Reverend Wright does not hold political office. Reverend Wright is not a spokesperson for the Democratic Party, nor the left. The Left did not need to give outrage to Rev. Wrights statements, because he DID NOT REPRESENT THEM. The right TRIED to make the connection that everything Wright said represented the Left, but this was incorrect.
I see you are still trying the same tactic.
To be clear - Wright does not hold office. He said idiotic things. The Right tried to paint him as a symbol of the Left.
Palin was running for office as VP of the country as the Republican candidate. She (was) an elected politician in the Rebpublican party.
I always enjoy your thoughtful posts. I think in normal times you would be right, but these are not normal times. For the first time in my lifetime we have a major network that has taken a hard ideological stand, even to the point of creating news events such as 9/12 and the tea parties, we have the vice presidential candidate of a major party who continues to defend an outright falsehood about an issue of crucial importance to the country, and we have Congressional Representatives who question the citizenship of the president.
There is nothing about conservative political philosophy that would make a person unethical, but for some reason the face of the conservative party has taken over by nut jobs and liars and I don’t see a groundswell of conservatives trying to stop it. Palin polls as the favorite presidential nominee for 2012. Beck has the most popular opinion show on television. These are not fringe people like Reverend Wright; I had never heard of him before the last election and barely heard mention of him since then. He is nowhere on the radar map with regard to the Democratic party. That is not true of Beck, and Limbaugh, and Palin, and Bachman.
To think that conservative leaders are not acting unethically would require us to assume they are idiots and just don’t understand that what they are saying is untrue. I’m sure you would object just as much to a thread that questioned conservatives’ intelligence.
I know that there is no conservative body which elects their spokespeople, but people vote with their viewership of Fox News and attendance at Tea Partys, and their deafening silence at the sorry state of the current political debate.
How typical; once again, we have the standard line about “oh, you can’t say that about the conservatives, the liberals are just as bad!” Which is both blatantly wrong, and a demonstration that even the people trying to defend conservatism are unable to come up with any actual defense for their behavior. So they pretend the other side is just as bad, hoping no one will notice that that isn’t even an actual defense.
The present American conservative movement is fundamentally unethical; not just for one reason, but many. Social Darwinists, holy crusaders and everyone-who-disagrees-is-a-traitor nationalists are not the sort of people who have scruples. People who sneer at any shred of compassion as “liberal bleeding heart socialism” aren’t going to hesitate to lie, cheat, steal and worse given the opportunity. Torturers, plutocrats, religious fanatics and neo-imperialists aren’t nice people, and those sorts of people are what comprise the GOP, as demonstrated by their actions not just their words.
As long as these discussions continue to include Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter, Malkin, and the rest of the shriekers on the Right, then your objection is meaningless.
My point has never been that the Right has no loonies. My point is that selecting the loonies of the Right as some sort of indicator of the qulaity of all Conservative people is silly.
Those “shriekers” ARE the mainstream leaders of the Right. Ignore them while talking about the Right, and you are pretending to a Right that doesn’t exist.
Viewership of Fox News does not identify anything other than people willing to watch Fox news. I know all sorts of people who would fall in the Liberal camp, along with a number who are Conservative, who watch MSNBC or listen to NPR, grinding their teeth at what they consider tilted reporting, yet continuing to return to the same news outlets.
Part of the news regarding the Tea Parties has been their extraordinatily inflated self-reported numbers. Hardly a sign that the whole of Conservative America is out there swallowing the [del]ballocks[/del] message being offered.
Even IF they were the leaders, (they are not–they are among the leaders but they do not comprise the whole of the leadership), this thread was an indictment of everyone holding a general political/philosophical position.
I actually think that a case can be made that the Republican, (not Conservative), leadership has been led astray by the successes, first of the Gingrich revolution and then by Rove’s dirty politics in ways that are, ultimately harmfukl to the country. I don’t think that the argument is a slam dunk, but it can be made.
Extending that argument into a claim that all Conservatives have completely bought into shunning decency and integrity goes too far.
How many posters arguing that Conservatism is morally bankrupt have kept up on the internal debates within the Conservative movement in which Fundamentalist preachers have argued that concern for ecology and related issues should be seen as Conservative values and that those on the Right who disdain any talk of conservation and stewardship of the Earth are betraying Conservative principles? If you are unaware of that movement, (among others), then you do not have enough infomation about Conservatives to be making some of the claims posted to this thread.
No, they ARE. When Rush and those like him say “Jump”, the Republican Party collectively asks how high.
More to the point, it doesn’t matter if some tiny minority disagrees; it’s the fanatics who set the agenda, who control the direction of the movement.
I’ve been well aware of those people for a long time, nor are such attitudes new; the Nazis had similar ideas. The fundie back-to-the-land pastoral types are just as awful as the despoil-the-land types; just in slightly different ways. I have no more desire to be a farm serf in a back-to-the-Dark-Ages agrarian Christian theocracy than I do to be a factory serf in a polluted Christian corporate dictatorship.
Conservatism has always been evil, ever since there was change enough for there to be a concept of “conservative”. Whether it’s fighting to preserve slavery before the Civil War, or fighting to preserve segregation and prevent women voting in later decades, or fighting against universal health care and the rights of gays to marry now; they are always collectively on the wrong side, morally and pragmatically.
As an extreme centrist it’s obvious to me (as others have noted) that lambasting the opposition with nasty labels is a time-honored political tactic (in this country and elsewhere), that politicians often employ sleazy means to gain particular ends (overwhelmingly, to be elected or re-elected) and both “liberals” and “conservatives” (whatever those labels means these days) do it, to an extent where differentiating who’s more excessive is a pointless exercise in wrangling.
As far as health care reform goes, in my view both sides are lying egregiously and neither wants to push the hard choices that must be made. Playing the “who’s the bigger demon” game just plays into the hands of those who prefer gamesmanship to doing effective work.
Good job in distracting the focus of the debate. We WERE talking about how some of the political leaders of the conservative movement were lying about “death panels”, questioning the birthplace of the president, calling him a secret muslim, or shouting “liar” at him. You were the first to bring up the entertainers on the right. Nice one! Almost as good as trying to paint an equivalence between elected republican leaders and Rev. Wright.
ALL conservatives? No. How about many in the conservative leadership. As evidenced by their actions.
I would like to hear the names of the top five leaders of the Republican party that have publicly repudiated Rush Limbaugh. Since he is a shreaker on the fringe, that should be easy.
I’m suppose to take a woman seriously who called a dem candidate for pres a fag beacause of his hair??
Just as I’ve learn to except that my ex wife will always hold me mostly to blame for our failures… just as I’ve learned to except that two knee patella surgeries mean that my time on the basketball court is over… I’ve learned to except that that their is a significant portion of the country who, other than agreeing that the designated hitter is a bad idea, i will never agree with… see eye to eye with… come to an understanding with… Would you equate my Eric Schlosser with Ann Coulter?? I simply couldn’t take you seriously if you would fooled by her act and schtick…
I’m constantly amazed at the hate that anti-conservatives are allowed to spew on this board. If a conservative said anything remotely close to the level of venom shown by certain liberals in this thread, they would be censured quite severely…TRM (who speaks from experience)
I’m so sorry for hatefully pointing out that Sarah Palin was a candidate for VP, and who erronously made up stuff about non-existent death panels.
I’m also very, very sorry for pointing out that there are members of the republican leadership who have questioned the president’s place of birth. That must have been venomous of me.
And Fear Itself noting noting that leaders of the Republican party have not publicly repudiated Rush Limbaugh. Wow, that was a nasty, venomous thing to say! I’m sure that if a conservative every DARED say anything like that, he would be censured VERY severely.
In other words, my man, your argument that there is a double standard at work here… Is full of it.
Conservatives like to point out that people are responsible for their own choices. The Republican leadership, the Fox news network, and the rest of the right-wing punditry have chosen to act in a hateful manner, so now they are hated. What do you expect when lies replace reason, a parade?
So her good points are that she trashes a Democratic candidate for senate for a single piece of dirt she could dig up on Coakley while she was a D.A. Nice. Flinging mud about an opposition candidate does not rise her up in my books. Well, at least she did not call Coakley a whore. That’s nice of her.
Oh, and you liked her bullshit argument that scientists are all acting in cahoots to fake anthropogenic climate change in a huge world-spanning conspiracy. How unsurprising. Ya, that really elevates her in my eyes.
While it does mention the leadership, I see nothing in that post to indicate that we are only discussing the foibles of the Republican leadership. (Der Trihs certainly seems to think that we are discussing Conservatism. ) I see a pretty broad condemnation of Conservatives and (while I have noted the misdeeds of the Republican leadership in at least one post in this thread), I have seen no evidence that Dan Blather has altered the focus of this thread to something narrower than the OP.
So, I deny your spurious claim that I have distracted from the actual thread as posted.
) I see a pretty broad condemnation of Conservatives and (while I have noted the misdeeds of the Republican leadership in at least one post in this thread), I have seen no evidence that Dan Blather has altered the focus of this thread to something narrower than the OP.