This article expressed something I’ve been musing for a while, which is that the constant hyperbole, exaggeration and alarmism used by both sides in attacking opposing candidates means that such warnings or attacks hold much less water when a *truly *dangerous or awful candidate comes along. It is a “boy cried wolf” effect.
If you call a non-sexist conservative “sexist,” then your labeling of a *genuinely *sexist conservative as “sexist” is much less effective because it has been diluted. If you call a non-communist liberal “communist,” then you have much less verbal ammunition left when a *genuinely *communist liberal comes around.
The same goes for Clinton’s scandals. For every legitimate Clinton scandal, the Repubilcans touted five others that were nothingburgers. Which gives Clinton supporters cause, in their view, to just assume all accusations against her are nonsense.
What we need is maturity in politics, and also in governing. Politicians need to stop seeing the law as something to be gotten around and see it as something that is sacred. They need to see the people as those they serve, not as adversaries standing in the way of their agendas, to be placated and lied to when necessary to serve the greater good.
I’ve come to the same conclusion in the election. Bernie, who is actually a socialist, was much more viable IMO because every single Democratic candidate has been labelled a socialist for as long as I can remember. Which isn’t to say that I oppose all aspects of western-european style social democracy, just that those who do oppose it have already shot their wad.
Similarly with those who always call the Republicans Nazis, this rhetoric will only score so many points when someone comes along who actually does want to implement severe nationalist, racist policies.
Which isn’t to say that both sides do this equally: just like with most examples, the GOP uses this from the lowest members to the highest echelons of their leadership, whereas blue nazi-baiting is mostly confined to the Internet. But in this case, you don’t have to nutpick very far to find dems calling Bush a Nazi.
I guess it depends on what your definition of ‘not having to nutpick very far’ is. I’m sure that there were, say, commenters at DU or Kos diarists who called Bush a Nazi. Or the infamous entries into that MoveOn contest that characterized Bush that way.
But these were fora where anyone could voice their opinion, despite being well-known fora at the time. So is that nutpicking very far, or not very far, when you find nuts there?
The fact is that GWB, at the time, was by far the worst President since WWII, leaving Nixon in the dust. Invading a foreign country on false pretenses, with its becoming a disaster area in less than a year? Torture and black sites? Politicizing the Federal prosecutors, and firing those that refused to engage in political prosecutions? Not paying attention to the many-times-repeated warnings (the infamous 8/6/2001 PDB was the last in a long series, recall) from our intelligence services that bin Laden was planning a major attack on us?
We should have soft-pedaled this because of the possibility that someone even worse might come along in a few years?? I’m gobsmacked.
On issues (as opposed to on a personal level), Trump averages out to being not much worse then any of the other Republican nominees since the turn of the Millennium.
Well, maybe. To actually be able to say that, we’d have to know what Trump’s positions on the issues were. But the only actual position of his that anyone knows is his position that Donald Trump should have more attention, money, and power.
If you reserve the label “sexist” only for men who brag about committing sexual assaults, then you’ve diluted the term to a sliver of its meaning. Mike Pence is most certainly a sexist. He’s not a rapist, true. But there was nothing inappropriate about calling him and his ilk sexists.
The same effect applies to Hillary. The extreme righties, by accusing her of everything under the sun, have diluted the effect of any actual serious charges.
To the best of my knowledge, no other Republican candidate has announced a policy of prosecuting their political opponent and putting them in jail.
Nor has any other Republican run on a policy of excluding all members of a religious group from the United States.
Nor has any other Republican announced a policy of building a wall across the entire southern border and intercepting money sent by private citizens to their relatives as a means of paying for the wall.
These are policy issues, not matters of personality.
No. Romney and McCain were both very centrist. Trump wants to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor, deport millions of people, break trade deals, etc. He supports punishing women who have abortions, etc. etc. etc.
Let me rephrase that:
Wtf? No!
Admittedly, Christie was the closest thing to a centrist on this season’s GOP stage, but you didn’t write “other clowns on the GOP stage”; you wrote “other Republican nominees.”
Most of his policies such as they are seem to have come out of a random Republican word generator. It’s all pandering and opposite of what he has said he believes in the past.
The article was behind a paywall, so I only got the first couple paragraphs. But the heart of the “cry wolf” issue is that if you warn about something that doesn’t exist, your credibility is lost. I reject that the lesson of “cry wolf” is "don’t say anything until it gets really really REEEALLY bad.
Like defamation, truth is an absolute defense to “cry wolf.” The idea that Democrats should, say, have held fire on Todd Atkin because years later the same party might nominate a groper is nonsense. Atkin (again just using one example) made his bed and he now lies in it (thankfully this bed is far away from Capitol Hill).
So I’m not sure if there are specific politicians that have been unfairlyf accused of being sexist, like in the article or whatnot. But I’d like to know who, exactly, was the non-wolf who was called a wolf.
There’s also his repudiation of the Republican free trade policy of the last three decades.
The one clearly Republican policy where he’s lined up with most of the GOP is his commitment to cutting taxes for rich folk. Purely coincidental that he’s rich, of course
No!