I agree with the gist of what you’re saying, but I’m willing to take a softer position:
If and when the GOP is willing to hold policy positions based on reality, it can be allowed to govern again.
Note that I said govern: Governing means debate, compromise, and an underlying willingness to unify around a shared policy crafted through fair and open means. It does not include holding the government hostage by playing games with the debt ceiling.
Government may not always meet the standards of a rigorous logically-sound debate, but it damned sure can’t be a hostage negotiation, and as long as the GOP thinks making it one is a valid tactic, it must be kept out of power.
If a generation or more out of power is what it takes to convince the GOP that insanity and hostage-taking are not how you govern a country, I’m all for it. There have been plenty of times and places where a single party’s nomination was tantamount to election.
BTW, this of all things convinces me that the companies aren’t running the GOP: No CEO would tolerate a company boardroom run like the GOP has run Congress. Companies have to acknowledge reality, and the board can’t sit around playing insane games with the budget until one side gets what it wants.
There is probably a name for this logical fallacy that you are promulgating, but i can’t think of what that name might be. Basically, here is what you seem to be saying:
Person A makes an assertion (I say Hillary is a hypocrite/pussy/loser for putting up with Bill’s serial infidelity)
Person B says that Person C has made an opposite assertion (You say that the Religious Right wants women to stay in bad marriages)
Person B accuses Person A of being a hypocrite (You say I am a hypocrite because I do not agree with the Religious Right’s condemnation of Hillary, even though I have NEVER agreed with it.)
Even though I have NEVER made the claim that you are trying to attribute to me. Dirty pool, good sir. And beneath the level of discourse I expect at the SDMB.
Tim, I have an honest question for you, and I would very much appreciate a straight answer.
Do you find it hypocritical/a double standard that Trump has said that it’s okay for Mike Pence to make a mistake (in his support for military intervention in the Middle East), but that Hillary Clinton isn’t allowed that same opportunity?
I’m not trying to make this a “gotcha” question. I haven’t seen anyone who says they are voting for Trump comment on this one way or another.
I’m not asking you to speak for the entirety of his supporters, or attempting to say that you feel it’s okay. I just want you to shed a little light on this, if you can, please.
It wasn’t even that broad of an issue - the question that prompted Trump to openly admit that he judged Hillary based on a double standard that he didn’t use with Pence was about the vote to authorize military force against Iraq. Both Hillary and Pence voted in support of the authorization.
Trump repeatedly claims that he said from the beginning that invading Iraq was a mistake, but no one has ever been able to point to or otherwise support this assertion, aside from a 2002 Howard Stern interview where he gave wish-washy support of the then-pending invasion.
You’re giving yourself too much credit. None of the arguments you’ve offered has ever made it to a third step.
Step 1. You offer a reason why you support Trump.
Step 2. Everyone else points out how irrational and contradictory that reason is.
Step 1. You offer a different reason why you support Trump.
Step 2. Everyone else points out how irrational and contradictory that reason is also.
Step 1. You offer another reason why you support Trump.
Step 2. Everyone else points out how this reason is as irrational and contradictory as the previous ones.
Step 1. You offer yet another reason why you support Trump.
Step 2. We split on this one. Half the people point out how irrational this reason is while the other half point out how contradictory it is.
We spend a lot of our time complaining about the party, but it’s the voters who are the problem more than the party. There is unfortunately a rather large political market for white rage, and the Republicans have been trying to exploit that to their advantage over the last several election cycles. In doing so, they’ve forgotten that when you turn your party into a refuge for the blindly angry, it’s difficult to talk about the more serious aspects of politics, like tax policy, foreign policy, and so forth. The republican party has lost the ability to lead or even hold mature discussions on these issues with constituents and to provide plausible solutions or compromises, because a now rather large contingent of their voters aren’t interested in level-headed thought and discussions: they want toxic rhetoric about their perceived enemies, and they expect it from their leaders. And if they don’t hear it, then they get sent home or kicked out of the party, like Eric Cantor, like John Boehner, like Alan Greenspan.
Unfortunately, the more gridlocked our congress becomes by this politics of the extreme, the more it exacerbates our festering economic, social, and political problems and leads to more instability. We can’t come up with an economic plan, so more people fall out of the middle class. We can’t come up with a consensus on national security, so one party stands back and criticizes the other every time there’s some incident like Benghazi. As our problems get worse, more and more people get outraged, and get sucked into the politics of hate. The market for this kind of politics will continue to expand unless democrats gain such a complete and decisive advantage that they are able to force their agenda down the throats of republicans and force Americans to see that there is actually a different path we can take.
I liked conservatism when it checked the abuses of liberalism. Conservatism had its place when the marginal tax rate was above 50 percent on the highest income earners and the welfare state continued to expand. I understand why the Reagan revolution happened. But it was a model of fiscal irresponsibility, and subsequent versions of miniature Reagans have been progressively worse.
I try not to be the stereotypical smug liberal elitist when I’m communicating with conservatives these days. I’m very much aware of the stereotype, and I’ve seen the type. But damn if some conservatives don’t push me to that point at times.
I’m not necessarily directing this at the poster in question (thinking about some recent discussions I’ve had with others on Facebook and elsewhere for the record). I’m actually interested in his responses, whether I agree with them or not, and I hope he continues to post.
IMO CLinton is a terrible candidate. And the ‘debunking’ of that on this and other threads is other people’s opinions or lawyerliness (‘you couldn’t prove in court’). If anyone is saying it’s ‘irrational’ to find Clinton a disaster, they are misusing the word. Although same goes the other way, I am not saying it’s ‘irrational’ to disagree.
I don’t like the general thrust of the Trumpist movement in the GOP ideologically. OK Trump himself is hard to nail down on policy, mixes/matches and contradicts himself a lot. However the general thrust, where his support comes from, is in favor of closing to the world (immigration, trade, foreign policy) and abandoning any serious effort to shrink govt or solve the long term fiscal problem (closing to the world would bring even more anemic growth, making an eventual fiscal meltdown that much harder to avoid).
The GOP prior was far from perfect on those things as I see it, but the Democrats worse IMO. But not having had 3% growth in any full year of Obama’s admin, first president to suffer that, is a central problem. That’s not all his fault by any stretch, I judge him on what I believe is his genuine emphasis on lifting growth: almost nothing IMO. Growth is always supposed to be a ride along that will supposedly come by pursuing other goals he’s actually interest in, like income redistribution or carbon reduction…but it just doesn’t work that way in the real world IMO. Clinton might emphasize growth more than Obama has, making compromises she’d have to with still probably GOP House, but she seems to be still trying to assure the Democratic base she won’t.
So if Trump were a credible person to be President saying the (substantive) things he has, I would still be disappointed in that as the GOP’s choice, but I’d probably reluctantly vote for him over the Democrats. However in the real situation he’s not a minimally suitable person for the office IMO and I can’t vote for him, though not for Clinton either.
Also the first president since FDR to inherit a financial crisis which was shedding 800,000 jobs per month when he took office. We went from that to consistently gaining jobs, now about 200,000 per month. He has outperformed Bush in terms of jobs creation, despite the fact that he was left the worst economic mess in 80 years. He can (and should) argue that he would have been able to accomplish a lot more had republican opposition not blocked him from 2011 until now.
In terms of economic GDP growth, yeah, he’s statistically the worst, but again, the economy was in a state of severe contraction not seen since the 1970s and with underlying economic conditions that mirrored those of 1932. Despite all of this, he nearly caught up to Bush in terms of economic growth over his second term. Again, he could (and should) argue that he would have accomplished more had his opposition allowed him to invest more stimulus into the economy and had he not inherited the disaster that was republican economic theory.
As for the emphasis on growth itself, that’s all well and good. But economies grow when the fundamentals of the economy are on track. Growth and employment actually go hand in hand. We need employment for continued confidence, spending, and growth, and we need growth for continued employment. The fundamentals of jobs and confidence were extremely weak in 2009 and remained so for a while, so his emphasis on those sectors of the economy made sense. It would have been the height of foolishness to address tax policy and peal back regulation when there’s an economy full of unemployed consumers. This is the part of economics that conservatives just simply fail again and again.
This bullshit works better when the person you are accusing has actually said the things of which you accused him.
I explicitly said that you may not be a member of the Religious Right and promoting that line of thought.
I have never accused you of hypocrisy.
When you trotted out your little snipe at Clinton for not dumping her husband, I pointed to the fact that a very large number of people who have criticized her on that point are hypocrites. You need only disassociate yourself from those people without going to great lengths to try to accuse me of what I have not said.
I was having a conversation about this yesterday. Trumps problem is that the things he says that make sense like the US and Russia should be friends or Fuck China gets lost in the other 98% of things he says.
