Since when? Plenty of people aren’t either.
It’s not like there’s any other alternative; the Republicans are crazy and unscrupulous. Supporting them means that you are too, or that you are too stupid/ignorant to realize it.
And I think that only 20% of the American population being either crazy or unscrupulous is an optimistic number.
I suspect a lot of Republicans are quite sane and at least moderately scrupulous. I was going to say highly scrupulous, but that may be overly optimistic.
The problem is when that sanity and scruple is tied to false knowledge put out by the highly unscrupulous or by those who hate and fear certain unpleasant (to them) facts.
Sanity and scruple are not enough to save us. We have to be willing to see when the emperor has no clothes.
“Supply-side” economics doesn’t increase the growth of the economy.
Increasing the prison population damages the job market. It accelerates the collapse of entire sectors as the prisoners are used as shockingly underpaid labor, and drive respectable private companies out of business.
It does appeal to unscrupulous politicians to felonize previously non-criminal activity (such as hiring someone without papers, or possessing controlled substances) as a way of having pretexts to cull votes. By disenfranchising portions of ethinc populations in the rival party’s base, the GOP can maintain control despite widespread public disapproval. This has been going on for a generation.
Here’s a better picture of how the country is split.
You’re allowed to disparage groups of people, but you’re insulting another poster here. This is beyond the bounds of what is acceptable in Great Debates. I’m giving you a formal warning here and advising you to reconsider these kinds of attacks.
:dubious: My apologies, but I meant “you” in the generic collective sense.
If they aren’t, I’m not sure the U.S. will benefit from their idea of victory. It’ll be destroy the country in order to save it.
A tad hyperbolic, to be sure, but I can’t see how not raising taxes and not imposing financial regulation and not ending the quagmire wars does anything but hurt the country, or how seeking to ban abortion and gay marriage and restore “don’t ask, don’t tell” (or impose something stronger) does anything to help.
Raising taxes during a recession is a bad idea. There are reasonable arguments on both sides of that issue. There are no reasonable arguments for executing innocent people, declaring open season on gay teenagers, drone bombings of Pakistani weddings, or sundry other elements of our politics which are often (though hardly exclusively) cheered on by Republicans.
The fact that the left has mishmoshed moral issues with reasonable disagreements about whether the top marginal tax rate should be 37 or 41 percent, to the point that it actually has more contempt for people who disagree with raising taxes than people who want to keep the Jim Crow laws for marriage, is a major reason Republicans can get away with this shit.
I agree, but you may be stuck because you didn’t raise them when you should have, i.e. when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were in full swing and it was increasingly obvious that they weren’t going to end anytime soon, i.e. 2004-ish.
I’m not certain I fully get your drift, here. If I may suggest, the contempt is for people who won’t even consider a tax raise regardless of what happens, and who have misplaced social priorities. Either is problematic. In combination, deadly.
I mentioned neither Palin nor Cain explicitly. The Huff Post has a full list here. Bachmann - creationist. Perry - creationist. Paul - creationist - Santorum - creationist. Huntsman - good guy, to be sure. Romney. Probably a good guy. Gingrich. Says he is both, so he is waffling (which shows what he think the base wants.) Cain hasn’t said anything, but he claims to be an evangelical, so there is probably more than a 50-50 chance.
They are much worse on climate change, which is far more important.
BTW, I haven’t criticized Romney at all on this. I’m pretty sure he understands climate change. It is the base of the party which has forced him to sound like he might be a denier:
Gingrich is another example:
From here
That’s standing up for your convictions, folks! So here are two examples of people who probably know what is going on but trembling in fear from the Republican base. Huntsman is the only one speaking up for rationality - and you can see how well it is working.
That’s true when the people you are raising taxes on would spend it. If they are not spending it - like our top 1% or 0.1% - you can raise taxes on them with very little impact.
Well, that is the problem with the Republican party today. They don’t merely think that Democrats have bad ideas, they think Republicans have a monopoly on good ideas. In fact, their ideas are sooo good and Democrat ideas are soooo bad that even if they have to drag this country through hell to get their ideas implemented (but this time they will do it the right way, not the way they did it the last dozen times when their ideas didn’t work), because in the long run, THAT is what will be in the best interests of the country. See they are just patriots with a longer time horizon.
Conservatives always lose the war. First they lost the slave thing, then Jim Crow, then forced prayer in school, women’s rights, abortion, gays in the military, etc. Progress marches on and conservatives just try and hold it off as long as they can. It is inevitable that we will have same sex marriage and universal health care in the US, and conservatives will just delay it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and at some point no ones’ skull is thick enough to maintain the empty space within.
Alternative history and facts is not hyperbole. Where else but the extreme right-wing news shows would you hear tripe like “America was founded as a christian nation on christian values”? Where else would you hear people lying their asses off about everything from the Iraq war to the president’s claimed religion. You wouldn’t have them asserting he wasn’t a US-born citizen. You shouldn’t have people ignoring scientific developments en masse. You shouldn’t have them pushing an economic ideal which has failed, time and time again, as though it was completely accurate. What you seem to miss is that after the part where he brings up this point about “conservative facts”, he does something else: he gives examples and cites sources.
On left-wing news shows, and among Democrats. Come on, surely you haven’t forgotten the forged CBS documents, or the stuff about the October Surprise, or that the federal government is conspiring to suppress OWS, or how AIDS was manufactured by the government to kill blacks, etc.?
This notion that the GOP is uniquely hypocritical is pretty silly and one-sided.
Regards,
Shodan
Quite true, but your contrary notion falls under the heading of “false equivalency.” The American LW has no noise-and-lies-machine comparable to the RW’s.
As for the “October Surprise,” I’m still not ruling it out.
And what you’ve forgotten is that Shodan has not even read the article in question, so of course he did not know about examples and cites. These are irrelevant in his world.
Normally Shodan at least brings a vacuous and/or tenuous argument to Great Debates. This time, he’s just brought willfull ignorance of the article under discussion.
…Except that those are aptly-named “fringe” positions. As in, only the radical fringe believes them.
The OWS one is a poor example, if only because a nationwide conspiracy, while unproven, at least matches the picture we have at the moment fairly well… It’s a bizarre, unproven idea, I will admit, but an interesting one nonetheless, and something that possibly should be investigated.
But the others? I’m not sure about the numbers in regards to the forged CBS documents, or the number of us who currently believe that AIDS is a conspiracy, but I’ll give you a hint: they’re not anywhere near as large as the numbers I’m pointing to here. I have no idea what you’re even talking about in regards to the “October Surprise”, so whatever.
Seriously, I’m really wondering what the figures are. The number of republicans who believe in Trickle-Down Economics is probably well above 50%, otherwise the party wouldn’t be able to keep its “economically sensible” moniker for more than a second. I’m willing to be well over 66% believe in the idea that we were founded as a christian nation, or at least on christian ideals. Damn near half the party (45% when last polled, IIRC) believe that the president is not a national-born citizen, despite offering up his long-form birth certificate. Viewers of fox news were, according to a PIPA study, 80% likely to have one or more major misconceptions regarding the Iraq war. Compare that to NPR/PBS, who had around 27% (cite).
Hell, that’s just a few of the more extreme examples. What about global warming, where republicans who doubt it vastly outnumber democrats? What about evolution? What about the way the rest of the world views the USA? France’s role, diplomatically, in US foreign policy? These aren’t minority viewpoints, either. The number one conservative news source touts these proudly, as though they were factually accurate. Is it any wonder, then, that it feels to some of us like the republican party is living in its own little world, complete with its own history and facts?
And it gets worse. Let’s contrast two issues: Birtherism and the forged CBS docs.
What happened when the docs were revealed to be fakes? The democrats who had bought into it left the stage cringing, hoping it would soon be forgotten. Nowadays you’re not going to find people who still believe it, save for a very nutty, very small majority that most democrats would not be happy about.
Now… What about Birtherism? Well, the man released his short-form birth certificate, and they didn’t shut up; they demanded the long-form for some reason. So he gave them that, and what do they do? Do they slink away with the realization that they were wrong and that the whole issue is stupid and makes them look like racists? NO! They claim it’s a fake and continue to demand that the president be removed. They refuse to admit that they were wrong, and instead keep acting like they were right all along. What better way of putting this than claiming that they are out of touch with reality? And this isn’t just a few areas either; this is virtually every area for the republican party. From Birtherism to Creationism to Global Warming Denialism to the backbone of their economic policy in the last 30 years, Supply-Side, they are proven wrong time and time again and refuse to admit it, hoping instead that reality will mold itself around their beliefs.
To equate the fact that some (even on occasion many) Democrats fall for stupid scams and smear jobs with the fact that much of the modern republican platform is grounded entirely in fantasy is ridiculous.
@EP: of course, how could I be so stupid…
Here’s one telling difference: A spammer who posts the same thread about the “global-warming hoax” on this and a dozen other messageboards might well be drawing an actual paycheck, directly or indirectly, from the Koch Brothers or some similar RW source prone to astroturfing. (We’ve been over that many times before, here.) Nobody earns any of George Soros’ money that way, AFAIK. More’s the pity.
What evidence is there that raising taxes in a recession is a bad idea? How many jobs will be lost if Alex Rodriguez or Paris Hilton pay higher marginal rates? How did unemployment drop during the New Deal despite FDR’s raising of tax rates? The notion that all we have to do is let the wealthy keep more of their money and they’ll graciously create jobs is fit only for fairy tales.
Actually, he seems to be arguing from a definite and more-or-less coherent position, which is that any complaint about the GOP’s course, made by a disgruntled Pub and published in the mainstream media, is dismissable on its face.
Which is perhaps arguable, I suppose.
But Shodan won’t really argue even that, nor will he actually address the actual thread topic of whether Frum is right or wrong, and how.