I love that this thread is titled “Democrats please explain this to me” and adaher has posted 15 out of 40 total posts. The next highest number is 3 posts.
It’s easy to intimidate a member of your party who is dependent on them for campaign funding and general support - just threaten to withhold them.
I realize that’s a treasured meme among your side, but it is not and has never been based on or supported by the facts.
That’s another one - the mischaracterization of sweeteners for a Senator’s *constituency *as personal corruption. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for that.
What “sensible and moderate legislation” do you have in mind? Perhaps something that was the Heritage Foundation’s own fucking idea, perhaps? Something with no public option to compete with Big Insurance? That’s what we fucking got. No, seriously, what’s your “sensible” proposal that you think we should replace Obamacare with once we repeal it? Your side has had enough damn time to come up with something, but we’re still waiting. So whaddaya got for us? :dubious:
The Democrats did choose to go the route of “sensible and moderate legislation”, in the naive expectation that your guys would act responsibly in return. But it was more important to them, and to you, to make them fail no matter the cost to the country. And you ought to be *really *ashamed of yourself for that.
It has to be very confusing to live in a present day Republican’s world. On the heels of the most devastating financial collapse in generations, Obama pursued an entirely unpopular agenda with no opposition from Republicans and achieved nothing.
And he still has a greater than 70% chance of beating a hypersuccessful businessman for the presidency! Democrats, can adaher explain this?
Sorry, but he was handed the keys to a car that had just crashed into an oak tree at 100 MPH, and he has spent the past 3.5 years trying to get the car running again, only to be opposed at every turn by those who crashed the car in the first place.
Nobody votes for 0bama’s budget proposals.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/163347-senate-votes-unanimously-against-obama-budget
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/mar/28/obama-budget-defeated-414-0/
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/227857-senate-rejects-obama-budget-in-99-0-vote/
Y’know, moonshot925 is correct on one point: 0bama is certain not to win the election. I mean, look at his name recognition: I’ve never even heard of this guy. What were his parents thinking, giving him a name with a number in it like that?
Now, Obama, on the other hand, is pretty significantly favored to win the election, because of his accomplishments. The contrast between these two men, 0bama and Obama, is striking.
That’s because each explanation has been ridiculously easy to debunk. Post a good explanation and I won’t have to.
Nonsense, Conservatives embrace compromise, in their own way of course:
[Indiana Tea Party candidate for Senate Richard]Mourdock appeared on MSNBC with Chuck Todd on Wednesday morning and said as much.
”I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view,” Mourdock declared
BTW, looking thru this thread, I hope this doesn’t get me in trouble to say this, but our own old-school board conservatives are always up for a real debate; our friend ‘adaher’, while a bit of a pain sometimes, often raises decent questions and serves as a good foil to sharpen our debating skills with; but this ‘moonshot925’ character just seems like a unpleasant refugee who wandered in from Red State or the Daily Caller.
THe Maine delegation has never been afraid to buck the GOP before.
If it’s a meme only held by our side, why were the Blue Dogs so afraid to back the Democrats?
It is corruption, and the media rightly reported it as such.
But they didn’t fail, as Shayna said. These shifting excuses give the game away. Democrats did in fact have the chance to pass their agenda, and for the most part, they did. It didn’t work, it wasn’t popular, it wasn’t even fully supported within their own caucus.
Democrats didn’t lose in 2010 because of obstruction. They lost because they did things. Now in 2012, we’re supposed to believe things would be better if only Democrats had been able to do things from 2011-2012. Really? Were they saving all their great ideas?
You know as little about ME politics as about MA politics, obviously.
The Blue Dogs are your side.
In what universe? :dubious: And which “media”, apart from Fox and the WSJ?
Despite the kicking and screaming from the obstructionists, and using counterobstruction tactics that you pretend to denounce.
Are you going to tell us what the Republican health care proposal was, or would have been, or will be, or aren’t you? Yes, we all note that “How about you go fuck yourselves” is, in fact, a proposal; however, you did use the words “sensible and moderate”. Time for you and your party to put up or shut up. And you in particular are going to keep being asked until you answer.
We have standards here against making shit up.
Your guys obstructed and filibustered every single fucking one of them. But you cannot and will not accept responsibility, can you?
Yes, it’s easy to create, and even believe it, alternate universes. But the rest of us are, tragically, condemned to form a “reality-based community”. Pity us.
Seems like he just didn’t have the cajones to hold the obstructionists, in his own party, to the party line. The Democrats who voted against his bills, should have been tossed out of the party directly. But that’s not the man he is, not his nature. But if he’d done so, then, he could have pushed through some stuff he wanted, in short order, possibly producing the change, he kept telling everyone, ‘wouldn’t be easy, and could take some time’.
The economy, the deficit, all of it, would be better today, (not all rosy, but better) without the enormous financial burden of an ongoing war, started by another administration with a pack of lies. The Republicans seem all about the money, without wanting to acknowledge any role in *why *there’s no extra cash, to give rich guys tax breaks.
I don’t know, but it kind of seems like, 8yrs of the Right produced 2 wars, and brought the world economy to the brink of collapse. And now the Right is all pissy because in 4yrs Obama hasn’t fixed it all!
I’d like to think most American’s, are smart enough to recognize, how unrealistic it would be, to expect anyone, to fix the mess of problems this president inherited, in 4 short yrs.
But then I heard that the target demographic, for the final keynote speeches, at the RNC, lost large TV audience share, to “Honey Boo Boo”, and now, I’m not so sure.
It did work. The problems with your premise and debunkings is that they are all falsehoods.
He saved the US from Great Depression II. He saved the auto industry. We went from shedding jobs to adding jobs. From a retracting economy to an expanding economy.
The stimulus was effective. Olympia Snowe was particularly responsible for it being smaller than it needed to be, or the outcomes would have even been greater.
Along the way, he took out bin Laden, Ghadaffi, achieved the impossible in the ACA, signed Lily Ledbetter…
We could go on with the achievements.
If Republicans could argue the point, they wouldn’t need to lie and they could develop convention themes that weren’t also based on lies. And they might actually have had a chance to win in November. But they cannot and they do not.
How about that convention bounce adaher? Seen 538 lately?
This coming from the side that doesn’t even seem to remember what happened in 2010. probably because they can’t explain it.
Such as?!
The amount of spending was controversial, yes… for being too low.
The real issue is that the Dems do not want to admit they are pussies. Simple as that.
It’s nice to complain that 40 Republican Senators held this country hostage and so they couldn’t do anything but they neglect the three questions that come about from that.
- What did you do in those months that there were less than 40 Pubs in the Senate?
- Why did you allow the procedural filibuster on everything? Why not make the Pubs work for it?
- If you are so ineffectual as a party that you let a minority of Senators pwn you, then why should we re-elect you?
My own theory? The Dems wanted gridlock to justify Obama not doing what he promised in terms of recovery. Look at what happened with UHC. The Dems passed that even going so far has to break their own house’s rules of order to get it done. There was the Louisiana Purchase and the Nebraska something-or-other. The Dems did what it took to get it passed despite 40 Pubs in the Senate. But they couldn’t do that any other time? Not buying it. Sure the Republicans were obstructionists but the Democrats wanted it too, and now they have the fall guys.
For a demagogue, or a party that no longer recognizes the importance of a national common good greater than its partisan advantage, worry is easy to turn into fear, then anger, then votes. It’s easier yet for a people with short memories. That is hard to counter with mere logic and facts and higher principles. Surely you understand that.
Now where’s that “sensible and moderate” health care plan you prefer to the one we actually got, the one based on Romneycare, the one your side wants to “repeal and replace”? Replace with what? Note that you always do have the option of admitting you’re bullshitting about it, which has to be the default conclusion otherwise.
There weren’t any. The Dem vote topped at 59, between the long-stalled certification of Franken’s win and the death of Kennedy, who at any rate was on sick leave the entire time. Plus, it includes Lieberman.
Naivete about the Pubs’ residual willingness to act responsibly. I doubt you’ll see it again next term.
Because of the alternative.
What happens whenever disaster strikes, people go nuts. Not as bad as after 9/11, but pretty bad. Tell me, look me right in the monitor and tell me that the Tea Party having the Republicans by the nuts is a good thing. Dare you. Double dog.
That’s the big drawback to democracy. Us. But if you love democracy, you marry her, even though you know that she’s a little crazy all of the time, and full blown whacko some of the time.
And so it goes.
What the Republicans want everyone to forget is not only the dismal state of the economy when Obama took office but also the “VELOCITY”. It wasn’t just that unemployment was high…It was that the economy was losing about 800,000 private sector jobs per month. We were essentially in economic freefall and nobody knew exactly when we would hit bottom.
Is it possible that we could have had a stronger recovery? Yeah…but only if we had done things to make it stronger, like have an even bigger economic stimulus. It would not be stronger because of some ideological fantasy that you throw money at rich folks (“job creators”) and get rid of the regulations that do things like protect our environment and then these folks go out and hire more people despite the fact that they can’t sell what they are already producing because demand is too weak! Throwing money at rich folks is what gave us the lost decade of the 2000s and insufficient regulation is what gave us a complete financial meltdown.
So, even if you think that Obama should have governed more like Paul Krugman thinks he should have governed, that is no reason to turn the economy over to people advocating policies that have a proven track record of trashing the economy! In fact, it is all the more reason to punish the Republicans by making them such a small minority that they can no longer use the filibuster to hold the economy hostage to their ideological nonsense with no basis in fact or science.