I have. He says that what a candidate promises in their campaign is not necessarily what they’ll deliver. He thinks that Obama’s party affiliation is more telling of what he’ll do in office than his campaign stances are.
-Obama is for the socialization of America
-Obama has ties with corrupt organizations/people such as ACORN, Bill Ayers, etc.
-Obama has a naive stance on energy independence
-Obama believes the government is the solution for all life’s problems
-Obama is not for nuclear energy
-Obama thinks that taxing the rich is an answer to financial problems.
-Obama neglects to see that raising taxes on large corporations effects the consumer more than the producer.
-Obama lacks the experience that he accuses the GOP VP candidate of not having.
-Obama requested an absurd amount of earmarks in his short career as Senator.
-Obama is the ONLY person to vote on the most liberal abortion issue ever. Some people have problems with babies being left on a table to die.
These are just a few issues. And, before anyone asks, NO, I am not a registered Republican.
Not really. You have to pick one or the other (essentially) … and you don’t have to be in love with the one you pick. Does it matter if the reason you pick Candidate A is that you find some of Candidate B’s positions especially unpalatable?
I never knew McCain had so many positives.
and
Does… Not… Compute… Must… Self… Destruct…
So Obama has only been involved in federal politics for a few years, therefore he is not experienced enough. But Palin, who has never been involved in federal politics, would do fine, you betcha. This is the kid of bullshit the OP is talking about. Your mind is already made up, and you look for reasons to support whatever you’ve already decided, even if those reasons are completely contradictory. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but to pretend that you’ve given this a lot of thought and were really open-minded about it is silly.
As an Obama supporter, I can see lots of reasons why someone would support McCain.
I think nuclear power is a good example. Global warming and energy independence are extremely important issues and nuclear power has a lot of potential. Both candidates support it, but it is not unreasonable to think that the Republican will be in a better position, politically, to get make serious progress on the issue. I’m not sure where Obama stands on reprocessing, and I think GNEP is a bad idea, but I see it as a good thing that McCain is mentioning some of the wider issues in nuclear power in his speeches.
The Supreme Court would be another good example. Obama has said he wants to appoint judges who, when the case is close, will use their own sense of compassion and empathy to make the decision. I personally tend to think that legal principles can only take you so far and that this happens inevitably, but if I believed in the sort of legal positivism that Scalia et al. espouse, this would tilt me toward McCain.
If I believed that trade without labor or environmental restrictions was, on balance, better than trade agreements with those restrictions, I would probably lean McCain on that issue. I think reasonable people can differ on that.
And on and on. I would hope that any McCain voter would have serious questions about the man’s temperament. But I don’t think those questions should be enough to overwhelm one’s positions on the issues.
Look around you, bud.
Seriously.
You speak flippantly of my credibility to a board population that seriously entertained a thread in which Sarah Palin was accused of faking her pregnancy.
It’s my hope that when the election is over, some honest folk here will say, “You know, that really was over the top ridiculous, and I’m ashamed I didn’t speak up against it.”
Maybe then the board can get back some of it’s credibility. The rest is simply lost forever in the wake of permitting the “N-word” thread in GD.
I don’t think that’s true, and it’s more than a little insulting. I see more absolute, utter intolerance of differing views in the real world than I see here. There’s only one Der Trihs here, but people like him are all over the place in the real world. There’s even more of the casual “I just don’t understand how anyone could disagree with me” types. In fact, I would bet that most people who have strong political feelings think the other side is unreasonable.
I know I do. I know you do, too.
Cite? And I bet you’re just fine with the Bush administration buying up banks.
But of course, you don’t care about McCain’s ties to Charles Keating, even though McCain actually helped Keating while he was committing the crimes that led to his imprisonment, while Ayers did his bad stuff years before Obama met him.
Cite?
Cite?
That’s news to Obama. Maybe you should call him up and tell him that.
Cite that he’s wrong?
Cite that he voted to allow babies to be left on a table to die?
Look, I’ve admitted already that I have been conflicted about these candidates for some time. (And I’ve been called a liar for it as well, by other members of the Tolerant Left here).
Some of what I wrote can easily be re-written as praise for McCain: I believe he’ll appoint a “Living Constitution” judge to the spot… becomes “I believe he’ll appoint textualists to the Court…”
OK, you know what? Strike that. I fear that McCain may appoint the reverse of Obama’s picks: not textualists so much as reliable conservatives, who will do just as much violence to the method of interpretation, just in the other direction. And I’ll leave this in rather than editing it out, too. So there.
But McCain won’t raise my taxes. That’s a positive. He won’t be beholden to the environmentalists and stomp on nuclear energy. He won’t sign a new assault weapons ban. Those are all McCain positives.
But the point of this OP is obvious: it’s UNREASONABLE to support McCain, period. No intelligent voter could possibly do so.
So wait… you agree that she’s not in the minority here. But you find this insulting because according to you, she’s ALSO not in the minority in the real world?
This place amuses me more every day. It’s made the election vastly more entertaining than any other I can remember!
But can you honestly examine your own posts and deny that you’re just the far right complement of that mindset?
I didn’t really want to get started in this, but here we go…
You’ve now called me close-minded and silly and called my position “bullshit”. Fantastic.
I see your point, but keep in mind that I had decided on McCain well before he or Obama picked a running mate. I made that decision based upon the views expressed in the other 8 or so paragraphs you glossed over.
When the running mates were announced, I evaluated my position and remained where I was. You will note that, on day one, Obama gets to sit behind the big desk. On the other hand, it is highly likely that Palin will never get to sit there at all. And if she does, it will be after going through the best training program for that position.
In any case, I find it silly for Obama supporters to compete in the area of experience with Palin. Obama is running against McCain, who will always beat Obama in the experience corner.
If you recognize that the experience issue is a problem, then you should probably find a better argument. How about “That’s what we want! Someone who’s not an insider! Someone who can think outside the box!”
I also implied my dissatisfaction with Palin in my post. However, it’s not a deal breaker for me.
Not going to offer my own opinion right now, but an interesting observation from yesterday.
I was in a place of business with a large lobby and reception area. CNN was on in the background. You could just barely hear the yammering of the anchors, etc. over the normal din of the lobby.
There were two young-ish (25-30 yrs old) receptionists working at the desk, and a slightly older woman behind them doing something. All were busy, answering the phones, talking to customers, filing stuff away, talking to each other, etc. I was sitting a ways away in a chair with a cup of coffee, reading something and occasionally stealing a glance at the TV.
Obama came on and said something, McCain came on and said something, Wolf Blitzer-or-somebody came on and said something, and the workers went about their business. It was just white noise in the background as far as the workers were considered.
Then they cut to Sarah Palin saying something at a rally. And the joint came to a standstill. The three women immediately stopped what they were doing, put down the phones, and had their eyes glued to the screen for the 15 seconds or so she was talking. Then it was over, and they went back to work.
I don’t even remember what Palin was talking about. I wasn’t watching her. I was watching the reaction of the workers.
THAT…my friends, is what some of us will never understand.
Do you really want to play ring around the rosie here? It’s insulting that you’re implying people who agree with me are crazier or more intolerant than people who agree with you, when by almost any measurable standard they’re not.
Sateryn76, a couple questions for you. Thank you for the reasonable response by the way.
-
Does it concern you that McCain proposed spending another $300 billion of taxpayer money to bail out bad mortgages at no loss to the banks that had a part in creating this mess? Are you convinced that even though McCain hasn’t shown much resistance to Bush in the past, the orgy of government spending we’ve seen over the last eight years won’t continue under McCain?
-
Do you consider the Bush presidency a success? Palin strikes me as very similar to him. Simultaneously ignorant and overconfident to the extreme.
No, he doesn’t. Nor do I, nor do (I would expect) most of the non-liberals on the SDMB.
Some on the other side certainly are unreasonable, and they tend to be the ones accusing everyone on the other side of being the same. Those are the ones about whom I said it was basically impossible for them to give a reasonable explanation of the other side’s position.
Some Dopers, even those not voting for McCain, can give a reasonable precis of the other side’s thoughts. Others - can’t.
I can think of a number of reasons to vote for Obama - he’s black, he has new ideas, he is going to shift the tax burden onto the rich, he is going to pull out of Iraq right away, etc. Whether or not I agree with these reasons, or think they are valid, is different from thinking 'anyone who votes for Obama is a moron".
That is a dangerous assumption to make as a default. You miss out on valid points made by the other side. And in a republic, that sometimes put you out of touch with the people you want to vote for you.
We saw some of this in 2004, where there were a number of threads wondering how anyone could possibly vote for Bush, given that it had been conclusively proven that he was wrong on every conceivable point, in every conceivable way. There were hundreds of cites from left-wing sources to prove it.
Then he won.
Now (it appears) that Obama is going to win. Good for him. But come November, I can pretty much guarantee that we aren’t going to hear the wails of horror and despair from the Republicans on the SDMB that we did from the lefties. Because we are not so freaking naive.
Yes, I deny that. See above.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, but you’re a youngster.
Board-wise, that is. You joined in 2006.
Assuming you weren’t lurking for seven years prior, you really wouldn’t have recognized the board as it was back in late 1999. Sure, there was a strong leftist bent to many members, and sure, there was vigorous political discussion. But the hatred that exists now wasn’t here. We talked about the hanging chads in Florida, and no one ever called me the kind of vicious names I’ve been hit with here more recently. We discussed Bush v. Gore with rancor, but it never transferred to solidly into the personal. Ideas were ridiculed, sure – but the level of personal vitriol wasn’t there.
I don’t know how you can say that when you have all the hippies.