn.
Enough already! Stop kicking us when we’re down! Clearly you have established the weak-willed, lily-livered inadequacies of conservatives. Now the world knows. I hope you’re happy.
Was just presenting study results. Sorry if they aren’t all that positive.
Will you stop it?! I get it! Conservatives = weak-minded mice. Liberals = well-adjusted saints. Why must you rub it in?
Is that another way of acknowledging that your contention that “they’re just as bad” is just hypothetical? :rolleyes:
Please. Well adjusted and high minded saints.
Seriously, thanks for not ripping me a new one while I was gone, gang.
Now then:
It was a sketch really, initially. The conservative crew (and their fellow-travelers, whatever) may not have caught it, but I was actually replying to Quiddity: I was favoring conservatives=lily livered yada yada over “Evil” and “Stupid”.[sup]1[/sup] (Hey, pick your poison!) Stratocaster et al replied: Ha! Typical!
In my defense, I’ve elaborated when asked to and have conceded the as yet unsupported parts of my argument (see DSeid). I even provided a link to a (NYT) site that gave ample ammo for my adversaries. (I do that: it’s best to work with the strongest arguments, right?)
Cardinal: I don’t want this thread to become the MfM show and at any rate I’ll have some RL issues over the next week. But here’s the point. Republican Presidential candidates read the same polls that I do, and none of them are backing off of George Bushism. None of them promise competent execution of conservative principles or even allude to a credible deficit reduction plan (though I wouldn’t expect them to spell it out in an election year.)
GWBush is unpopular among the general populace, I would assert, owing the outcomes of his policies (deficits, Iraq). Until modern conservatives start thinking harder about cause and effect (eg arithmetically consistent tax and spend policy), getting them to dislike one political personality or another is a waste of time. Oh, for the traditional conservatism of Nixon, Eisenhower, Bob Dole or John Anderson!
And no, I don’t mind using such broad-brush rhetoric: 75%, after all, is a wide enough majority to permit me to characterize a grouping.
Thanks for being decent sports, Stratocaster and Contrapuntal and for giving as well (or better) than you were getting.
[sup]1[/sup]As background, I would argue that talk radio and Fox have enabled some of the groupthink that I alluded to. For some reason, I assert that there’s substantially less of this on NPR. Bias, sure: they are not robots. But NPR gives sufficient information for the listener to draw reasonable conclusions. Those looking for queasy liberal consensus clusters though, can find them on the Pacifica network. But that operation holds little sway in DC.
At any rate, I hope to return to the decline and fall of the conservative sensibility at a later time…
Word.
Full disclosure: That’s what I’m currently fighting, personally.
I hate W to the point of wanting to drag him from the WH physically, but then I wonder if I could have really voted for Kerry and instituted a reign of social spending.
FYI.
Good. Now how about the former? If Chavez weren’t a leftist, would there be a reason to pay more attention to him than to all those other brutal rulers we don’t have time to pay attention to now?
Ah, Sam, the prince of evenhandedness. Good Lord, are you training to be Broder’s replacement when he kicks?
Both sides engage in what sort of behavior? What’s the equivalence? You have GOP leaders cozying up to right-wing dictators. Which Dem leaders cozy up to Chavez and Fidel? Members of Congress? No. Members of recent administrations? No. People on the fringe with no power or influence? Yes.
Great equivalence, Sam. Both sides do it, as long as you’re equating the movers and shakers on one side, with some guy on the street wearing a Che T-shirt on the other side.
The other thing is, only one side has a PR machine dedicated to creating or raising side-issues like Chavez that don’t matter much or that we can’t do much about, so that elections are fought over stuff like that, or whether Gore is using too much electricity, rather than the real issues of the day.
Sometimes, only one side is ‘doing it.’
Wish I had a dollar for every scandal nobody’s posted about here, because of the sheer thicket of Bush scandals there are. (That’s why I’ve started a couple of those “Pitting Bush for stuff not worth a thread of its own” threads, which everyone jumps on. Stuff that would have been at least a Scandal of the Week in any previous administration, just disappears with these guys.
Don’t worry, if the Dems win in 2008, it’ll all be back to normal. BUT I will be pointing out that, in all honesty, the Dem Scandal of the Week is equivalent to Bush garbage that nobody had the time or energy to post about.
I’m sure you’ll feel that proves your point. Such is life.
No, I’m just going to insist that both Administrations be held to the same standard.
Bush has a lousy record against terror - one of many issues that, like I said, simply gets crowded out. He has militarized the whole GWoT, when the only way to win is to get Muslims to realize we’re not fighting them, so they don’t need to fight us, so that they won’t give aid and comfort and invisibility to the terrorists in their midst. Terrorism is up, around the globe, even excluding Iraq and Afghanistan. And of course, the biggest terrorist attack against America in history occurred on this President’s watch; given his consistent record of fuckups, at this point it’s only reasonable to regard it as his First Big Fuckup, even if at the time he was able to convince America to the contrary.
No. You see, Dems don’t regard the GOP as the real enemy. We think of al-Qaeda as a real enemy. Poverty’s a real enemy. Global warming’s a real enemy. Nuclear proliferation’s a real enemy.
But for the GOP, the Dems are the real enemy. And this distinction defines American politics today.
Just in case you missed it, see post 145. That part of your argument is now supported. Republicans continue their partisan support much more so than do the Democrats. Bush’s level of partisan support in the face of absolute disgust by both those of the other party and those unaffiliated is unprecedented but even Nixon still had more partisan support than Truman did and Carter was bailed on by his own to amazing lows.
It does seem that the character of the Republican core is to overlook the bad in their own leadership. And that that partisan tendency has become exagerated with the passage of time. Meanwhile Democrats are much quicker to criticize and become disgusted with their own if they disappoint. That is part of the character of the Democratic core: they are less partisan, less likely to be so afraid of the other that they’ll stand by their own idiot no matter what.
“Your protected. So shut up.”
You believe this will be true, so you will likely see it, just as it is said that early users of microscopes saw in sperm a little shape of the animal that it came from.
The problem, as RTFirefly notes is that you will see this even if there is no equivalence. Republicans already engage in efforts to find false equivalence that strain credulity to the breaking point.
What you are really engaging in is projection. Many people can admit when they are wrong. It appears that Republicans have a harder time doing so about a leader from their party. This is an unattractive trait, so you must presume that both sides share it equally. The numbers don’t really bear that out, as DSeid and common sense should tell you. With Bush, you have a perfect storm of inept, corrupt, perfidious, nepotistic, failure of massive dimensions, yet three-quarters of Republicans think he’s doing a good job. (That can’t be explained away by evangelicals either, both in terms of numbers, and in terms of the fact that he has essentially failed them as well, and likely never had any intention of serving their interests.)
I’ve posted here before about studies of authoritarian personality and political affiliation, so I won’t bore everyone again. Suffice it to say that I do believe there are personality differences, and relatedly issues of character, that go to one’s political affiliation.
Trying to be as fair as possible, I’m trying to parse the numbers contained in that site another way. At the bottom of the page is a graph comparing the different Presidents’ approval from their own party, the oppposition, and those unaffiliated. Another way to parse the numbers is to discount the significance of other party support and only focus on how same party approval ratings compare to the approval ratings of those unaffiliated at each President’s low points. Here the numbers show that two overall popular Presidents, Reagan and Clinton, both had a fairly wide discrepencies, @35 points. Carter only 5, ,Truman 22, Nixon 28, and GWBush a blow them all out of the water 55 points!
While the partisan tendency to support ones own in the face of evidence of incompetence sufficient to cause those unaffiliated to become disgusted does lean more heavily on Republicans overall, this particular Rovian era has exaggerated it far beyond any historic norm.
It honestly scares me.