Yes, no kidding.
It’s hilarious to me that someone can say that Hoffman is “libertarian” with a straight face.
I did not anticipate Dierdre Scozzafava quitting the race this close to the end. This is definitely a boost for Hoffman. Generally speaking, I would not bet against Nate Silver in an election but I think the undecideds and the moderate Republicans are going to give Owens a hair of an advantage. This will be a tight finish that turnout, or the lack of it, will decide.
Getting back to the OP, however, I don’t think that this election by itself starts the wave that becomes a national Conservative party…but there will be ripples left in the water. If there are any more special elections between now and the mid-terms in 2010, I’d expect the Club for Growth, Minutemen PAC, Palin, etc. to jump in with both feet, further disturbing the waters. It was my impression that party discipline was a fundamental tenet of the GOP. If that starts to breakdown now, they will be in the minority for some time to come.
My dear splunky: one doesn’t have anything to do with the other. At least IME, you have had a tendency, over the past couple of years at least, of simply ceasing to post in threads where I or others had come up with a heavy dose of evidence or counterarguments on the other side.
You know what I once did when I realized I couldn’t adequately respond to the rebuttals in the number of threads I was engaged in?
I started posting in fewer threads, and for exactly that reason: so I wouldn’t have to just disappear when holding up my side of the argument took a lot of work.
You can do whatever you want, but just sayin’.
Nice goalpost-moving. Here’s your OP, in its entirety:
IOW, this wasn’t about whether Hoffman could win, but whether his success (to whatever degree) was evidence that a third party could form to the right of the GOP.
It’s not. I’ve explained why, as have others. Got rebuttal?
Now, given there is not time to reprint the ballots, do you really think that people will vote Conservative? Do you think they will do so in enough numbers to give Hoffman the win? He’s basically lost the entire senior vote by not being Republican, I’d say.
I’m not going to say the Dem’s going to win it, but I think there’s about a 60% chance it might just go that way, as the Republicans split their votes.
It is not good for democracy for either part to abandon, much less repudiate, the center, as the Jacobin faction now controlling the once-Grand Old Party is doing. Having succeeded in driving off the remaining nonpurists, they are dooming themselves to irrelevance, and the Democrats to internal factionalism.
Maybe it’s time to consider reasons for that other than “This board is just biased against conservatives”, hmm?:dubious:
BTW, welcome back, Milossarian. 
Local paper reports Scozzafava may be encouraging split:
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20091101/OPINION01/311019918/-1/OPINION
If Reagan’s bargain is not yet ruptured, there’s certainly a swarm of quakes happening along its line.
True, but if the neocons leave the GOP, the moderates have a chance to rebuild the party into something competitive in a reasonably brief span of time. If the moderates leave the GOP, the party will be virtually destroyed in terms of being able to win any seats, anywhere.
This is probably confirmation bias on your part. For my part, there are a lot of threads in which I post a long, researched post, and kill the thread. The fact is, every debate has to end at some point. If you’re of the belief that I’m constantly running away, then every thread where someone other than me has the last word is going to get noticed by you.
And as you well know, with some people there’s a point at which you have to say, “Okay, I’m done. This is no longer benefiting anyone. It’s become nothing more than a waste of time.” Of course, if your own biases cause you to see the last person’s post as being a great riposte, then the lack of response by me is seen as ‘running away’. Especially if you really want to believe that it’s my normal modus operandi.
An excellent point, and one which I wholeheartedly agree with and will probably completely ignore.
You know, at this point calling everyone on the right a ‘neocon’ just displays your ignorance. A neocon is a very special kind of conservative, and in general the neocons are nowhere near the tea party movement. In fact, they generally don’t like it. They don’t like Sarah Palin, either. Neocons are generally well educated, somewhat elitist, internationalist Republicans. Many of them are ex-Democrats.
New York, Moderates and the GOP
Boehner just isn’t convincing here, but then I’m a Democrat. At this point I’d almost like to see Hoffman win.
You haven’t ‘explained’ anything. You’ve given an opinion as to why a 3rd party is or isn’t a good thing.
For what it’s worth, after doing more reading of what the movers and shakers behind this are doing, I don’t think they want to create a 3rd party. What they want to do is send a message to the Republican party that they won’t accept a Republican candidate just because he or she is Republican - they’ll simply put their enegy behind the candidate closest to their values. Their hope is not to fracture the Republican party, but to pull it in their direction.
Maybe there are, but damned if it ever seems to be in the ones I’m in. Rather, it seems to not infrequently be my “long, researched post[s]” that seem to make you disappear.
Can’t see why that would be. Like football games generally ending with either one QB taking a knee a few times, or the other QB trying to make something happen but failing, few football games end with a 50-yard TD play. Same thing in threads - they generally kinda trickle to an end, rather than come to an abrupt end after a major rebuttal that seems to cry out for some sort of reply.
Yeah, I notice those endings.
Well, if you regularly think that’s the case after strong rebuttal to your argument, then you’re hanging around the wrong forum.
Maybe you can’t tell the difference between good arguments and bad, but that’s been an integral part of my professional life, and my academic life before that.
Then you shouldn’t gripe when people notice that you’re stretched too thin to respond to serious counterarguments.
Well, no wonder you can’t tell good arguments from bad. You just ignore anything you can’t trash.
Look, you can talk until you[re blue in the face about what you think Tea Partiers are really like, but someone is getting the people who formally represent the GOP - the Congresscritters including, as I’ve been pointing out, the GOP Congressional leadership, to say ridiculously crazy things that, oddly enough, coincide with the garbage the Tea Partiers are spouting.
If the Tea Partiers were just a bunch of guys who believe in limited government, the GOP leadership wouldn’t be talking about death panels, and would be con-sponsoring normally everyday bills honoring Hispanic broadcast media.
I’ll make you a deal. If you ever post a rebuttal that you think deserves a response, and you don’t get one from me, just PM me and politely ask me to respond. I guarantee you that I will.
Part of the problem is that I’m kind of a creature of habit in that I don’t use features like user CP to look at subscribed threads. I just drop in to the board and respond to things that I remember talking about. I used to occasionally do a vanity search for my name to see if I’m missing a question directed at me or a thread I was involved in, but this board’s search is broken. Maybe it’s because I have a 3-letter word in my name or something, but when I search for my own posts now, the newest ones that show up for me are from 2003. So I’ve given up on that. But in any event, if you think I should be responding to something, let me know.
Please. I do no such thing. But you know what? I’ve completely given up on trying to have real, substantive arguments about politics and economics on this board, because every single thread breaks down into a bunch of name calling, usually started by one of a handful of unreasonable lefties on this board who simply can’t resist dropping into a thread and throwing some snark about bush, or the dreaded ‘tighty righties’, or the horrid neo-cons, or whatever.
You can post a long message trying to argue for limited government on economic or philosophical grounds, and the next post will be, “Yeah? Well you sure didn’t care when George Bush did it!” Followed by half a dozen posts mocking Republicans, Bush, neo-cons, the religious right, Rush Limbaugh, yada yada. For every person who tried to seriously discuss the issue I’m trying to discuss, there are half a dozen like gonzomax, ElvisL1ves, or Der Trihs who dive-bomb the thread with boilerplate attacks or anti-capitalism rants.
This is one reason why sometimes I just give up on a thread. You guys may think you’re scoring big points, but in fact I’m just sitting here thinking, “well, I tried to be serious, but there’s just no point.”
Examples?
The ‘death panels’ thing is shorthand for pointing out that if you aren’t using prices and the market to ration health care, something else will have to ration it. That invariably leads to governments decided who will or won’t be treated, and by how much.
This isn’t paranoid fantasy. Britain does this today. Ever heard of a ‘QALY’? That would be a ‘Quality adjusted years of life’ measurement, used to determine whether someone should be given certain medical treatments.
You can read about it here.
Far from being a fantasy, I don’t see how a government-run health care system can avoid making judgments like this without blowing the health-care budget sky-high. The fact is, there is more demand for health care than there are resources, and this will be the case for a very long time. Given that there is scarcity, if you don’t use prices to control demand, you will have to have government boards making arbitrary decisions. Or do you have another solution?
The neocons also differ from other RW factions in that they have no mass base to speak of. Their base is in academia, RW media, PACs and think-tanks.
Well, I keep waiting for rebuttal.
Forgive me if I call B.S. on your calling B.S.
I remember debating Lemur866 with some frequency over the past decade. He damned sure used to be on the conservative side of things, and as such, there’s no reason to think that he wasn’t a Republican. You may dislike his explanation of his political evolution, but his evolution is a fact, and there’s no particular reason why he should be making up his reasons for his change of attitude.
Maybe if you can point out which members of Congress or media figures of a liberal bent with a major following were espousing Oswald’s, Fromme’s, or Moore’s agendas, it would be unfair.
At a very minimum, Congressional Republicans backed Bush all the way - doubling down, if anything, after the 2006 midterms. Ditto major conservative opinion leaders outside of Congress (Rush, Dobson, etc.). They broke with him on a few things where they felt he was insufficiently conservative (Harriet Miers, port security, Hispanic immigration), but that’s about it.
How about crazy as in Sean Hannity claiming that people - individuals - would be unable to opt out of the public option?
This on top of stories about Obama wanting to put Granny on an ice floe, and all the other nutso stuff.
I welcome a debate over the size of government, though a party that supported Bush for eight years would be somewhat confused about its stance on that. But the GOP argument on most things these days (UHC, climate change, Sotomayor, etc.) consists of making shit up and scaring people with it.
It can’t go in their direction and win. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you can be sure the party leaders have. Whether the hard-right conservatives bolt from the GOP or drive the moderates out of it, the result will be the marginalization of both the GOP and the conservatives. Coalition-building has been the basis of conservative-movement success ever since Reagan. If they toss that overboard, they got nuttin’. They’ll be an extremely vocal presence everywhere but victorious nowhere.
That’s about what it looks like to me too.
I think there’s a pretty good chance they’ll fail, and we’ll see a major third party insurgency come 2012, but I’m not exactly unbiased in my outlook here, and inside info is hard to come by, so I could well be wrong.