Ever notice how invoking the phrase “fighting ignorance” has become this board’s version of wrapping oneself in the flag and singing God Save the King?
Fucking Tory! Get 'em!
I have no idea why your objective is to defend Republicans. If you’re curious, you’ll have to ask yourself that.
No, not at all. Others have already done so, and I could do myself.
I’m just observing that you haven’t. This is particularly odd, since you’re the one implying that the standard of 99.9% bullshit would be okay.
So, no examples then?
Seriously, I’m a disillusioned Republican. I actually really liked Bob Dole, GHW Bush, and Dick Lugar back in the day. I have in fact heard Tom Coburn say some smart things, and W Bush and Karl Rove have said some things on Hispanic immigration that I agree with, and even my state’s own awesomely creepy corrupt Senator Blunt occasionally shows something that appears to be practical concern for his constituents. But in Coburn’s, W’s, and Rove’s cases, the examples that come to mind are the cases where someone breaks with an 85%+ consensus. It’s not encouraging. And these guys have their own silly ideas too.
But yes, there are still smart Republicans. There are still decent people in the party. They are not well-served by the likes of Eric Cantor (who is not that smart) and Newt Gingrich (who has no decency) as the face of the party. A lot of us decided that we could not be smart, and decent, and keep voting for the party when the candidates and platform were so bad in so many important ways.
The party is largely nativist now.
The party is committed against all reason to Reaganomics.
They claimed they were balancing the budget even as they fought against balancing it, and created the deficits they get the base to complain about.
The party claims openly to be opposed to affordable health care, Medicaid, and the living wage, then turns around and calls the Democrats elitist thieves. What?
The party is incredibly anti-conservation now.
And they seem to get votes by appealing to race-baiting and conspiracy theory, as if they don’t really have any policies to run on that could actually work.
Talk about self-parody!
Perhaps Stratocaster is auditioning to play a zany right-wing thinker on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, in which case I’ve fallen for his trap. :smack: But I’m going to pretend that he is serious here.
First of all, Strato, Hentor is being ironic when he suggests that “ever saying a single thing that isn’t daft” is a pretty low bar to brag of besting. Your response (“are you suggesting that it would be impossible to come up with an example?”) is almost precious.
Also, your “Why do you believe my objective is to defend Republicans?” elevates you to an elite group with Shodan and emacknight, proudly telling us what your objective might not be, while keeping what your objective really is well concealed!
Thanks, Stratocaster. Your contribution is worth the price of admission to the thread.
I agree that individual Republican officeholders say smart things a minority of the time. But the overall thrust is bad, and that’s not “good enough.”
Not how debate works. Want to knock down my thesis? Knock it down.
I referred to a party that hates taxes so much that they have come to hate math itself, violates the Geneva Accords, and feels no fear of being punished for being lawless. Do you see something different?
I was not more detailed, because it really was following another thread dedicated to a party’s love of very bad ideas. We are in the middle of a conversation here, and I just didn’t bother rehashing all the bad stuff we already know.
Feel free to show where the party is voting responsibly. I think a majority of the time a majority of the party is voting irresponsibly. Do you disagree?
I agree that the Democrats stink too. I just think the GOP are getting worse over time, and they have to be smacked down for it, because if there are no consequences, how will they learn?
Not my assertion. You already had a straw man, now you’re adding “never.” Go away.
Welcome to the SDMB, cbass1017! We sometimes have debates without cussing each other out, though they do end up here a lot. Such is life.
I don’t think you’re a bad guy. I just think the party has been subverted by a cabal. I was GOP myself until 2000, when I had enough.
So no, then. How about this: It’s only funny if an actual liberal said it. If it was just a voice carrying over Tarentum harbor, then it is not at all informative. By referencing Pauline Kael, you point to an actual liberal who was actually so clueless as to be shocked by the outcome of a lopsided election. What you have is a fictional liberal who was, fairly incredibly, shocked by the outcome of a close one.
Worse, it’s not even a British flag–maybe a Puerto Rican flag, or a French tricolor. 
I would like to say that I’m sorry for not including a line in the OP where I averred that many GOP leaders are actually intelligent men who have signed onto a bad platform, and that The Tooth’s characterization of them as morons was inaccurate. I forgot, and then much later wondered why Stratocaster was going off on me. Ah.
Yes, they can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But the amount of bad is too great. Majority bad is not good enough. And among officeholders these days, even the social conservatives are basically economic conservatives with a puritanical overlay, sorry to say. And no, I don’t have cites, just the overall impression I’ve gotten having been raised in the religious right, etc.
Personally, I find myself partial to the thesis that Corey Robin lays out in his book The Reactionary Mind, which attempts to tease out the connecting thread of conservatism from Edmund Burke (with a little detour back to Hobbes as well) to the present. This passage is relevant to the current discussion:
The introductory chapter to the book, which lays out the basics of his ideas on conservatism as a reactionary movement trying to preserve hierarchical forms of organization in the face of a challenge from below, is largely reproduced as this article. At times like the present, when there’s been decades without any real challenges to the established hierarchies (labor unions are all but dead, the major civil rights fights are all in the past, fights about women’s rights these days are mostly about a slow slog forward and huge battles over the same rights they won in the 70s, etc.), there’s not the same intellectual motivation for new ideas. All their left with is trying to repeal the twentieth century and perfecting the art of simply being mean.
For those interested in a more leftist polemical take on Robin’s book, this review by Conor Kilpatrick is pretty amusing. Hopefully, more people on the left take this argument seriously, because I think our side’s misunderstanding of conservatism has been one of the reasons we haven’t actually got much done (I mean, come on, we passed Bob Dole’s health care plan 15 years after he proposed it, and that’s our biggest success):
Since Carter, or even earlier, the Democrats have been abandoning the New Deal ideals of giving the masses more political power in comparison to the plutocrats, and have been talking about deregulation and globalization to grow the economy, and then redistribution afterwards, preferably through some sort of free-market solution. This has ceded enormous ideological ground to conservatives. But after thirty years of redistributing wealth and political power upward, they’ve used up all the good arguments to keep doing so. Without some sort of challenge to the established order, they’ve got nothing to react to. And attempts to find some new life by reformulating the same crap as, say, Sam’s Club Republicanism, fizzle into nothing.
Oh, I neglected to mention Huey Long and the “Share Our Wealth” program. Sort of strange that redistributive sentiment essentially ended with Democratic racism.
Edit: Also, it’s strange that the article writer criticises Orwell (Marxist Internationalist) and critiques of Lenin (author of “Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”). I suppose he’s left authoritarian?
Errr, is this in response to something in particular?
Fourth, and most importantly, the error of supposing one’s own views to be much more popular than they are certainly is not one to which LWs are any more prone than RWs.