Wouldn’t it be nice, if both parties told the christian right to fuck off?
YES!!!
Sounds plausible. How is that odd, in connection with what I’m saying here (i.e., that a negative shade of meaning appears to have attached itself to “apologist”)?
And yeah, I misspelled my name. I type fairly quickly, but am growing increasingly inaccurate in my old age. When I sign off on my posts, it goes D-A-N-I-E-L-TAB-ENTER. It’s fairly common for me to hit the E and L in reverse order, and finish the sequence before I realize what I’ve done.
I’m with you on the OP, Scylla, because of the two links I clicked on randomly, one of them was an example of rjung calling John Mace an apologist, which is pretty clearly an unfair cop. Your later posts in the thread look like peyote-fueled insult poetry, so I don’t got your back any more :D.
Daniel
Don’t show anybody else this email, but just between you and me, yeah.
I think the foreign policy Bush has implemented has been necessary. For some of the failures in that area I’ll make the Captain Queeg defense. You’ll remember that the brilliant young lawyer gets the crewmembers off during the Caine Mutiny trial by exposing the weaknesses of Queeg to the public light. Later though, the attorney gets drunk and lambastes those that he saved. The weaknesses of Queeg would never have come to light had he had the support of his crew and officers, he argues. While the crew and officers are setting Queeg up for failure and doing everything in their power to make him fail, the lawyers relatives are being turned into soap at the hands of the Nazis.
(I beleive this to be the first example of Godwinization.)
Anyway, I don’t think Bush is Queeg and I don’t thing the Democrats are the disloyal officers but I think there is something in the analogy to be considered.
Domestically though, he ain’t a conservative. Conservatives are about personal responsibility and the personal freedoms and risks that go with it; a smaller less-intrusive government, lower taxes, yadda yadda, I’ll shut up now. This is where Bush fails, IMO.
[nitpick]
[
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole-axe)“Head axe”, but not the human head,
[
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse#Words_relating_to_horse_anatomy)so, an axe, with a handle (a pole) long enough, to strike a horse on the head (the poll).[/nitpick]
I’ve been making them for a decade, so it bugs me 
.
BOB fnord!
So, in a Pit thread devoted to one of the more egregious examples of the one-trick pony on the SDMB, the only response you can come up with is, “oh yeah? Well, Bush lied about Iraq!”
How stunningly original. 
Regards,
Shodan
I have to absolutely agree. He is not a conservative in my view either. If anything, he is the opposite, on too many areas.
‘Taint nuttin’. Uke promised years ago to put me in his will. And although it gladdens my petrified greedy little conservative heart to see he ain’t pissing away his fortune on his kids, he has as yet failed to succumb to an untimely death. So, my hopes of ever seeing that inheritance grow dimmer with each passing day. :-p
As long as you brought up pedantic, askeptic, the word is sophomoric.
If it’s saying “get out,” I’m with the house.
Well, I would find it enlightening if you would. Could you please (without reference to a dictionary) explain the definitions of “sophmoric” and “pedantic” that you are using and explain what portions of the OP raised those feelings in you and why?
For you my supercilious friend, no.
I think he’s a conservative taken to extremes. I did want to object to a perhaps unintended implication of your post, if one takes “liberal” to be the opposite of “conservative”: liberals are also for personal responsbility and the personal freedoms and risks that go with it. We just apply responsibility more “liberally” in that we accept responsibilty for more than just ourselves, but for our country, our environment, our economy, our relationships with others in the world… It was a liberal that suggested that we ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. We recognize that unfettered self-interest is not advantageous for America, and for ourselves in the long run.
In fact, I think Bush is the perfect microcosm (if a gloablly impactful example like this administration can be a “microcosm”) of conservative ideology. What happens if you enact tax cuts without regard for the future or the larger economy? What happens if you enact regressive economic policies? What happens if you encourage consumption of energy and fossil fuels? What happens if you act unilaterally in international policy matters and eschew diplomacy?
So, I don’t think Bush is the best example of a functional Republican, such as we’ve had in the past, but is an example of what conservative policy looks like in the full light of day. The problem, in my opinion, is that too few of those who would like to see conservative policies enacted have been willing to actually be critical of the problematic way they’ve been enacted, or to help to limit the power of the current administration.
Scylla is a perfect example of an enabling Republican whose interest has been the power of the party over the good of the country - willing to defend nearly any behavior by the Republicans in power and unwilling to check that power in any way. How often have you heard a Republican say “I don’t like what Republican leader X is doing, but I can’t vote for a Democrat!” How this actually reflects personal responsibility is beyond me.
These are all false dichotomies - probably. I’d be very, very surprised if the Bush tax cuts were considered “without regard” to the future effects in the economy. You claim disregard when in all probability, the considerations the Bush advisors undertook were simply different (or differently priortized) than your own. Same kinda thing for the rest of your examples.
It’s hard to believe that is true when tax cuts were the solution regardless of circumstances. When we had projected surpluses, tax cuts were the solution because it’s our money. When we went into recession, the same tax cuts were the solution because it would help grow the economy. The same tax cuts now are the solution because… I don’t know why. If tax cuts are always the solution independent of what’s going on, it seems safe to say that they are considered without regard to other circumstances.
There is a school of economic thought, and a fairly mainstream one, that claims in times of a stagnant economy, deficit spending by the government can be a good thing. And, of course, it’s very hard to argue that when the government is running a surplus that it should not be returned to the taxpayers. These two things can both be logical and rational positions.
Huh. Okay, I looked up supercilious. I fail to see the haughty nature of my post. I asked that you explain your reasoning. The “don’t look in a dictionary” was to ensure that you explained your reactions were as they were at the time you had them not with a post hoc rationalization. I was (and remain) honestly interested in how you came to the sophmoric conclusion (I’m assuming the “pedantic” was based on the massive number of links in the OP).
Okay, under what circumstances would a tax cut not be a good idea?
How about during a time of war - as far as I’ve heard, no civilization ever cut taxes while simultaneously going to war, until we did.
Forgot to add that we might have used the surplus to shore up social security when we had the opportunity, and as the Democrats had been pushing for. After all, that was my money that was borrowed over years in exchange for a cabinet full of T-bills in an office in Philadelphia. Nice that the top one percent are owed more in some sort of tax cut than the middle class deserves to be paid back.
Kewl.
I made a five-word post, and I got to be the fifth person Scylla lashed out at. To upgrade my status as a Scylla-Annoyer, all I’ve got to do is call him “sophomoric and pedantic,” and I’ll be able to make his head explode.
Who’s got a video camera?