Sometimes you just need to vote for somebody smarter than you. Someone who understands the issues. Someone who can articulate his beliefs, which are much like those you hold except he can put them into words. You know, someone who isn’t a fucking idiot.
Facts are meaningless in this type of discussion.
Seriously.
What facts could anyone present to convince you to vote for McCain? Or to convince me to vote for Obama?
That’s. Because. You. Are. Wrong. Not wrong merely in a political manner, but because you have chosen the wrong path and revel in it. Were I more religious I could point out how far your kind of conservative has strayed from the path of righteousness, with an acceptance, nay, WHOLE-HEARTED LOVE of lies and deceit. Modern conservatives are actually evil, and we can see that in their support of this evil war. I wish you had the morality of a Barry Goldwater, but you are more like a skinhead, wrapping your beliefs in a tissue of lies and calling it “good.” It is not good. It is evil. You lost my respect years ago. You are filth in my eyes.
That’s over the top. Only a few of them (mostly the politicians, the media abettors and the henchmen like Rove) are actually knowingly evil. The vast majority of the electorate isn’t evil, just stupid and easily manipulated.
Bill Maher tonight made avery good point about the way many conservatives who know better are cynically lying about how great they think Sarah Palin is because they know that most voters are stupid and they know she can get over on them [cough: Peggy Noonan].
So we have a bunch of very bright, extremely politically informed righties now pretending that they didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was either, and so it’s no big deal that Palin didn’t know (John Fund was on Maher’s show trying to do this and Maher called bullshit on him and told him he flat out didn’t believe that Fund didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was). They’re saying this because they know that most of their base is stupid, and they don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is either and they have no idea that it showed an alarming amount of ignorance that Palin didn’t know it.
Anyway, the point is, most are more naive and ignorant than maliciously evil.
Right, because if you hadn’t heard of her then nobody had.
For fuck’s sake, Palin has been well-known and buzzed about by Republicans for ages.
There are actually numerous instances of people changing their minds on SDMB. For me the biggest issue was the war. I’ve never been pro-Bush but I was very pro-invasion-of-Iraq in the beginning, and it was largely SDMB arguments that began to make me reconsider my position. There are other Dopers who most certainly do not blow with every wind who’ve done likewise. You speak only for yourself when you say you’re impervious to argument or reason.
(taken aback) Moi? Over the top? Compared with YOU? 
C’mon, you and me know that the “stupid and easily manipulated” only abet the evil ones. The time has come to pull the smarter ones to our side, but do you really think Starving Artist and his ilk can be drawn? They are like my cow-orkers, too fucking stupid and easily manipulated to come over. The big hump of the bell curve are our targets, and the sooner we start ignoring the terminally stupid the better off we are.
We need to remind the middle they are not the retards the GOP thinks they are, but can vote for the party that best serves their interests, the party committed to improving their lives and bringing their kids home. The GOP has spent too much telling them they will, one day, be John McCain rich, so they should vote for the party that supports the rich guys. It ain’t gonna happen; we in the middle class are working too hard treading water to have much hope of that. Democrats need to tell them they can be Pretty Well Off like they are and can be, not letting their savings, investments (ie: homes), and PAY CHECKS diminish to support the top 1/10th of 1%. AND NOT by sending their kids off to die or be horribly wounded in a stupid, immoral war.
I would be very surprised if one percent of the people who post around here would change their minds on the basis of any particular fact and vote for a president whose party was in complete opposition to everything they’ve always felt was right.
People like dropzone love to think that just because the Republican party is no longer the party of Goldwater (I could propose the Democratic party is no longer the party of Kennedy, for that matter), all good Republicans should abandon it and vote for the party whose ideology represents policies and a type of government that we’ve strongly opposed for decades.
That is just idiotic.
Why would I, because my party may be fifty percent what it used to be and what I might want in a perfect world, turn around and vote for a party that I already know is ninety-five percent what I don’t want?
Again, that’s just stupid, and that’s what dropzone and his ilk think they can get us to do by calling us stupid and EEEVIL.
Well, it ain’t gonna work, pal! (Not you, Sampiro.)
In terms of experince it’s Biden (most) then McCain, then Obama, then Palin. Biden and McCain have whaaaaaay more experince that Obama and Palin.
No, its because what you stand for is EEEVIL. I simply was raised better than you. You remain a turd on the political landscape. You simply have the choice of remaining a turd or choosing NOT to be one, a choice I do not expect you to make. I have grown tired of conservatives claiming the moral high ground. Claiming it does not make it so, and you remain immoral. Or, in the TV-based-idiom you prefer, BZZZT! You are wrong and evil and nothing you can do can change that. Sorry, but that’s how the Morality card you claim plays.
Obviously not.
Confirmation bias is a powerful thing, as is staying in an echo chamber. You guys ignore the evidence of stupidity or bad judgment on your side, amplify every tiny bit of evidence of stupidity on the other side, and over time you reinforce your own worldview so strongly that you simply can’t believe that anyone can be stupid enough to believe anything else other than your own orthodoxy.
And of course, many conservatives do the same thing.
Case in point, the current whining about Palin. Oh, she doesn’t know the Bush doctrine! Obviously she’s just a complete empty head with lipstick on it! How can anyone not see that?
Of course, there are those of us who look at her and go, "hmm… She upended a corrupt party machine in Alaska. She took down Frank Murkowski and his minions. And without family connections, without being a trust fund baby. Then she takes his job, and becomes the most popular governor in the United States. She gets a pipeline deal done that was stalled for years, and she renegotiates tax rates with oil companies that favors the people of Alaska. There’s got to be something there. So you look for it, and you find that she’s well liked by Democrats and Republicans. She gets kudos from both sides. The people generally love her.
You guys look at a woman who gets tripped up on a question and decide she’s an airhead. I think, there’s a woman who comes out of Alaska and gets a whole two weeks to completely absorb McCain’s campaign policy, get up to speed on foreign policy and God knows how much other stuff she needed so learn, while campaigning 12 hours a day with McCain and commuting to Alaska twice, and while her family is being shredded in the press. Then she has to spend two complete days with Charlie Gibson shadowing her and interviewing her repeatedly, and she can’t make a single major gaffe or she’s sunk.
Given all that, I think her performance was pretty good. Although she looked shaky a couple of times, in the end all of her answers were correct. And you haven’t even heard her at her best yet - wait 'till she schools Biden on energy policy.
Speaking of Biden, who you guys keep repeating is a foreign policy heavyweight - this is a guy who has had 30 years to figure out how the world works, and still says and does amazingly stupid things. And not just under the kind of pressure Palin is under.
Consider this, after 9/11, from a profile in The New Republic:
Got that? America gets attacked, and Biden’s plan is to show the Arab world that it’s not bent on its destruction. How to do that? By sending a cheque to Iran. Iran is not Arab. Arabs don’t like Iranians, generally. And it was such a stupid idea anyway that his own staffers were embarassed for him.
Then there’s his plan to split Iraq into three countries along ethnic boundaries. That’s not old news - he was proposing that last year. Do you have any idea what a disaster that would have been? The Shiites would have moved into Iran’s axis. The Sunnis likely would have allied with Syria, and the Kurds would have been left hanging, and under threat from Turkey. The area would have been permanently unstable. And since the Kurds have substantial oil, the partition wouldn’t have been accepted and there likely would have been a war. Oh, and only 5% of Iraqis supported Biden’s plan. They hate him in Iraq for pushing this idea.
Here’s one of your Democrat foreign policy people on Biden:
That’s your foreign-policy wunderkind. The guy who you claim would be perfectly capable of being President. This is a guy who’s ego has caused in to run for President several times, but crashed and burned every time. And who is busy putting his foot in his mouth so many times in this campaign it’s hard to keep track. But hey, did you see that Palin didn’t know exactly what the Bush Doctrine was? How can anyone other than a complete moron support her?
I would count his campaign. After all, he put it together from scratch. It grew to have a budget of twenty times the budget of Palin’s mayoralty. It is fiscally sound, not owing more than it has. It is extremely well organized and well run.
So, if experience means more than just being a bobble head occupying space in an office called “governor”, then Obama’s experience far outshine’s Palin’s. As Palin herself might put it, Obama has experience in actually leading people.
I don’t know, dude. I keep getting letters from the DNC asking for money. Got a letter from Senator Obama hisself, saying all the great things he’s gonna do. Two so far this week.
Funny thing, even though the return envelope was postage paid they had a little note that it would help the campaign if you put your own stamp on it.
HUH! The only people I’ve ever seen do that are religious or charitable organizations because they are non profit.
Sounds to me like the DNC is not managing their money too well.
Hey, but what do I know I’m only a voter.
Also I don’t think Senator Obama manages his own campaign he does have a campaign manager, I believe.
:smack:
Soliciting donations (also called “fund raising”) is the way campaigns normally raise money. They can also borrow money (including from themselves, if they’re wealthy enough, like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney), but then their accounting ledger takes a hit in the expense section — as a debt. As Republicans understood in days of old, the idea, fiscal-wise, is to have more revenues than expenses or an equal amount of each.
When you made the point that Obama’s campaign conducts fund raising, I wasn’t sure whether you missed the point altogether, or were making some other new and unrelated point but quoted me anyway, or were just some ignorant fuck who wouldn’t know a balance sheet from an income statement but felt compelled to comment anyway.
Yes, fuckwit, and the President gets to appoint a chief of staff, and other sundry employees. No matter how much help he gets, though, the buck still stops with him, for good and ill. He doesn’t get to go “My dumbass CoS did that, 'tweren’t me.”
When Senator Obama’s staffers do something acting for him that you think is dumb, like asking you for money and signing “Barack Obama” to the letter (or are you suggesting that he actually signed the letter you got, and licked the envelope “hisself”?) you seem to have no problem crediting him with the action, do you?
The main difference between Palin’s executive experience and Obama’s, as friend **Liberal **points out, is his having waged a successful campaign for the nomination, against a well-funded front-runner. Having done that, Obama’s put his executive bona fides before the voters, and said in effect, “I created this effective organization–no squabbling, no in-fighting, no fuck-ups, and I did it in public and I did it this year. If you think that’s executive experience, you can vote for me.”
Can someone who doesn’t have a vote try and give a sensible possible answer from the wrong side of the Atlantic?
You correctly note that those defending her know very little about her. But it’s very apparent that those trying to smear her know even less. And the very act of smearing gets peoples’ goats. And smearing was the very first thing the Democrats tried. Not derision a la Quayle. And it’s been hugely counter-productive. It’s been a huge blunder for the Democrats. And you’re still trying here with ‘when evidence of her ineptitude continues to mount’: not from over here it doesn’t. The more you shit on her, the more she comes up smelling of roses. It’s also a blunder that shows Obama’s lack of leadership: Democrats should be concentrating on McCain, and he should have stomped on it immediately and directed efforts at his true opponent.
And, BTW, we still know very little about her.
The Democrats will do a lot better when they stop trying to smear her. Get her on the issues: abortion / choice, healthcare, defence, and so on.
Consentrating on Palin detracts from McCain. Yesterday on “The View”, he was asked what changes he intended to make and he seemed to skirt around the question, he never did give any change except he was going to go after the “old boy” network (of which he is really a part , being he was in Washington as long as he was). When the war in Iraq became unpopular with 80% of the american people then he decided that we needed more troops,even though one of our Generals had stated that we needed more troops early in the war.
The flowers that were thrown at our troops were really road side bombs. Our pro-life president wasn’t worried about unborn or born people, nor did he take his fathers advice, but said he had asked a higher father,well I guess the higher father was not heard right.
When the English left Iraq years ago it split into 3 divisions, If true freedom is not in the Iraqi constitution the Sunnies will run the country and the Shias and Kurds will be under their thumb. If we leave next week or 5 years from now the Sunnies will be the majority and will use the word Democracy as an excuse to over run the other Iraqui’s who do not follow their religious beliefs.Iran could back the Sunnies because Iran has a majority of Sunnies.
Monavis
That, sir, is a load of turds.
Unless you live in Wasilla, Alaska.
I just did a search on this very board – a very political board with some relatively knowledgeable conservative/Republican contributors – and the first mention of this well-known, buzzed about pol was four days ago.
If you want to argue about her experience and her stance on issues and all of that, fine, keep yanking shit out of you ass. But bullshit, she was well known.
I remember recall reading somewhere around here just the other day that her name had come up a year-and-a-half ago among the Republican PTB as a potential VP candidate.
I also remember someone mentioning her some months back and after looking her up online being surprised at how attractive she was.
If I can remember more of the posts I’ll do a search later to see if I can find them.