John Cole did this back in 2005, thanks the Republican’s involvement in the Terry Schiavo fiasco. It was a lot more impressive then, since the Republicans were actually in power and the right wing blogosphere was, if not ascendant, then certainly a lot more credible than it is today.
Chris Buckley broke away from the National Review earlier this year (and is now on the Daily Beast instead).
There is a lot of this going on, as more and more people decide that they do not want to be associated with the fringe that has taken over the microphone.
Sorry, no. I see two parties, both of which are full of crooks and crazies of various ilks, and both of which act primarily out of either political self-interest, or else at the bidding of various moneyed interest groups. There’s no shortage of right-wing nutballs, but I see Cynthia McKinneys and Dennis Kucinich and other reality-deprived freaks on the left, not to mention blind partisan tools in the media and in office. Who has a proportionally-higher ratio of freaks and tools? I don’t give a damn. Both have plenty.
I identify and sympathize slightly more with the interest groups that own the Pubs than I do with the ones that own the Dems, and so I tend to vote that way when I have to pick between the two. When there’s a third party candidate I like, I vote that way. But when I’m holding my nose and picking a least-bad option, I’m gonna say so. I call it “voting my conscience.”
Frankly, when I see intelligent people insist that “ya gotta pick a side,” I feel depressed and ill.
Sorry, no. I see two parties:
One which is trying to do as good as it can. Sure, it’s got flaws, but dammit, it’s trying.
And the other which can apparently do no wrong, and when called on doing something wrong, points at the other party and says, “Look! LOOK! They did something similar, and you didn’t jump all over them! That makes you a total hypocrite! You’re not allowed to call my side on anything, because you’re not completely blameless! They’re just as bad as we are… and we didn’t do anything wrong, anyway! THEY did! They’re the reason everything bad happens!”
The problem is that the nutballs in the left are primarily on the fringe. They aren’t in power. On the right, though, you’ve got the craziness of Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, Malkin, etc.,… and they’ve got nationwide voices.
Is the Left perfect? Aw, *Hell *no. But to compare the two sides and say that they’re equivalent is just silly.
I vote my conscience, as well. I don’t WANT to have to vote straight Democratic, but the Republicans’ actions over the past decade or two have driven me off. If the Right-Wing were to try to adhere to the LGF proposal, I’d vote for them once again.
I agree with SenorBeef on this. This kind of false equivalence is simply a cop-out or an attempt to distract. If you think there’s no meaningful difference, you’re not looking.
But you have picked a side. I agree that you should vote your conscience, every single time. But there’s just no way that you conscientiously could evaluate the left and the right and conclude they are equivalent. You’ve got to vote your conscience, but you’ve got to be honest with yourself as well. My sense is you’ve picked a side, and you’ve picked it so fully and completely that it blinds you.
Need a link for that one, baby. :rolleyes:
I sympathize with this. Unless you’re a career politician, being loyal to a political party is really pretty fucking stupid, in my opinion. Political parties are in it for power first, the good of the country second, at best.
Don’t forget the “I’m so cool, I’m an independent. I think for myself. I’m not part of some party label. Sure, I vote for the same party 99% of the time, but that’s just a coincidence” people.
It’s particularly entertaining when they feel the need to weigh in on political threads when their only point is that they’re not one of “them” and they damned sure aren’t part of the “other them”. Gawd.
-Joe
Chris is one of those brave principles souls who not only broke away politically but publically denied the Faith…
once Dad was safely deceased.
Come on, really? You’re doing exactly the sort of thing I described.
Look at just the treatment of the last two presidents. Obama has made a legitimate effort to improve the country - and it may be flawed - but he’s a person of fine moral character and means well, so far as I can tell. He may be wrong, but he’s not evil.
And yet - I have never seen as much hatred for him as any political figure in my life time - and it’s not even close. A significant fraction of republicans openly wish him dead, feel fine making up lies against him, and believe everything negative about him from secret muslim to kenyan to antichrist.
Compare this to treatment of Bush - someone who certainly did not have pure intentions and did not mean well - who was not widely criticized until after he massively fucked up the country - and yet the level of hatred never got close to what Obama was experiencing before he was even elected.
The hatred and ignorance that the mainstream republicans have currently is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. They had their chance to rule and massively failed - and rather than have a time for introspection and consider the possibility that they’re wrong, they decided to instead attempt to reunify by turning the hatred and ignorance up to 11.
I’m not a democrat - I actually voted for Bush the first time around (woops!) because I tend to identify more with what I thought at the time were conservative ideals. I don’t want to define myself as broadly as picking one of two options politically, but I have never been a democrat and oppose a significant fraction of their political platform. So I don’t have a dog in this fight - I’m not a die hard liberal who sees flaws in the right when they can. I’m a libertarian-leaning guy who has been utterly disgusted by what has happened to the right over the last decade, and cannot in good conscience associate myself with it. That doesn’t mean my ideas or principles have changed - but rather the particular political party has dramatically gone away from any overlap they might’ve had with those principles.
If you honestly cannot see the dramatic change that has happened to the Republican party over the last decade - I don’t even know what direction to approach this discussion from. I mean - what would it take for you to actually acknowledge that there’s a meaningful difference between the parties? If the Republicans openly advocated eating babies and decriminalizing buttrape on tuesdays, and Glenn Beck suicide bombed an orphanage on national TV to the applause of his audience, would you be saying “well… uh… Kucinich! See! Both parties are the same!”?
OK, the religous right/anti-abortion crowd has been a major factor for the past two decades, since Ronnie the Great said “You can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.” So what has made it a tipping point that Johnson can’t stand anymore? And NOW he gets around to denouncing Rush?
Most importantly, what is he for? I’m all for critiquing the craziness on the Right, without denouncing the basic essence- the way liberals here can part ways with the excesses of Sheehan, Sharpton & Moore.
I read him from back when he was fairly wingnutty, because I was searching hard to find truly rational voices on the right to follow, to try to understand their point of view. The intellectual integrity that attracted me led to him rejecting his party, and his transformation was something to behold. This is one of his posts from back then:
I love the subtitle of his blog - “Consistently wrong since 2002.”
I find it hard to believe that Bill Buckley would have stood silent with the way the right has been trending. Hell, he didn’t stand silent when the George W. Bush administration was in power. He thought the Iraq War was an unrealistic disaster and that the movement he helped create had destroyed itself by association with George W. Bush.
The modern Right is not Bill Buckley’s Right. And I doubt he would hesitate to say just that were he alive to do so.
Um, sorry. I spent much of the Bush administration hanging around a state university system. I saw/heard plenty of Bush=Nazi rhetoric. I shared an office with someone who needed sustained argument to be persuaded that voting for any Republican was not an inherently racist/sexist act, and who forwarded “Bush is still a secret coke addict” emails. One prof had a “Darth Cheney” thing on his door, saying something about “The Evil Empire.” I must have read a few dozen student essays explaining how the Patriot Act was intended to ensure that Bush would stay in power forever or similar claptrap. I hiked with a guy who believed that Bush was deliberately starting wars so that he would personally profit, by raising Halliburton stock prices or something.
Are there more or less of them then there are the Obama-is-a-Muslim crowd? I couldn’t care less.
And historically, it’s all par for the course. Hell, if anything we’re more civil now than we were 100 years ago.
Nope. I don’t. Partisan politics was the domain of freaks and crooks and jackasses a hundred years ago, ten years ago, it is now … probably will be a hundred years from now. And partisans always get more freaky the more they’re out of power. The left was going ape in 2005-06, and the pubs are beserk now. They’ll calm down a bit after they pick up seats in 2010. When the Pubs next hold all the levers, it’ll be the dems’ turn again.
I’m not denying there are differences; indeed, on most issues they both take a reflexive “if they’re for it, we’re against it stance.” They are united mostly only on issues serve that enhance the power and control of government in general, and which enshrine the two-party system.
What I reject is the idea that either side is somehow more moral than the other. Bollocks to that. Both are a mix of good and bad, as is true of humanity in general. But it is in the nature of partisanship that once you put yourself on this or that team, you start seeing everything through that lens of one side good, the other bad, and you find yourself doing silly things like pretending you know what other people’s motives are so you can imply that they’re “evil.”
So I don’t do it. YMMV.
And that’s a key issue. You seem to be saying that so long as there are crazy people on any side of any debate, then all sides are equal. It doesn’t matter how crazy the people are, how far out their views are, what they advocate doing about their views, how well represented they are amongst the influential of their view, or how much power they have - so long as there are crazies on any side of an issue (and there always are), then all sides are equal to you.
This is essentially useless, and a cop out.
Maybe 100 years. What about 10 or 20?
Were they “going ape” in the same way that not being out of place shouting “kill him!” at a Palin rally is?
I agree with this. I especially find the whole partisan mentality to be counterproductive and stupid. But it’s easier to hitch your views to one side and just blindly follow than it is to give thought to each issue and come to your own reasoned conclusions.
I agree with your comments on partisanship, but not the rest. You are essentially saying that no matter what, all sides on any debate are equal so long as they have the same goal.
Hypothetically, what would it take for you to acknowledge a difference between the parties? What would the Republicans and/or Democrats have to view to change your view that they are equivelant? If you don’t have an answer to this, what use are your views? They are not amenable to facts, and are more dogma than reasoned belief.
I never said that you should refrain from saying that Bush sucks, or anything of the sort. What I said was that you should be trying to improve whichever party you think has a better chance of becoming something tolerable to you. This can mean, for instance, voting in primary elections, or writing to your elected officials to sway their views on particular issues, or holding rallies for candidates that you think are better than the others. If someone points out problems with the party you more closely identify with, and you agree, then you should try to fix those problems, instead of just grousing that the other side has problems, too.
As soon as the left has a network line-up consisting of crazies then I will begin to see the equivalency.
ANd the name little green footballs has never been disclosed as to its orgin. However, the site wasnot started as a right-wing blog, it was primarily a blog about desing and such. Then 9/11 happened and Charles Johnson started using it as a soapbox.
Yes, their 9/11 coverage was actually kind of boring:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/day/2001-09-11
The blog improved thereafter.