I voted for a Democrat in the last 3 Presidential elections. I consider Trump to personally be the worst Person who was been nominated for the office by a major political party in my lifetime. I have personal cause to despise him as an amoral piece of shit, based on my business dealings. He bussed elderly widows down to his casinos in AC, and gave them bags of coins for the slot machines if they listened to a presentation about his junk bonds, and got them to put their life savings into them, money they could not afford to lose. He did this with full knowledge of the impending bankruptcy. Some of those bonds never made a single payment. I represented a group of these women, and their lives were drastically altered and their financial well-being destroyed because of this.
I am unimpressed with attempts to make me think ill of Trump, because of whatever ridiculous or stupid or shitty thing he said or did. I know what he is, and it is worse and more odious than is being represented here.
During the last election I posted that I hated Trump so much that if it turns out that Hitler himself was found frozen in his bunker, and they thawed him out, and ran him for President against Trump… than I might vote for Trump.
So, I am not a knee jerk Republican. I am not a single issue guy, and I am more liberal and progressive than probably 95% of Republicans and conservatives that you will meet.
So, when I say that the Democratic Party has gone so far past liberalism and into radical leftism as to sincerely disturb me so much that Trump is looking like the lesser of two evils, know that that is not the normal hyperbolous bullshit political hacking that people make every election. I am sincere.
Among people not in liberal echo chambers or enclaves, my alarm and sentiments are pretty commonplace.
Trump is going to win in a landslide because the left has gone off the rails.
You can tell yourself that it’s because we are all a bunch of ignorant bigots and have your defense set up when it happens so that you can avoid addressing what everybody else finds so horribly wrong and repugnant, or you can fix it.
That is what you are being told about the Democrats. It is not based on reality. Can you list for me some policy positions that the Democratic candidates are running on, or any elected Democrat is advocating that are “radical leftism”, or “off the rails”? I understand that is what Trump and the Republicans, and Fox News and the Right-O-Sphere are spewing about us every day in order to rile your side up, but I want to know what specific things it is that lead you to believe this? Is it trying to save the environment? Is it trying to reduce the influence of money on our politics? Is it protecting the right to vote and the right to fair representation? Please explain in detail what is so off the rails so that I can understand what those in your bubble are talking about.
Dogma over science. Ramping up of conspiracy theories. Treating others by the color of their skin rather than the content of character. Harshly labeling anyone who disagrees. Rashida Tlaib just proposed a national $20 minimum wage and there are many examples of these few freshman Democrats who continue to be oblivious to how in over their heads they are while they garner much media coverage.
Jussie Smollett.
Covington Catholic HS.
Erica Thomas.
The hypothetical you offered was, “What if I demanded Little Nemo prove he’s not racist.” Which would be you attacking a single, specific poster, not a broad political movement. Did you, instead, mean something like, “What if I demanded liberals prove they’re not racist?”
Because that also wouldn’t be bigoted in any meaningful sense of the term.
No, that’s disagreeing with you about what conservatism is.
“Conservative values are based on bigotry” isn’t an ad hominem. You can tell, because there’s no homme mentioned in the statement.
Well, that “falsely” there is kind of the rub, isn’t it? You’ve asserted that conservatives aren’t bigoted, based on your experience being a conservative. A lot of us feel differently, based on our experiences being around conservatives. And then you get angry because people don’t take your assertions at face value, and prize them above their own personal experiences.
Cool. Do you think it’s unfair to say that the Republican party (please note, I did not say “conservatives”) openly espouse the superiority of heterosexuality? Is it “false” to say that the Republican party is bigoted against gays? Does the fact that individual Republicans are not monolithicly against gay rights make it impossible to criticize the party on that axis?
Democrats have lurched far to the left on immigration from where we were under Obama to the point of being unrecognizable. They seem to be talking more about morality than policy half the time.
Like if that was not what seen coming from the Republican leadership in industrial quantities.
BTW Trump just repeated the most ugly and bigoted unfounded conspiracy theories against Democrats, so I do expect crickets to come in response from many Republicans in power.
For the Democrats they are proposals, that after negotiations and dealings in congress are done, it would be lucky to be that high an increase in the end.
Uh, by proposing that Ann Coulter is a reliable source you only demonstrate that you do not know how to check for reliable sources. Ann can be correct about an example, but as usual, she paints a very, very misleading picture:
And the Daily Caller again, you are not even trying, If anything, after seeing what Trump is doing with his bigoted lies against Democrats that number is actually low. Point being that it is not just with **no justification whatsoever **that a poll can come like that.
For all the talk about how they want to slash Medicare and Social Security to balance the budget - Mitch McConnell is particularly big on this, do you think the rest of his party is going to go along with this and get voted out of office for it?
No?
Then they’re not going to reduce the deficit through spending cuts like they all claim to want to do.
They’ve talked this game for 40 years. They claim it is what they need to do. They can never get the votes because most of them know it is political suicide. So they pass the tax cuts their billionaire backers demand and then get stuck because they cannot pass the spending cuts to balance out the ludicrous tax cuts. Then, even when the Republicans hold both houses and the Presidency, like they did 2016 to 2018, they blame the Democrats for it.
“Although a USA Today/Ipsos poll found that a majority of people, 68 percent, saw Trump’s tweets as offensive, there was a stark partisan divide: 93 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of independents found the tweet offensive, while only 37 percent of Republicans did, according to the poll, which was released on Wednesday. Meanwhile, 57 percent of Republicans said they agreed with Trump’s tweets, while only 7 percent of Democrats agreed.”
So 57% of Republicans agreed with a racist post by Trump and only 37% found it offensive. But gosh, Scylla will get mad at you if you call them racists…
Ok, so maybe not ALL Republicans are racist. But quite clearly, the majority of them are. The rest aren’t exactly running away from it either.
Did you mean to post this in a different thread? This seems to be about policy, but up 'til now, you’ve been talking about how a bunch of liberals on the internet are being too mean.
So, I’m not seeing a strong distinction between describing conservatives as bigots, and describing liberals as repugnant. What makes one okay, and the other a crass discretion?
So you’re saying that you can only call someone a bigot if they openly and clearly state it, that if they do things like tell dark-skinned Americans ‘go back where you came from’ or implement policies to deprive LGBT people of human rights, it’s bigotry to call that bigotry? Your definition is a sick joke.
I would say that being a bigot who proudly votes in favor of various varieties of bigotry and revels in (or at least supports people who make) bigoted comments like ‘go back where you came from’ is the one making a “dick move”. Calling out people on their bigotry based on facts and observations is simply dealing with reality - which conservatives used to claim as a value, but certainly don’t now.
Also it’s ironic that the people who complain the loudest about the tide of “political correctness” when they’re asked to be polite to minorities come into threads like this and bitterly complain that people should use more polite language when discussing their repeated attacks on vulnerable people and that discussing the actual effects of their preferred laws is “too extreme”.
So is claiming that the Democratic Party has gone so far past liberalism and into radicalism that it looks worse than Trump also bigotry? By the standards you’ve laid out, that looks like you’re engaged in bigotry against the Democrats.
And no, I don’t accept your absurd claim that pointing out where conservative values are mired in, allied to, or based on bigotry by using real world examples of how they operate in practice is bigotry. Judging people based on their actions, especially their actions towards vulnerable people, is the opposite of bigotry.
Sure it would. It would mean the starting assumption is that liberals are racist, that that is the default that must be disproved. That starting point shows a preferential stance.
Conservative values don’t exist without conservatives. They are the home.
I am not angry. I am more disappointed and disgusted, that you thinking is ok to attribute such vile motives to your political opponents. It is such an inherently obviously stupid thing to do. It suggests such a basic mental inflexibility and failure of critical thinking and empathy that it is difficult to believe it exists. It requires only the most basic tools to dismantle. It’s the kind of attitude that intelligent thinkers are always wary of, that tendency to demonize those they disagree with. When they catch themselves doing it, they commit to a hard stop.
It’s not hard. “Hmmmm, roughly half my country identifies this way. Probably I know some of them that are really smart, who are truly good people, who are deep and careful thinkers. They hold to conservative and Republican values yet they do not demonstrate racist or bigoted tendencies, and tend not to tolerate those that do. Perhaps before I simply categorize and sign bigot to their entire philosophy, I should talk to them about their beliefs and seek to understand what values and priorities are driving their thought processes. Calling them bigoted is easy and dismissive. Understanding their point of view is hard. I should not take the easy route.”
So much of the pro-right argumentation even on these boards is so astonishingly fallacious that I can hardly believe it’s not trolling and especially of the Russian kind.
There are arguments on this thread that are so full of nonsense that in wonder if it’s not doing them a favor to bother responding. O
Conservative tax cuts consistently result in lower taxes on the wealthy and higher taxes on the rest at worst, and huge cuts (by percentage, not raw numbers) on the wealthy and tiny cuts for the rest at best. Pointing out this basic fact of reality is not a “dick thing to say” or being “bigoted”, it’s addressing the real world. Until you stop claiming that discussing reality instead of conservative fantasyland is engaging in dickery. Until you’re willing to accept that the discussion is about the real world and stop claiming that using actual facts is ‘dickery’ and ‘bigotry’, there’s no real point in engaging your arguments.
Tax cuts help people who pay taxes. The wealthy pay more taxes than the poor. This is an intrinsic truth.
Various cites say somewhere between 2/3 and 80% of all taxpayers got a tax cut due to Trump’s tax bill;
To be fair, that means that the value in question is not anything remotely like ‘limited government’, but is instead ‘big government on the things I like and limited government on the things I don’t’, which is pretty much everyone’s ‘value’. “I want government to do the stuff I like and not the stuff I don’t” doesn’t really convey significant information, everyone from near-anarchist libertarians to the strictest authoritarians holds that value.
My criticism of the list is based on what conservatives do in reality and comparing it to the list. Most conservatives appear to want to live in a fantasyland where the real world effects and implications of their policies are ‘too extreme’ to mention, and where calling someone a bigot is worse than stripping someone of human rights. I am not going to enable that fantasyland. When I was growing up, I used to think my father was too harsh in his criticism of conservatives, now I see that he was just ahead of his time.
I mean, there’s really no way reconcile the way that people claim to believe in ‘traditional values’ but idolize a multiple divorcee who married a trophy wife, makes sexual comments about his own daughter, and brags about sexual exploits and sexual assault while criticizing a man who regularly attends church, is happily married in a functional relationship, respects his daughters, doesn’t brag about sexual assault, and has had no substantive accusation of gross sexual impropriety (no, wearing a tan suit doesn’t count). Either the ‘traditional values’ are something absurdly gross (that I’d be accused of caricaturing people to try to list out), or they don’t actually matter in real life.