That’s been a problem since the inception of the constitution when the delegates against slavery decided to look the other way and get it ratified.
Probably they shouldn’t have folded and gotten the Civil war over with 70 years earlier.
Unfortunately, we Republicans who are in favor of fiscal responsibility and limited government have been frozen out of the process. The social conservatives want big government to impose their morals on the rest of us (goodbye, limited government). And the business interests want to extract any pork they can (goodbye, fiscal responsibility). The only hope I can see for the Republicans is to ditch those two factions and appeal to social liberals in the Democratic party. Not likely. 
While I’m keeping my Republican registration, so I can influence their primaries, I feel no reason to vote for a party that hasn’t been representing my interests. Of course, the Democrats haven’t been especially useful for me either, but it’s time to give them another chance.
And you know what their best interests are?
Democracy doesn’t work that way. The voters get to decide what their interests are themselves. If having guns and stopping abortion and gay marriage are more important to them than their own economic outlook, that’s their prerogative. You can say they’re stupid, but you don’t get to decide what their best interests are.
Interestingly, although the Republican Party is all about states’ rights when states try to outlaw abortion or keep assault rifles legal, they cry foul when states claim their right to legislate SSM or medical marijuana into legitimacy or to enforce the Constitutional prohibition against the establishment of a national religion (see Mt. Soledad). Similarly, us lefties celebrate states’ rights when California legalizes the things we like, and we tend to cry foul when Louisiana passes a discriminatory constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage and South Dakota all but bans abortion. So the “states’ rights” argument is, IMO, as cynical and unabashedly hypocritical as ever, if quite a bit less sinister and now bipartisan in its own warped way. It’s a smart move for the two sides to embrace states’ rights when convenient for them, because everyone likes to feel like they’re that much closer to the center of influence in their own lives. I don’t think any of us should pretend to be for “states’ rights”, though, when we only like the states to do the stuff we want. I, for one, will be the first to admit to the hypocrisy mentioned above on this issue.
Good Og, they’re getting it. Man, you don’t know how good it felt to read that post. I know you don’t get a lot of credit around here, but I want to thank you for keeping an open mind and calling a spade a spade. I hope I can be so unbiased if placed in a similar situation by my candidate.
Now if only we could get you to actually vote for the candidate who has an economic plan for this country…
That’s the thing–Democratic administrations have never prevented them from having guns, Republican administrations have not stopped abortion, and the whole “defense of marriage” argument is a canard. Granted, “stopping” SSM, such as it is, is something the Republican Party has been able to deliver on, on a state-to-state basis–but no Democrat will ever get elected on a no-guns platform and neocon policies only encourage teenage pregnancy and abortion. To the extent that the Republicans can actually prevent safe and legal abortions–for example, by withdrawing funding from foreign hospitals who even mention abortion as an option for their patients–the net effect is to endanger the lives of mothers and children, not to mention everyone else who depends on those hospital programs for disease control and prevention. Basically, the Republican Party has nothing to offer someone with those interests, and causes a lot of collateral damage in the process. Sure, everyone gets to decide for themselves who they vote for–nobody argued anything to the contrary–but the point is that anyone who votes for the Republicans on a large scale is getting suckered. Unless, of course, they’re in big business, in which case they are voting in their own interest and I can’t really blame them for that.
Yeah, actually.
The truth is, I’ve made a careful study of what gets responses. Frankly, no one will read or care what I write as long as I write thoughtful, careful explanations of what goes on, why, and who does it, for example, the various factions within the Repoublican party and what they’re after and why.
It isn’t going to matter, because jerks will simply come in and conflate them all and pick the things they hate most and project their worst nightmares onto someone in order to hate more. And no one actually reads this. Sometimes I’m tempted to go into full-time trolling. That’s what people seem to actually like. And it’s not like it’s the first time I’ve tried to explain this. No one seems to have figured it out yet.
Heck, all I’d have to do to get numerous people happy with me on this board is to make a bunch of idiotic threads on how John McCain is really Chimpy McBushHitlerFurherMonster and Sarah Palin is really some hideous monstrosity. The fact that it wouldn’t be true in either case is basically irrelevant.
I’ve been pretty ticked since going through a Rhetoric class where the teacher was a hard-core lefty (just this side of outright Communism) and who was blatantly and obviously pro-Obama. And talked about him every class. Not to examin his rhetoric much, but just to boost him. I quickly realized that she wasn’t interested in cogent analyses or our own rhetorical pieces and simply wanted people to validate her (and have decent writing). I compromised by writing an analysis/critique of a McCain speech. But that’s pretty much what I have to do every time I meet leftists, online or off. I try to be honest and earnest but rational and compromising. They ad hominem me, and then congratulate themselves for being open-minded and intellectually honest.
As I said, feel free to call them stupid. I was objecting to gonzomax deciding what they interests are. In other words, it’s fair game to point out how the Republicans don’t actually support the interests of the voters that they claim to. But, it’s arrogant and anti-democratic to tell people what issues are or should be important to them.
You post to get responses? I post to let others know my viewpoints. It doesn’t matter if I get responses or not. Or, in simple terms–I’d rather be remembered as a thoughtful poster than an attention queen.
Because they know the Republicans don’t give a wet squirt whether it’s true or not?
Not really. I noticed after a while that nobody commented on my better posts. IN fact, I quite often point out that both sides in any given debate are wrong, or are reaching noncontradictory conclusions, or one side simply hasn’t realized what, specifically, the other one is valuing, and hence they are not getting the point. These posts do not affect anything and people simply ignore them. I don’t post to get responses.
I just post less.
Clinton balanced the budget. We had peace and full employment. Bet your glad those times are over.