You mean now they’re pigeonholing candidates with no names at all? :eek:
“That Warmonger”, “That Bitch”, and “That lefty”.
I’d like to see someone actually say, for once “What the hell is WRONG with being Left, whether far or not?”
It seems like “leftist/liberal” is a dirty word, anymore. 
Well, most of the people who DO use leftist as an insult do it with the implicit or explicit “starting assumption” that the nation, as a whole, leans to the right, and that thus leftists are out of touch with the rest of the country. Or else when they say “left,” they really mean “people with its worst stereotypes or qualities.”
Although I feel like things today in this regard are better than in the '80’s. I don’t think today’s environment can spawn that one set of Bloom County cartoons where Opus goes before a Congressional committee and comes back with “liberal”/“loony left” labels stuck all over his body.
People who use the word “anymore” as a positive are dirty, you know.
I’ll bite.
These are ACU rankings, ranking Senators by how conservative they are. Republicans score high, of course, with some very partisan snd conservative ones scoring very high. Some moderate Democrats score in the twenties or teens - these are typically bridgebuilding figures in the Democratic Party from the West and South. Liberal and partisan Democrats are in single digits.
Obama has a lifetime score of 8.
Similarly, for liberals, the ADA rankings for Obama for 2006 (PDF) give him a score of 95%. There are plenty of Democrats with far more moderate stances.
On the face of it, Obama is a liberal and partisan Democrat based on his voting record.
Of course, “liberal and partisan Democrat” != “Far Left.”
More’s the pity.
Of course he is a far left radical, he’s a democrat.
How could a democrat be anything but a leftist.
Actually I was discussing Obama with a friend I work with whose thoughts were that he was a left wing socialist bent on a level of governmental oversight just short of full fledged communism. I asked what the basis of this opinion was and he said “Just what I’ve heard, I haven’t read anything from Obama or anything.”
This is what scares the hell out of me. People, even intelligent people who should know better, who base their beliefs on the positions of a candidate on the opinions of the “talking heads” instead of doing their own research.
Say, this is the pit innit, so I can call these people lazy ignorant bastards who are more of a threat to this country than any candidate ever could be, and get away with it huh.
So, how does that stack up against the rest of the Dems? I see at least 13 with scores lower than 8, and a few more that are 8.X or 9.
No, it’s worse than that, your friend is not even paying attention to the TV “talking heads,” who are at least professional journalists of a kind, and who are saying nothing like that about Obama (except maybe on Fox and then in veiled language). I’d guess he’s getting his misinformation from RW blogs and viral e-mails.
Well, here’s the deal. When Obama ran for the state senate in Illinois he did so as a “progressive” - that was how he described himself in a story in the Chicago Reader. His overall record, as we have seen, is pretty liberal.
Now, that would all be fine and dandy, except that Obama in his stump speeches has been emphasizing his ability to work with everyone. Now, one wouldn’t expect a senator to vote against his party often, but one would expect it to happen sometimes. In the case of Obama, it seldom does. Very seldom.
So that’s some proof against his claim that he can work with everyone - he has to explain this somehow. Perhaps during his career there wasn’t anything he choose buck his party on, or anything at all he agrees with Republicans on. That would also be fair, but in that case he ought to drop the pretense and just run as what he is - a liberal Democrat.
This claim of yours has already been rebutted on this board. You can keep arguing it, but to do so intelligently you should at least acknowledge the facts you’ve been made aware of in previous threads.
To explain again: you’re conflating “work with everyone” with “presses conservative issues.” Obama went across the aisle in the Senate for a number of important bills, including ethics reform and nuclear proliferation prevention. And if you go back to the state senate, there are even more good examples. In addition to bipartisan work, he managed to bring Republicans into legislation on which they were initially very opposed (death penalty reform).
He has a record of serious bipartisan accomplishment. There may be good arguments for why he won’t be able to so as President, but ignoring his accomplishments as you’ve done here shouldn’t convince anyone of that.
There are even better arguments for why he shouldn’t. At this stage we need a divider, not a uniter – a POTUS who will fight to marginalize the Pubs, not conciliate them.
But I have little hope for Obama on that score.
:rolleyes: That was stupid when you posted it in GD and it’s stupid when you posted the exact same thing here.
Bipartisanship is nice. I like to see the parties come together on matters like ethics reform and nuclear nonproliferation. There has always been room for this and there always will be room for it.
However, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are different from each other in important ways - and we ought not lost sight of that fact. We also ought not lose sight of the fact that most politicians differ from their party leaders on small or large matters of policy. In a country with only two parties, this is to be expected.
It then becomes pretty significant that Obama has very few policy differences with his party leadership. He does buck them pretty seldom. Hell, even Harry Reid has an ACU rating higher than his.
It isn’t wrong to point this out, any more than it is misguided to point out Obama’s work across the aisle to craft legislation. While these are somewhat related, they do measure different things as well - not only how often you’re willing to work with your opponents but how willing you are to piss off your friends.
Obama hasn’t shown himself willing in his life to piss anyone off. That is a bit worrisome to me.
I’m glad you’ve now recognized the distinction between bipartisanship and adopting conservative principles. Now if you’ll show us where he claims he’ll do the latter, you’ll have demonstrated that he won’t be able to meet the standards he setting out in his campaign.
(Which is not to concede your premise that he never bucks the party, if you followed the history of ethics reform you’d know that he did just that, but rebutting that point is unnecessary to prove your argument false.)
I have very good reasons.
I thought the same thing until I looked at his reasoning. I don’t know that I’d say we need a divider, so much as a chief executive who’ll ignore the Republicans when necessary.
The biggest flaw of Obama IMO is that he wasn’t present for the vote against the Iraq war. It’s nice to give a speech, but he didn’t vote against it.
To what vote, on what date, do you refer?