yes, I’m sure I’ll be greeted by a spate of “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” posts. I knew this when I started the thread.
But, for reals. Some of you are just really fucking retarded in your absolute blind, biased devotion to everything Democrat. I think the thread on the justness and propriety of dodging a quorum as a valid exercise of political power just tipped the scale for me. You fucking idiots would be FOAMING at the mouth if this was being done by Republicans. Screaming about how they were usurping the will of the people.
There’s other shit, too, but I frankly don’t care to go and point out threads where I truly wished that avowed “liberals” were disenfranchised.
I can only take comfort in the fact that Republicans don’t have any crosshairs targeted on my specific Gender/SES/ethnicity. I guess I’ll have to deal with the abject incorporation of religiosity into civic life, though.
You’re damn right. There was a time when that might have bothered me, but not any more. Republicans have been pulling this shit for years, so we would be damn fools not to. Game on.
You know you won’t have to work hard to get me to agree there’s a huge amount of hypocrisy here about stuff that Democrats do being okay, and very similar things that Repblicans do being sheer evil.
But on your one tipping point example… I’m not so sure I agree. As I may have mentioned in that thread, there was a point in the eighties when forty GOP senators left to deny the Dems a quorum and Senate President Pro Tem Robert Byrd ordered the Senate Sergeant at Arms to arrest 'em.
It happens, both sides do it, and I can’t really picture any reasonable posters here being all that outraged if the GOP did it again. Sure, there are some hard-core idiots that would say something, but… who cares?
I’m not angry at the practice so much as the attempt to justify it. Wisconsin Dems are just representing their constituents and vigorously upholding the democratic process. State X Republicans are raping babies and destroying the concept of democratic society.
You should talk more to us Canadians. By American standards, we’re somewhat left-ish, but we don’t have any particular emotional attachment to your Democrats.
Edit: I should elaborate. I don’t mind the hypocrisy, actually. But I do severely dislike the attempt to cloak ones position as some righteousness when it’s really just about the fact that, without opposition, those espousing a certain opinion are going to lose and be in the minority. It’s like some fucked-up type of cognitive dissonance. Have the stones and admit that you’re pissed that Wisconsonites wouldn’t actually vote in enough Assemblymen to overturn Walker’s bill - instead of coming up with some pandering bullshit about how the Democratic senators-in-hiding are doing god’s work.
I agree that one should, as a matter of principle, be consistent on this issue. If leaving the state is a valid political tactic when your side does it, then you shouldn’t complain too much when the other side does it; if you bitch and moan when the other side does it, then you shouldn’t defend your own side when they do it.
Having said said, i don’t think it’s any more silly and inconsistent, on a philosophical level, than your argument about filibustering:
While you are right that filibustering is a component of a legislative body, as a matter of principle it is no more or less a perversion of the democratic process than running away, IMO.
The fact that a legislator can stand there and drone on for hours or days about his grandmother’s apple pie recipes and the vacations he took as a child, when he’s supposed to be addressing a bill about tax increases or healthcare, is exactly as big a “fuck you” to the democratic process as not showing up in the first place. The fact that there is no mechanism to stop such irrelevant sidetracking doesn’t change the fact that it completely subverts what the democratic process is supposed to be about, which is dealing with and voting on the actual issues.
Shit, I’m sorry, I slept in this morning and didn’t catch Morning Edition. Which state do you live in, and when did the BBQ Pit collective get sworn in?
I don’t know the poll numbers in Wisconsin, but in Ohio it’s about 60-40 against our version of the bill. But yet, the bill passed. If the numbers in Wisconsin are similar, the Republican legislators are actually going against the wishes of the majority of their constituents.
Stop the presses! Someone is getting a heavy liberal slant from a board that is known to slant liberal.
Go to an analogous conservative board for a while. Or just read the comments to Yahoo news articles. Then come back and tell us that the far end of that spectrum isn’t just as crazy as some of the liberals you demonize here.
GOPers foam at stuff the Dems do too and at least as often.
Let me guess, you’re one of those “Independents” that would vote for a Dem if you ever found one worth voting for.
It’s not the slant liberal. It’s the slant liberal in the most retarded manner possible that bugs me. The Left can use a heavy dose of “here’s what we believe, stick that in your pipe and smoke it” instead of the bullshit “well, golly gosh, Wally, here’s why we’re righteous and the right is wrong”.
But how would you abolish filibustering? By making a ruling against it, right? And yet you’ve already conceded that what the Wisconsin legislators are doing is not illegal.
It’s hard to work out what you’re arguing here.
Your position seems to be:
[ul]
[li]Filibustering and quorum-dodging are both douchebag moves that subvert the democratic process.[/li][li]We should abolish filibustering.[/li][li]We should not justify quorum-dodging as a valid exercise of democratic power.[/li][li]But filibustering is, until we pass rules specifically banning it, a valid exercise of democratic power.[/ul][/li]
Do i have that right? Or are there subtleties to your argument that i’m missing here?
no, fillibustering does not subvert the democratic process. it is anti-democratic and douchebaggy, but a legislator engaging in it is not an abdication of that legislator’s duties to represent his constituency.
Read some of the conservative responses here. You get EXACTLY the same idiocy from the Right.
The difference is that as far as I can tell, the majority here are liberal, and that’s the operative issue. You seem to be assuming that since you get more of that here, that it’s a consequence of the liberal position rather than just a numbers issue.
