The fact that you draw that conclusion from what I’ve written is a shineing example of the ignorant attitude that is preventing progress.
The point is that we, republicans, democrats, libertarians, independants, and any who choose to participate, discover what works and what doesn’t work together. Thats the process that makes it work. When you choose “we’re right and fuck you” you deny the process. Thats the same attitude that the present admin has and many christian fundies. Yours is just as wrong as theirs.
I find it telling that you find it necessary to limit responsibility to that of individuals, while apparently placing none on corporations or stockholders. Unfettered greed and acquisition is not very Christian qualities, yet you seem to ascribe to both. Any luck getting your camel through the eye of that needle yet, Lib?
I combined the two sentences because the problems are intertwined right now.
Each party has their own media: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, etc. for the right and Air America, etc. for the left. Both have blogs. They can hear exactly the news that they want to hear and avoid anything unpleasant that they may disagree with. Comfort in propaganda. Anybody popping up in the middle will likely get gunned from both sides.
Since the mainstream media culls news from other sources, including the partisan sources, a crossover candidate or truly independent candidate won’t happen until you fix the media.
Honestly, I can’t think of a good way to fix it. Try to put any sort of restriction on it and people will scream “freedom of the press” until they turn bluer than a frozen smurf. Of course, they really mean “freedom of their press” but that’s not what they want to hear.
I know NPR news has three ombudsman (ombudsmen?) going through their news for bias (fyi, they haven’t found any) which is more than any other news organization has by a score of three to zero. That zero represents all other news sources combined. That could be a good start. Get the political spin out so at least people seem like dingalings when they bitch about the liberal media.
I’d like to see some sort of standards applied to editorial programs. The line between journalist and editorialist has been smeared to shit. It needs to be redrawn and bolstered with concrete, barbed wire, electrical fence, and armed guards using the DMZ as a model.
Lastly, we need a good news source. The current batch just ain’t getting the job done. I prefer NPR news and the BBC that they broadcast to anything on television. I get more information from them than a thirty second blurb. Take something like that and make it into a twenty-four hour news service. Essentially make what CNN should be. Give it government funding so that it won’t have to fret about ratings and corporate ownership, but let it sell advertising to cut the cost to the public. Keep the editorial shows to a minimum and crank up the information content.
I give Rep. Jones a lot of credit for being open enough to change his mind and push for a change. Maybe there’s some hope for the GOP yet. If guys like him are jumping off the bandwagon, surely the opposition to the war is nearing critical mass. Make no mistake, this is a Republican war. Blaming liberal Democrats for it is just plain nuts.
Unfortunately, we don’t. At least out favored politicians don’t. They wish, then they wash, then they compromise, then they apologize.
What we need is a strong cadre of dems to stand up and say “Mr. Bush, you were wrong. There is no grey area here. Wrong is wrong.” And then to present a clear and workable plan to un-fuck us from this mess.
Can the media help? Yes, but it’s not Fox that’s going to do it. People whine about “Liberal Hollywood”, but that’s a potential asset, not a liability. Hollywood activists need to stop making shrill speeches and start making un-shrill entertainment. Make Bush the butt of jokes in sitcoms. Show the effects of the War on Terror on hour-long dramas. Make liberalism hip again. Make “stoopid conservatives” part of pop culture. News media will soon follow suit. They’d have no other choice.
Dickens proved it: Real social and political reform begins in entertainment.
So, we’re supposed to dump Dean and listen to you chastise liberals? How rich is that irony?
I agree with you 100 percent about Walter Jones. But to turn that story of courage into some kind of proof that your political philosophy is superior to anyone else’s is simply crass and self-serving.
IMHO, if it takes him having to write condolence letters and going to a funerals to grasp the result of his voting for war, he’s not qualified for public office. I’m glad he’s against it now, but it’s too bad he didn’t have writer’s cramp before all those folks were killed.
It’s a little like when conservatives become more tolerant of gays when one of their kids turns out to be one, or start supporting stem cell research when their husband is wasting away from Alzheimer’s. The empathy only goes as far as personal first-hand experience.
Are there no depths to which you will not sink in order to blame liberals for everything that ails this country? I am truly perplexed about how or why this guy’s sudden about-face should be an exemplar of the sort of behavior liberals should aspire to.
So, this guy is now taking a position virtually identical to that taken by millions of American liberals and leftists over the past couple of years, and this makes him the person we should look to as an example of righteous and selfless behavior? Not only that, but you also have the gall to say to Hentor:
I gather that he’s not the only liberal about whom you hold such an opinion. Do you really think this was nothing more than a coin-toss or an exercise in hubris for those of us who opposed the war? Why is it that you ascribe the basest of motives to people who took a stand against the war the first time around, yet place on a pedestal a man who finally concedes, months and months after it has been made clear that the intelligence leading up to the war was rotten and that there are no WMDs, that we may not have made the right decision?
These are all points worth making, and questions worth asking. But why, then, does the title of this thread contain the question “What does this mean for liberals?” instead of “What does this mean for those who supported the war?” I mean, if you want to bring “the majority of this country’s citizens together against this shameful ongoing tragedy” then the people you need to convince are those who supported the war, not those who were always, and still are convinced that it was the wrong thing to do. Why is it that we aren’t asking what this means for people who lined up behind a bogus reason for going to war, and who often called those of us who opposed such action ‘traitors’ and ‘cowards’ in the process? I’m wondering if the OP thinks there are any lessons for them in all of this.
Whatever else i think of Walter Jones, i am indeed happy that he’s finally pulled his head out of his ass long enough to see some daylight. And i think that we could have an intelligent discussion about what it might mean that former ardent supporters of the war are now beginning to have major doubts about it. But that wasn’t the OP’s intention at all. He sat there burning with desire to take another cheap potshot at liberals in general, and happened to stumble across a convenient launching pad for his tirade.
The whole second half of his post is a massive non-sequitur having essentially nothing to do with Walter Jones and everything to do with Liberal’s oft-demonstrated penchant for blaming liberals for the failings of liberals and conservatives. There is apparently, in his mind, no Democratic or Republican policy so awful that it can’t be blamed on liberal Democrats.
True enough.
But what i’m interested in, for the sake of this thread, is why the OP gives Walter Jones so much credit for his change of position, and is apparently willing to believe without question the politician’s assertion that he was standing by his conscience when he made his u-turn. This strikes me as rather credulous coming from a libertarian who is usually so quick to question the motives of politicians.
I’d be interested to see opinion polls of Jones’s constituents, to see whether their attitudes to the war have changed over the past months. Because whenever i see a politican do an about-face on an issue, the first thing i think is not “Wow, he’s following his conscience,” but “Wow, he must have seen some new opinion poll numbers.”
Maybe you’re onto something here. Seriously, maybe neo-cons are concrete operationalists–they can’t be empathic and they cannot think in hypotheticals.
Afterall, all we got from them is “bring Democracy to the Middle-East–improve the “neighborhood” and all will fall in line” or words to that effect. Was there NEVER any thought of things possibly going south? Of biting off more than we could chew?
IMO, the neo-cons are blinded by idealism (of a particlarly noxious kind, but that’s another thread)–where are the pragmatists in the Cabinet (Powell’s gone).
As for the diatribe against liberals and Dems for the failings of the current admin, and the lionizing of ONE war supporter who actuall grabbed a clue after a severe case of carpal tunnel–what the hell? It makes no sense. As a Dem, I would like to hold some of my party’s bigwigs feet to the fire, but elevating a GOP’er is not the way I’d do it.
I really don’t understand how you chose your moniker, Liberal --sorry, but from here, it reads, Contrarian .
A libertarian telling people it’s time to get serious about politics. Now there’s humor.
Lib, let me tell you some truths about politics. There’s two parties in America; all of the others are make-believe. The Libertarians, the Greens, the Socialists, the Natural Laws, the Right to Lifes - they’re all just sitting up in the stands, telling themselves what they’d do on the field while the Democrats and Republicans are down there playing the real game. So if you want to start having an impact on the way this country is run, you should join in with one of the two organizations that run it.
Despite the fact that i think Liberal is being a dick in this thread, i don’t think that anyone should be dismissed simply for wanting to move beyond the two-party stranglehold that dominates American politics. To argue that you should only join one of the two major parties is to make the two-party stranglehold a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, at the moment the situation is such that only the two major parties have any real chance of having significant effects on policy decisions, but i firmly believe in people sticking up for their political beliefs by supporting minor parties. For some people, politics really is about matters of principle, and they shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they see no benefit in supporting the Republicrat duopoly.
While i don’t agree with Lib’s libertarian worldview, i believe that he is genuine and principled in his support for such a political system. And, in fact, that’s why i’m so annoyed and perplexed that he so often seems more concerned with searching out any pretext to bash liberals, even when it means offering tacit support to conservatives who are an even greater threat to liberty than the liberals he loves to stomp.
We need to move away from the “my party right or wrong” mindset. We need to get away from the “my party has a monopoly on truth and the other party are traitors” attitude. We need to vote for individuals, regardless of their party. Straight ticket voters do no good.
Lib’s entitled to his political opinions. But when he starts advising people on realpoliticks while advocating his own personal ideology that’s not even shared by the Libertarian party, he’s going to get called for hypocrisy.
A liberal can be a threat to liberty only in the sense that a Christian can be a threat to Christianity. I don’t know how much harder I can possibly come down on conservatives than to damn them and call their leadership tyrannical, as I did in the OP. When I say that the Democratic Party should reclaim the highground, it is not a bashing, it is a constructive suggestion. Democrats should accept responsibility for allowing the Republicans to steal their ideals and buzzwords, and then take them back. Your reputation did not come out of nowhere; you’ve had leaders from Indian Hater Jackson to Emperor Roosevelt to Paranoid Johnson to Paralyzed Carter. I am criticizing heavy-handed government and wealth fetishes. I submit that, as liberals, you should not identify yourselves with those, and therefore should not feel bashed.
We liberals need to remember that when Libera uses the word liberal, he is not talking about us liberals.
Re the OP: I am, of course, delighted to see another Republican realizing that the emperor has no clothes. That doesn’t make up for the fact that this guy was one of the most noisome, jingoistic voices in support of the war. I too wonder what a poll in his district would show, and am skeptical that it is actually his conscience he is following. His previous record does not indicate that he owns one.
