How did the concept of the wimpy progressive/liberal start

Great Debates
41

Really, Wesley? We Republicans are better at getting things done? MAYBE it seems that way to you, but let’s look at reality.

  1. Abortion is still legal, and that won’t change any time soon, if ever.

  2. Conservatives with any backbone still can’t get confirmed to the Supreme Court- only wimps like Anthony Kennedy.

  3. Reagan’s attempts to roll back Great Society and New Deal programs, ultimately, came to naught. No Republican President since has even TRIED to cut spending.

  4. NONE of the things Jerry Falwell dreamed of in 1980 (or that liberals feared) has come to pass.

42

I’m interested in knowing why Joe Lieberman hasn’t been fucked over. It seems to me the guy is nothing but an anchor on Obama’s agenda. He does nothing, absolutely nothing except get in the fucking way. Can anyone explain why he hasn’t just been booted out of the party? I mean, does he ever side with mainstream Democrats on anything important? I’m really keen to know. If I was Obama I’d take great pleasure in fucking that old coot over whenever humanly possible on absolutely everything. I’d create a secret department just for the purpose. Why not brutally punish the obstructionist, obstreperous old bastard and send a message that’ll get other Dems in line? It’s what Bush would’ve done, and say what you like about Bush but he knew how to get his way.

43

I don’t remember a firestorm of opposition among liberals to sending Stingers to the Mujadeen. I was certainly all for it.

Fainting fits? Saying that wasn’t what did the trick, you know.

You do remember Carter launching a military operation to rescue the hostages, right? And then in all his liberal wimpiness he was able to get them released unharmed.

44

The point is that Carter didn’t do it about the Soviet invasion (except cancel the fucking Olympics), and Reagan did. Carter was a Democrat and an ineffectual weenie. Reagan was a Republican, and won the Cold War.

Somewhat the same with the Viet Nam war. Congress promised, as one of the conditions to end the war, to supply military aid to the South Vietnamese. They broke that promise. Subsequently, the boat people and Pol Pot.

Which operation he botched, badly enough that not only did it fail, it killed four of our personnel. Contrast that to, say, the invasion of Grenada.

Likewise the first Gulf War, which was launched amid much hand-wringing from fools like Kerry and other idiots all wailing that we were sending our troops into death. Instead, largely due to the modernization of the military under Reagan, it was a turkey shoot. And those Senators who voted against the liberation of Kuwait would up looking like weaklings.

He was? I was under the impression that the Iranians waited until after the silly bitch was out of office until they released the hostages.

My impression is correct, as a matter of fact. Because the Iranians believed, perfectly correctly, that they could get away with any amount of stalling and thumbing their noses at Carter, who is and was a weakling. Reagan, however, was not.

And of course, once the hostages *were * free, we got a barrage of sniveling lies about collusion between VP Bush and the Iranians.

One of the most unfortunate things about the Democratic party was the swing away from people like Scoop Jackson and towards people like George McGovern. FDR won WWII, and Truman the Korean War. But then Kennedy bungled the Bay of Pigs and Johnson the Viet Nam war, and then the Democrats became almost ineffectual because they were afraid to make another mistake. For heaven’s sake, the Dems ran Kerry, a war hero, and it didn’t fly because he had been constrained by his handlers to vote against the liberation of Kuwait.

Democrats with national security are like Republicans with anti-racism. They had an honorable tradition at the beginning - and then they blew it.

Regards,
Shodan

45

I think the perception - fair or not - comes from a few things. Carter is one of those. Anti-war sentiment being common. A tendency - in more recent times - to try for compromise (instead of trying to ‘win’) and a lack of a united front.

This isn’t all helped by the perception that ‘liberals’ want to save people from themselves via what some people view as needless over-regulation in a variety of areas.

46

Thank you for the counterpoint.

However with abortion the recent health care bill may ban funding for it, despite a supermajority of democrats. It seems the GOP has more party discipline. When the GOP controlled the house of representatives, they would not let bills out of committee unless they knew they would get 218 GOP votes. The democrats do not do that and lack that kind of party discipline.

And when Arlen Specter acted up around 2004/2005, the GOP threatened to take his chairmanship away to control him. Nobody has threatened to take the chairmanships of Lieberman, Baucus or Conrad away.

The GOP used budget reconciliation to pass the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. The dems refuse to use reconciliation to pass the employee free choice act (pro-union legislation) or health reform. The democratic congress could get meaningful health reform (with a strong public option) and strong pro-union legislation passed with 50 votes plus Joe Biden as a tie breaker using reconciliation.

When the GOP controlled the senate the filibuster was rarely used, maybe 50x a session. Now that the dems are in control it is used 150+ a session.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/31/republican-filibusters-skyrocket/
The GOP isn’t perfect at getting what it wants (they failed to get SS privatized in 2005), but they play hardball. The threaten to take away chairmanships, they use party discipline and they use procedural tactics (reconciliation, filibusters, etc) to get legislation passed or blocked. The democratic party does not.

The GOP threatened to destroy the filibuster option (in certain circumstances) in 2005 because the dems wanted to block some judges. The democrats can barely get up party discipline to overcome it. When faced with a lack of 60 seats the GOP uses budget reconciliation and intimidation. When faced with 60 seats (not even lacking 60 seats) the dems can barely muster party unity and refuse to use reconciliation.

So they are wimps. One party has the discipline and balls to threaten to destroy the filibuster. The other party lacks the discipline to even overcome it, let alone destroy it.

47

I want to get back to this point:

Our strategy was never to “win” the Cold War by “defeating” the Soviets. The purpose of the Reagan-era arms build-up (which liberals did complain about) was: a) deter the Soviets from attacking, and b) to increase our chance of winning if war did break out. That it would compel the Soviets to reciprocate in the arms race to a degree that would push them near bankruptcy and lead to reforms that would spin out of control was not the strategy that was being debated.

Meanwhile, the liberal impulse of not going to war prevailed throughout. And sure we “accommodated” them to a large extent, depending on how fine a point you put on it. Stingers to Afghanistan played more of a key role than anyone intended, but it wasn’t exactly a full-scale military confrontation. Oh, and remember that liberal elite named Kennedy?

But what I’m really getting at is that also included in the recipe of the end the Cold War were the liberal protest movements and youth culture of the West whose influence gradually sank in in the East.

48

I can’t tell you for sure about whether Carter was an effeminate weenie and Ronnie was an iron-ass, but I’m pretty sure which one wore more makeup.

49

And my point is that there wasn’t much Carter could have done in the time he had left, and that Democrats in general were not strongly opposed to arming the Afghan resistance.

Does that mean that Carter lost the Cold War, then?

We bloody well should have accepted the 1954 Geneva Accords!

You argument has gone off the rails. As CinC, Carter acted; he didn’t cause the failure. Paradoxically, if the mission had reached Teheran, some or all of the hostages might have ben killed. The negotiations that your own link shows took place under Carter were successful, so the only deaths were the result of the manly action.

You don’t do yourself proud by making it sound like Reagan got the hostages released.

So what if we got a couple of noses thumbed at us? It sure beats having gone to war with the USSR and/or Iran. WWIII didn’t happen because the nicety-nice prevailed.

Fools! Idiots! Wailing! That’s 3 Ann Coulter books!

The first Gulf War was pretty popular, IIRC. You don’t think any liberals supported it?

What got blown again? What is this catastrophic defeat that can be laid at the feet of those who failed to act militarily aggressively enough? 9/11?

But your narrative is missing its last chapter. Did Bush’s “Axis of Evil” crack win any cold wars? Those who supported the invasion of Iraq wound up looking like war mongers. And what got blown was the war in Afghanistan, which a lot of liberals supported.

50

I believe Lieberman was booted from the Democratic Party back in 2006. He’s an independent who continues to sit with the Democrats though.

As for Bush booting Republicans out of the party, I don’t know of any who were forced out. Jim Jeffords switched parties, but he wasn’t forced out anymore than the dozen or so Democrats that switched parties when Bill Clinton was president.

51

Here’s a list of militarily aggressive moves by the US that ended badly:
Bay of Pigs
Vietnam
Iran hostage rescue
Marines in Lebanon
Somalia
Iraq

It’s also worth mentioning that Bill Clinton used military force on a number of occasions with considerable success and very low casualties (while Republicans suddenly and temporarily rediscovered their isolationist roots), and, if belatedly, planned to go after Al Quaeda.

So on the one hand, Democrats are capable of getting tough militarily, on the other hand there’s something to be said for showing restraint.

52

Well, I think at the time that Operation Eagle Claw failed, Ross Perot hiring a rescue squad to extradite his employees from Iran in 1978 was probably still fresh in people’s minds.

53

And “invasion of Grenada”? Isn’t “invasion” rather grand a word for that? If Vin Deisel beats the living snot out of Steven Hawking, is that a “fight”?

54

Didn’t A. Whitney Brown at the time say it was nothing more than a US Marine knocking over a fruit-stand?