Not if we don’t get tricksy and evil, or at least more prepared to respond to tricksy and evil campaign strategies.
For example, don’t allow the Swift Boat Veterans to go unchallenged for a month. You know, that sort of thing.
Are you sure it wasn’t aliens in black helicopters hovering over the grassy knoll with Lee Harvey Oswald back from the dead and heading the Illuminati? :rolleyes:
Seriously, Sandy Price, you need to get some new books.
Heh. I don’t mind so much the accusations that the Republicans are tricksy and evil and stupid, since such an accusation can arguably be supported. What I don’t like is the assertion that the Republicans are tricksy, evil and stupid but we Democrats are kind, good, and thoughtful, and so we lack any sort of defenses against said trickery.
The blushing maiden pose doesn’t exactly work for me. The failure of the Democratic party to adequetly respond to Republican dirty tricks wasn’t because the Democrats were so kind and good and thoughtful that they had no idea of the depths of depravity their opponents would stoop to.
The other half of the kind, good, thoughtful pose that annoys me are the complaints about how horrible the Republicans are for being so tricksy, evil and stupid, followed by a recommendation that the Democrats should also be tricksy, evil, and stupid. Either it is wrong to be tricksy, evil, and stupid, or it isn’t. Pick one.
What a brilliant contribution to Great Debates, Psycho Pirate. Almost completely without content and meaning. I don’t think Bush caused 911 but I sure as hell think he took full advantage of it for partisan political gain.
Well, if the past Dem campaign was the ‘high road’ I’d hate to see the low one. Especially on this board, but certainly not limited to it, it looked like hysterical hand waving and bashing of the lowest sort. Serious threads started here to ask the weighty question of whether Bush was stupid or simply a moron. Monkey boy and shrub were so regularly used that one would think this was his actual nickname. Bush=Nazi was used countless times, and effigies of Bush in a Nazi uniform were seen in myriad protest marches…even here in fricking New Mexico for gods sake. Gloom and doom predictions by the Dems were everywhere you looked, with each dire prediction of what would happen to the world if Bush were re-elected beating out the previous one for the tin foil award of the year. THIS was the high road? I didn’t see anything even close to similar about Kerry.
As for the Swift Boats, lets not forget the Nation Guard accusations dredged up once again for another go at Bush. Lets not forget the myriad attacks from sites like moveon.org. Oh, but they aren’t part of the Democrat party and shouldn’t be counted? Well, the Swift Boat Veterans weren’t officially part of the Republicans either, and if you are going to count such folks as part of the Republican ‘low road’ then I hate to break it to you that turn around is fair play.
To my mind, as an independant, neither side had lilly white hands in this (or any other election). BOTH sides take the low road whenever they can and bash away at the other side for all they are worth. Its amusing to see Dems in this thread and on this board get all worked up about what the Republicans did or said, while blithely going along with some of the most outrageous bullshit imaginable…because, you know, THATS just the truth. :rolleyes:
How are the Republicans getting away with what they are getting away with? Its called they are WINNING elections at all levels and the Dems are LOSING them. Perhaps its simply Republican dirty tricks ( :dubious: ) or, perhaps…just perhaps mind you…the Dems message isn’t as popular as it once was and they need to seriously think about coming up with a new message. Or maybe they should just keep losing and blaming it on the vast, evil Republican spin machine.
-XT
As a practical matter, the PUbbies are getting away with it because they control all the venues that might be used to ;prevent them from getting away with it – they control the House, the Senate, the White House, the Justice Dept., the CIA, the FBI and to an ever-increasing degree, the judiciary and the media. I mean, who is there to stop them, so long as they don’t commit crimes that are prosecutable in local jurisdictions controlled by Republicans?
No one, or as they say in the Pit, No Fucking One.
One shudders to think what they’ll be getting away with in the next election.
er, make that “local jurisdictions NOT controlled by Republicans.”
I am not interested at this point in rehashing the Bush versus Kerry campaign. Suffice it to say that it is fairly evident to me that Bush used far more negative attacks and Kerry was smeared with far more lies.
My point is that Bush/Rove are particularly adept and successful with smearing others, and I used the McCain primary in 2000 as an example. Nobody seems to refute this. I think that their success set a tone, and that other Republicans have bought into the idea that they have some type of mandate.
They will get away with it until they can’t, but they show no inclination to control themselves. It’s that simple.
So we are now debating that Bush knew about 9/11 and let it happen so that he could advance his partisan agenda? Pardon me if I feel that such tripe is not worthy of a debate. My post had just as much content and meaning as many others in this thread.
But since I must contribute to the debate with content and meaning: The conservatives/GOP aren’t “getting away” with anything. If their agenda is so corrupt and unpopular with the general public, they will be voted out.
Correction: “Bush = Hitler” is a perfect example of the imaginary hyperbole and drama coming out of the left as depicted by the right.
You’ve really got to stop getting your impressions of the left from Fox News.
If you think free-for-all discussions on a message board had as much impact as, say, the Swift Bullshitters for Bush ads or Sinclair Broadcasting’s “unbiased” John Kerry documentary, you’re in some serious denial there.
Oh, puhleez. Our “unelectable” candidate got 48% of the vote nationwide, despite anti-gay amendments that bolstered turnout among the hard right. Kerry was as electable as a candidate as we were going to get.
When right-wingers talk about the Dems getting someone “electable”, they’re usually talking about somebody like Lieberman. Like I’ve said before, the Dems are not going to get their margin of victory out of the middle, but out of the people who are sitting at home and don’t see the point in voting. With Lieberman, they would have had a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, and the fake would have been crushed.
And I keep seeing news reports about people standing on street corners with signs saying that God Hates Fags, and trucks with ten-foot-high portraits of bloody fetuses, and no one seems to talk about the harm that does to the Republcans.
I agree. The Republicans didn’t win because Kerry was so bad; they won because Bush was so good. Kerry did as well as can be expected, but it still wasn’t enough, which should tell the DNC something.
Not so. Look at Clinton, all praises to the 22nd Amendment. He won by courting the center. Courting the left is a policy that will turn America into a defacto one-party state pretty damned quick.
The problem here is that the posters on this board are generally from the hard left wing of the Democratic party, and they’ve been living in their own echo chamber so long that they can no longer see how marginalized their own views are. So they call some of us who are actually moderates fascists, warmongers, neo-cons, and they think that we’re way out of the mainstream and they aren’t. So to them, the election results are baffling, and they think the correct answer is to get more Democrats to think the way they do. Then they try to deny reality by claiming that this election was really close simply because they could have won if Iowa had flipped 100,000 votes or so. This completely neglects the fact that Bush increased his margins in almost every state he won, that Florida went from being a swing state to solidly Republican, that Republicans increased their margins in the house and Senate, and that they now control all branches of government.
The only reason this election looked close is because of the nature of the electoral college.
And right now, people like this are in control of the Democratic party, which is why it’s veering into the weeds at such a breakneck pace.
Oh, and I should add that Democrats had the lucky break of the election being timed to coincide with the low point of Bush’s approval ratings. Imagine if the election were held today, after the Iraq elections and with the economy picking up even more steam. Bush’s approval ratings in the last two months have jumped from 46% to 57%. And I’m willing to bet that he’ll be over 60% within a month. You know what that means? It means he’s captured the entire center, and the only people that disapprove of him are the people firmly in the Democratic camp.
It should be obvious to anyone that you can’t win elections playing only to your base. They aren’t going anywhere - they aren’t going to make the mistake of voting for Nader again. The Democratic base is safe, and Democrats should be working night and day to recapture the center. Instead, they are abandoning it and retreating into their own camp. Bad move.
Ah, good ol’ Sam. More than any other, he reminds me of Twains description of “the calm confidence of a Methodist with four aces.” How immutable and untarnished is his faith! David Kay is bouncing up and down on his toes, grinning from ear to ear, just about to rush out there and find all those “vast stockpiles”, yessiree Bob. But no. A 48% segment of the population is nothing more significant than an artifice of the Electoral College. Yes. Quite.
A lesser man, a man not given to the faith that surpasseth all understanding, might fall prey to doubt, the gnawing termites of facts. But not our Sam, he is as constant as the Northern Star that blesses the land of his birth.
There is something admirable in such adamantine opinion. I don’t know quite what it is, but something.
Oh, look! A gratuitous personal insult message! Who would have guessed?
The notion that Bush’s approval rating has jumped to 57% is somewhat selective.
From Feb. 11’s AP
From Feb. 8 Gallup poll
A lot of the poll results depend on the specific question asked: it’s very easy to get force poll-responders to ‘pick a card’ with certain wording. Regardless, I think it’s evident that the President is still, and will continue to be, a divisive figure.
As for the Dems, they have been ineffective, partially because they are not playing to their strengths. Bush and his team are very good about making plans, setting the national agenda, proposing solutions (even to problems that don’t exist), and talking in soundbites. They stay on message and people do respond to a politician who has a clearly stated plan-- even if it’s not a very good one.
The Dems picked an ineffectual candidate for president who refused to speak clearly to a general audience. Kerry did well in the debates, but most of the time he was campaigning the only soundbite you could grab from his speeches was ‘I have a plan, it’s on my website, go to JohnKerry.com’. Well listen up dems: when you have an audience right in front of you, don’t tell them to go away! Sit 'em down and tell them in simple terms what you plan to do, not what you plan not to do.
The dems got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history except Bush without a plan. If Dean (I’m getting us out of Iraq) and the DNC come up with a easily-stated plan, they should rebound in 2006.
No such thing, Sam. I hold in you considerable personal affection, I merely point out your foibles and eccentricities, as in your insistence that 48% of the popular vote represents only some odd peculiarity of the Electoral College. Or your fantasy that the liberal element of this board is some sort of abberation, as if the SDMB were a Trotskyist collective of Chicago radicals, the merest sliver of a population that lauds The Leader with an overwhelming crushing landslide of a mandate, a staggering 52%!
I am charmed, amused, but not contemptuous. There are any number of Tighty Righties to draw my bile, but not you. You are so…so…Canadian. I have great affection for my adopted state, and really, Canadians are just Minnesotans without citizenship.
My ‘eccentricities’, personal habits, manner of dress, or other personal characteristics are off limits in this forum. You want to discuss them, feel free to start a pit thread. If you can’t debate me on this board without going after me personally, I would ask that you simply refrain from posting at all.
Have you noticed that I rarely post in GD these days? You know why? Because I avoid threads, no matter how interesting, which are occupied by certain posters. I no longer have the stomach for this crap.
And you can go ahead and spin a 48-51% difference as trivial, but you should rather look at it this way: Roughly 80% of those who vote are ‘out of play’. They vote for their party, and it’s very, very hard to get them to change. So elections in the U.S. have come down to who can sway the 20% or so of the undecided ‘swing’ voters. Therefore, a 3% victory overall means that Bush had more like a 15% advantage among ‘swing’ voters.
And remember, this was a president at his lowest approval, with a huge number of forces arrayed against him. He was opposed by the Democrats, the mainstream media (which even manufactured scandals to try to bring him down), the European elite, the terrorists, academia, Hollywood, and a billionaire who threw his fortune behind getting rid of Bush. We had an entire year of being bombarded with nothing but bad news in Iraq, while the good news was being supressed. The Iraq election was therefore a big ‘surprise’ to everyone. It shoudn’t have been, because the signs of a strong democratic showing were all over the place. But if all you read is the New York Times before the election, you weren’t going to hear about it. Huge grassroots movements by groups like Move-on brought record numbers of people out to vote against Bush. And yet, you guys still lost.
If the election were today, Bush would win the popular vote in a Reaganesque landslide. The electoral college wouldn’t have moved much at all - maybe another small state or two would have flipped. That’s what I meant when I said that a close electoral college vote no longer represents a narrow popular vote difference.
And we’re in an echo chamber?
Thanks for your input. It certainly helps to elevate the tone of the discussion, Sam. I feel chastened.