I’m sure it’s very convenient for you. Define a political term as innately evil, then you can dismiss anyone who holds the actual views. They’re evil - you don’t have to argue with them. And you will always find evidence for it, both because you’re always and everywhere looking for it, and because you want to find it. But more, you can always then dismis anything your political allies do as well. If you don’t like it, then it’s simply the result of them being on the “other side”. Sometimes they’ll even be constantly switching back and forth - even if they aren’t actually changin anything.
So you define conservatives as selfish, greedy evil bastards. And lo and behold - you’re always right. But it’s not because conservatives were or became bad people. It’s because you always view bad people as conservatives. And because your opponents are bad people, your allies are always good people unless they stray from your particular ideal - and any contradictory evidence can be handwaved. They’re good people, and therefore you don’t have to pay attention to anything nasty they do. It’s just a minor personal peccadillo - nothing important!
I’ve never seen anyone on the SDMB say that all conservatives are bad people and all liberals are good people, you got a cite for that?
edit: It’s particularly wrong your little pet theory, considering progressives will criticise their own plenty in public. Whereas there is no equivelency on the right of people having criticism for the people calling Obama a terrorist, “the enemy” and “2nd amendment solutions” etc. Lefties criticise their own, Righties are team players and tribal.
These same republicans who don’t call out their own, criticise peaceful muslims for not spending all day every day 24/7 decrying terrorism, btw. Hypocrisy and doublethink is in conservative blood.
Feel free to demonstrate that conservatives and liberals criticise their own in perfectly equal amounts, you’re the one making the absurd claim that anyone paying attention to current events will know is bogus.
That’s another difference between conservatives and liberals, conservatives cannot understand what a generality is and what people mean by them when they use them for example “Americans are more straightforward than Japanese” Conservative “THATS NOT TRUE I KNOW SOMEONE WHO IS VERY BEAT AROUND THE BUSH AND A LOUD TO THE POINT JAPANESE.” :smack:
I’ll call them out my own party: There’s nary a true Reagan-style Republican serving in national office anymore. Clowns like GWB, Rick Scott, assorted creationists, deniers of climate change, and a plethora of fools proclaiming that their Bible is the literal truth have made the GOP a laughing stock. Norquist and his followers have made a mockery of the legacy of Reagan – a man they claim to hold in the highest of esteem. I know that the SDMB has few fans of the Gipper, but that’s not relevant to this issue.
Reagan once said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. With the Tea Party theocrats and the big business thieves seeming to represent the Republicans, I’m feeling much like Dutch. Unfortunately for me, there’s no major political party to which I can switch. Today’s Democrats seem to be mostly people who get their news from Jon Stewart and blindly follow a fellow who seems determined to outdo his predecessor in the sheer stupidity market.
I think it depends on what you mean by right and left.
Obama really is seen as a center-right guy by economic leftists. I suppose he’s seen as a corrupt big-government Washington Democrat by the populist right, *for much the same reasons–*that is, he’s seen as the establishment’s man, not “ours.” “Social justice” liberals and establishment centrists see him as more one of their own.
There are really at least three poles in US politics, and more than one scale being used.
Maybe if they don’t like the criticism, conservatives could stop being hypocrites and police their own instead of circling the wagons? Or you can just keep making fun of me for calling a spade a spade, because we all know the two sides are exactly the same and we can’t make any comparisons between them, that’s “balance” which is more important than reality.
Corruption and greed are very right wing, which tends to associate with the moneyed and powerful. Now what I am saying about Obama’s administration and much of the Democrats is that they are just as economically corrupt as the Republican leadership. It would be DAMNED DIFFICULT for them to be MORE corrupt and greedy than that crew. Abramov ring any bells for ya?
As for Obama being right of center of economic issues … it’s easy to see that he is, when you don’t live in the far right bubble. Bubbles have a way of distorting things.
Or, perhaps you just live in a left-wing bubble or echo chamber, where you only hear leftist criticism. There isn’t much more unity on the right wing than the left. It’s quite factionalized: neoconservatives, paleconservatives, some libertarians, the Religious Right, the social liberal / fiscal conservatives, single-issue gun-rights folks, protectionists, isolationists, anti-immigration folks, guest-worker program supporters…these groups form an uneasy coalition as the base of the Republican Party, but they certainly do criticize their own.
Greed is a human trait, not a political one.
Of course corruption correlates to power, it requires power to be called corruption. It doesn’t correspond to politics either.
To drag us back to the thread topic, I choose Utah. It’s absolutely gorgeous. The Mormons might even come along for the ride if we legalized bigamy (hey, it’s a lifestyle choice…).
The South is unsalvageable, however. Goad them into secession, wait a generation and then harvest their women like those of any other failed state.
Take our lovely ladies? Why, they’d likely use one of those dreadful firearms to shoot the first Yankee-type that made unwelcome advances. Best not get yourselves into a situation you couldn’t handle.
