Y’all are crazy. Politics is the best legal drug there is. Beats sports hands down. Hunter Thompson knew this, which is why he titled one of his books on politics “Better Than Sex.” The only reason most of you are so bitter is that your guy lost somewhere along the line, or you refuse to do a damn thing to actively change the political actions of your representatives. Get off your ass and do a little politicing yourself sometime, instead of expecting someone else to do it for you. Get acive and get involved. All politics are local. You have only yourselves to blame.
I wouldn’t be so cynical about politics, either, if I ever thought it would change.
Politics doesn’t “get better” as time goes by. It doesn’t learn from its mistakes. It doesn’t filter out what’s bad and keep what’s good. It doesn’t put into place and enforce rules that might make a difference, or if it does, they just find ways to circumvent that.
I hold out no hope whatsoever that by the time I’m dead, I’ll be looking at a sensible system filled with people behaving like reasonable people. I don’t care if someone stole an election. I don’t care if voting machines are rigged. I don’t care if someone broke campaign financing laws. It’s never going to be cleaned up.
You know what I care about? How well my bowling team is going to do this wednesday against the new team with the high handicaps. Whether I should lay the 14.5 with Patriots. These are things that affect me.
And, I know that a lot of people have the attitude “well of course things won’t change if you don’t participate.” I call those people suckers. They’ve existed as long as the politicians, and they haven’t made a difference yet.
On a positive note, I think that we do it in America about as well as I could expect anyone, anywhere to do it.
Following politics on the level that I follow sports is the only way I could be interested in it.
That couldn’t be more wrong as it pertains to me.
Sorry. I’ve got bowling league on Wednesday, and Idol starts tonight.
I’m not sure why you decided to post this as a response to me. I agree that there are many factors that force both parties to the political center. But is a long and ignorant leap from that to the conclusion that both parties are the same.
Well, people are morons if they think their guy (ie, the president) is going to be able to deliver on his campaign promises. Congress passes the laws in this country, and if the president can convince Congress to do something, then it’ll get done. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. And it works on the opposite side, too. People who complain they won’t for Obama (for example) because of his stance on gun control are just ignorant of what the president can actually do about gun control-- virtually nothing.
So, I look at their policy proposals, but I also look at how they make their decisions and whether they take principled stands or just sway with the political winds. I’ve said this in other threads, but the reason I support Obama right now is not because I agree with all or even most of his policy proposals. I support him because I like, and feel that I can trust, his decision making process. But I wouldn’t be at all upset at a Clinton presidency or a McCain presidency, either (for pretty much the same reason).
I don’t think anyone is saying that. The median voter model is just a model. It works when preferences are single-peaked and only in single dimensional issue space. It also predicts that no one votes at all, and that an election between two identical candidates is settled by a coin toss.
There are models out there with greater sophistication, believe me. But the median voter model is to political science like, I don’t know, the Cobb-Douglas production function is to economics. It’s a workhorse that drives many more interesting insights.
I hate when that happens.
Sorry, wrong thread.
I person I was addressing, Oregon Sunshine, has said that four or five times in the last two weeks.
No doubt there are areas where the parties look very similar. I think trade is such an area–despite what some Democrats say about fair trade, they generally won’t vote for it. It’s also true the foreign policy differences can be somewhat minor (though with obviously huge exceptions, like Iraq). But those issues are dwarfed by the issues on which there are genuine differences. Off the top of my head: Abortion; Gay Rights; Sex Education; Torture; Gun Control; Education; Environmental policy; Health Care; Stem Cell Research; Affirmative Action; Tax policy; Minimum Wage; Support for UN; Civil liberties; Iraq withdrawal; Supreme Court appointees…need I go on?
This isn’t just rhetoric. In every single one of these areas there’s been a party-line vote in recent history.
From a wide perspective, the two parties are somewhat close together. But they are still distinctly different, and which one wins does affect things you care about.
You and over 60% of the American public, for most of Clinton’s two terms. Sorry you were in the minority, Zambini57.
And that is especially so in the areas of judicial appointments and administrative appointments. If you don’t think it matters which party is running the EPA, for example, you’re nuts.
This argument might have had some validity in the 90’s. Now it’s just naive.
marshmallow
Granted, I know this has always been a deeply religious country but it seems as if the more devout (or even fanatical) people are the ones doing the voting. Until the last decade or so, do you ever remember hot political topics being school prayer, the 10 Commandments, creationism, and intelligent design? (Someone just posted a thread about Huckabee wanting to pass a “God amendment”).
My own guess for this situation is that the more educated, knowledgeable, liberal people have become dis-satisfied with the whole process and just gave up and stopped voting. However, the more conservative types, the better dead then red crowd, the Bible thumpers and so on value their voting rights as sacred and you can be damned sure they are going to vote. Who knows if this keeps up the next decade’s hot political topics might include teaching virgin birth in the science classroom.
Does that make them – or me – a “deluded ass?”
Your guess would be wrong. In the 2004 Presidential election 64% of citizens voted. But if you look at the breakdown by educational level, the voting rates were under 40% for people without high school diplomas. The voting rate for people with graduate degrees was over 80%. Cite.
Less educated people vote less. And people who believe that there no difference between candidates are either naive or ill-informed.
Anyone who thinks a Gore presidency would have been the same as a Bush presidency is insane.
Yes Gore would have disappointed. All presidents do. It’s impossible for them not to dissapoint, what with trying to please >300,000,000 clients at the same time. But surely you can see the difference between a disappointment and a disaster.
Sure. The former is The Matrix Reloaded; the latter The Matrix Revolutions.
Hey isn’t “who pissed in your cornflakes” supposed to be a cute alternative to some other expression. I can’t for the life of me think of it. I hate the expression by the way. I should go add that to the thread about expressions that grate our nerves.
I’m a non-voter. I really hate when elections come around. People won’t stop quacking about it at parties and it gets tense, the Daily Show goes from funny to mean-spirited and condescending, the celebrities all join in on the Vote or Die campaign. It’s a media frenzy and not in the awesome JonBenet Ramsey kind of way.
It’s just so boring. They all sound like exactly the same loser in a suit to me. I’m even more bored by people who fly off the handle about the whole thing.
Hey Zambini, did I tell you about the time I saw Allen Thicke from the Growing Pains ride a Zambini?
If that’s the “cute” version, I’m guessing it’s “who the fuck took a shit in your mouth, asshole?”
I would have thought that you would need to have followed politics in order to know that following it and voting are moronic. So… yeah.
Your guess is wrong, as Pochacco pointed out. Incidentally, I would consider someone who hasn’t read the Bible — one of the most influential books in the history of Western culture — to be uneducated, not to mention someone who hyphenates “dissatisfied”.
Two observations which illustrate the difference between “education” and “influence.” I would consider the Bible to be inversely associated with education.