How does that work? If no exploitative behavior was involved, how can you accuse them of taking a contrary position? The exploitativeness must be firmly established before this can be offered as a concrete example of the phenomenon.
Stoid, that’s not so.
If this group, or these groups, condemned a Republican president as exploitative for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky under identical circumstances to Mr. Clinton’s affair, but failed to condemn Mr. Clinton, that’s the phenomenon in a nutshell.
Of course, their condemnation of the Republican president is the hypothetical here; you may be advancing the idea that they would have reacted identically in such a circumstance. I don’t buy it, but since it’s the realm of the hypothetical, there’s really no proof one way or the other.
In any event, the specific example is not as germane as the illustration. As I said, you’re more than welcome to substitute the equally hypothetical case of what conservative treatment of a Republican First Lady chairing a national health care reform committee would have been. I am convinced that the conservatives would have offered very little criticism of such a move, as opposed to the actual howls that ensued when Ms. Clinton acted in this role.
- Rick
** Rickjay, ** that was a very good analysis. But I’m still left wondering… who decides? If, for instance, the Republican Party has X platform, which covers 20 separate issues. Joebob Citizen has considered every issue and decided how he feels about it. When you compare the Republican party platform and Joebob’s opinions, you find that they coincide perfectly.
Is that so fantastically outrageous a mindboggling coincidence that the only * possible * explanation is brain-checked partisanship? You don’t think it’s possible or reasonable that a legitimate and thoughtful examination of the issues could cause one to be in total agreement with a particular party? Really? Because if that’s the case, how did the Pubbies come up with their platform in the first place? Is there some God of Party Policy that thinks up the ideas and then directs all followers to agree?
While I think, I know, that partisanship as you describe it exists, I don’t think it is as common as you seem to. I don’t think it is possible in most cases to know whether someone is partisan to the point of willful blindness, but it is an easy charge to make. “You don’t see it my way, which is obviously the right way, and therefore you must be blinding yourself due to mindless partisanship.”
It’s a pretty arrogant charge, really, if you look closely at it. Because it amounts to “I know your true mind”.
For the record, in my own case, I am not, as it happens, a Democratic Joe Blow. I disagree with many Dem Platform items. My disagreement often finds me farther left than farther right, thoguh not always. And many of these issues have come up on the boards and I have discussed them, but those who would accuse me of blind partisanship apparently don’t remember that.
I don’t disagree with the big picture you paint, Rick. It’s an unfortunate truth that narrow special interest groups on both sides of the spectrum tend to be, well, intellectually dishonest. And that is terribly sad and terribly frustrating, because it undercuts the otherwise valid nature of their positions.
I was taking issue in this particular instance only because I call myself a feminist, but there are many feminist positions I do not hold with at all. In the case of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, my own personal and political opinion of it is that he was weak and foolish and probably self-destructive, but I do not hold with the idea that he was exploiting her. And if he were a Pubbie, I wouldn’t either, I would just be less likely to expend any energy defending him.
Entirely possible, although you’d think it’s pretty rare.
As to “who decides,” that’s up to the observer. It’s not something you can test in a laboratory. Some people like bacon more than sausages, some people like the DH and some don’t, and some people base political opinions on allegiance rather than issues.
Of course it is. However, in many cases, it quite obviously is not. I’m not necessarily just talking about voting decisions here; you might agree with a particular party’s platform up and down the ticket one year. That can happen, although I have trouble believing it’s very common, given the complexity and sheer size of a major party’s official platform.
But let me ask you this. Let us say that tomorrow, George W. Bush were to announce that he had selected a “Religious Advisor” to provide him with counsel while he was President. This person - a Christian, naturally - was to be consulted by Dubya on matters Christian to help him in his duties as President. Let us further suppose that the person Dubya chose had in the past been known to associate with bigots of varying stripes and had been heard on at least one occasion to use racial slurs against Jews. How do you suppose Bush’s decision to employ this person as an “Advisor” would be treated by Democrats? How would YOU feel about it? Answer honestly to yourself, please, right now. How, really, would you react to that? What are your thoughts on that sort of development happening in the White House today?
Hmmm.
I see it every time I turn on the television, to be quite honest. Like I said, in my experience, EVERYONE who joins a political party ends up being more interested in the party’s fortunes than an honest examination of the issues. YMMV, but my perception is it’s an overwhelming force that drowns out a lot of honest debate.
You’re simply making things up that aren’t true here. I see an amazing amount of partisanship in people who are on MY side of the issue. All the time. I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but this is not something I (and many others) only perceive in people I disagree with on the issues - I honestly do not think there’s any less partisanship on my side of the house, ideologically speaking. As you know I think (I stress THINK. Not know.) you’re a very biased partisan - and that’s why this thread exists, at least in part - but you and I agree on many, many fundamental issues. Probably more than we disagree on, from what I can tell.
Oh, by the way: Dubya, so far as I know, has not named any such “spiritual advisor.” But I know a President who did:
Bill Clinton.
I agree that partisanship is a pretty common phenomenon. You often see smart people making silly (and/or inconsistent) arguments that happen to support their views. Partisanship is the only reasonable explanation.
The problem with such intellectual dishonesty is that it tends to undercut the otherwise valid nature of a position, as Stoid correctly and cogently observes.
I believed it was correct to impeach Mr. Clinton, for example. But I respect the Republicans who voted ‘Not Guilty’ in the Senate; they were clearly acting against their party interests. I also respect the Democrats that supported the impeachment for the same reason. It’s hard to divine the true motivations for the Republicans that voted to impeach, or the Democrats that voted not. Were they truly convinced of their positions, or were they swayed by the political affiliation of their subject?
There’s no real way to know.
In any event, I think this dicussion pretty well answers the OP. Whether the epithet is deserved is one thing, but the above is why it’s used as a epithet.
- Rick
I read a most stirring letter to the editor today - from a Democratic partisan who expressed disgust that the election outcome favoring the G.O.P. was motivated by “fear and greed”.
You can find justification for such an argument in the wave of campaign advertising depicting Democrats as supporting tax increases. Just inserting the epithet "Tax-Hike (your opponent’s name here) into an ad apparently is seen as an effective strategy.
There was a legislative candidate in my district who was labeled “Tax-Hike Tyack”, an interesting claim since she had never held public office (I voted for her, partly out of spite).
But what of the Democrats who tried, mostly in vain, to roundly paint their opponents as seeking to destroy Social Security? Might there be a little appeal to fear and greed lurking there?
True partisans are incapable of grasping the hypocrisy and irrationality of their political obsession, or at least pretend they can’t.
We have a lot of them on this board. I doubt they make any converts to their views. Mostly they end up cheerleading each other.
Very tiresome.
My, what a civil political discussion.
Bricker, the point is that the Clinton episode is a set of facts that has not publicly happened to a Republican President. While Bush Sr. probably had a ladyfriend on the side during his tenure as VP, the press never gave it much play, and Democrats were not going to use the federal budget to chase down what appeared to be the man’s private pecadillos. The Clinton/Lewinsky affair could not have happened to a Republican because the Democrats respect the right of someone to have a wholly private affair, as immoral as it may be. The Clinton affair was unlike the Packwood affair because Sen. Packwood forced his hands and tongue on unwilling Senate employees approximately 8 of which complained.
The only thing I can say to Republicans who believe that Democrats have unfairly chased down Republican private affairs and are bitter over it: I’m glad that Republicans have something to be so bitter and self-righteous about, because it suits them so well. But really, who are they kidding? A Republican having an affair? The only one that ever came close to having the balls was Newt Gingrich, who incidentally was not having the same kind of “not sex” that Clinton was during the 90s. Yet the press and the Democrats left him alone. That fool Livingston and the other Republicans that were embarrassed at about the same time were done in by the fellow Republicans, not Democrats.
Nor was I above equating liberal, partisan and Democrat. They sometimes overlap, depending on who you talk to about whom. Anyone who says I called them all equal is just making a straw man argument. Is it wrong to be a “partisan”? I don’t think so. Are there people who don’t like partisanship? Sure. But in a system of competing political interests (not a dictatorship) partisanship is either admitted by the participants or covered beneath bullshit.
And someone who thinks that women’s groups went after Clinton because of his “immoral” affair apparently don’t know the difference between a knife fight and ass covering. Women’s groups (many meetings of which I attended during the relevant time period) strongly supported Clinton’s political program and him personally, as did I. Simply because I and others said it was immoral and stupid of him to behave that way didn’t change my support for him personally or politically. And in the '98 elections, the public agreed by spanking the Republicans badly.
While there are Republican women’s groups, the vast majority of women who organize politically in this country do so as Democrats because they are tired of a bunch of patriarchal assholes telling them what to think and how to behave because of religious convictions that these women do not share. Most women do not like being treated as though they are unclean, stupid, unequal in the eyes of the law, or a mobile uterus of some man who thinks he has the right to “own” a woman as he would a dairy cow. Like most people, they don’t like being told by some insincere jackass that they must adopt an offensive political position or the jackass(es) will think they are hypocrits: Republican jackasses are the enemies of a woman’s right to choose whether their logic is perfect or not. And as for Republicans’ who think that they have perfectly consistent logic, it is no more or less perfect or flawed than anyone else’s: it is usually just an artifical construct to justify their pre-existing value system of their own self-interests.
:rolleyes:
**
yeppers, same applies to (most) Dems.
Luc, I didn’t say that the most Dems weren’t the same. We are all people, and we are pretty much alike.
As for the election last week, I’m not bitter, as I was after 2000. This year the system worked the way it was supposed to. If people want to vote Republican, or stay away from the polls, that is their right.
Bricker, perhaps you could explain your understanding of the meaning of “consensuality”, and throw in “youthful indiscretion” and “family-oriented” while you’re at it. You might emerge with a fuller understanding of the related terms “hypocrisy” and “vendetta” while you’re at it.
IAS, you’re overlooking the broader context of the Clinton lame-duck-session impeachment, which was essentially about finding something, anything, whatever it took, to get him for, and fabricating something when the earlier efforts to find something had failed. The Beltway press was hardly a neutral observer; they’re a player with their own agenda too - part of that was to get revenge on a politician with more popularity than they, largely gained by consistently going around them directly to the people.
“Partisan” is often used as an epithet, because partisans are often lying.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s perfectly possible to imagine a person adopting his position on the merits - for example, I could extend to you the benefit of the doubt and say that, had a Republican President confronted the identical set of facts in the Lewinsky scandal, you would have been outraged at the Democratic intrusion into his private life, and seen the entire issue as insignificant.
But I am absolutely convinced, however, that this is not true for most of Congress: I am sure that many of the Democrats that said those forgiving things would NOT have said them were a Republican President facing that gun. Equally certain is that many of the Republicans decrying the horrible crime of lying under oath in these circumstances would have been amazingly forgiving if it were a Republican President accused.
Again: the issue is just an illustration. If it’s something about which reasonable people may differ, why did almost all the Congressional support for impeachment come from Republicans, and almost all the defense from Democrats? This doesn’t say one side was right and the other was wrong – but it does suggest that BOTH sides were motivated to take positions by party affiliation, not by merits of the case.
Partisanship constitutes intellectual dishonesty when it’s exhinited like this.
- Rick
My 2 cents worth is that a partisan is bad when he or she is one of those guests on the Sunday morning talk shows who never ever admits that his or her opponent occasionally has a good point. According to these people, everyone on their political side is now and has always been on the side of the angels, while the other side supports drowning puppies, when the truth of the matter is that they’re really arguing about something prosaic like whether the top marginal income tax rate should be X% rather than Y%. But no, according to all of them, their side is always good and the other side is always evil and unless you support them and their side the country will be in ruins.
Coming at it another way, to me a partisan politician is one, like former President George H.W. Bush and Al Gore, who demands that people support him even though he has no real beliefs and is just hollow at the core. “Vote for me! Why? Just because I have an R-elephant or a D-donkey on my shirt, that’s why!”
Or that one side was. That’s all it takes.
Just wanted to chime in here and say that I’ve been very impressed with the civil and even handed manner in which Bricker has posted in this thread as well as his spot on analysis. Bloody good job.
Grim
You cannot adopt a political position on the “merits”. Politics are about competing interests and values. Anyone who claims to be neutral with a politically neutral position is a fool and a liar.
Elvis, I more or less agree with you. The whole Clinton thing from the first of five Whitewater investigations was in the worst bad faith. That doesn’t change my opinion that Clinton’s womanizing while married is adultery, and that other than knowing the basic fact, we should have left it there. The use of the government to investigate and prosecute Clinton was a gross abuse of governmental authority and demonstrates the complete despicability of all prosecutors everywhere who did not speak out against it. A notable former prosecutor who was opposed to it was Vincent Bugliosi. I can’t think of another off hand.
And someone else said above that partisans lie a lot. So do a lot of people, that does not equate partisanship with lying. We have a word to use to describe with 100 percent accuracy the type of people who lie: liars.
I am Sparticus:
That’s a rather sweeping statement.
And I don’t agree. While it’s true that politics are about competing interests and values, it does not follow that neutrality is impossible, nor is an honest person who is stridently one-sided tainted by this brush. The partisan condemned by this thread is the person who, in spite of their convictions on an issue, adopts a position because of party affliation. I have no quarrel (on these grounds), for example, with an ardent enviromentalist who consistently decries those in Congress who accept campaign contributions from oil and lumber companies. But he becomes partisan when he excuses, applauds, or fails to criticize, fellow Democrats for accepting such contributions, but attacks Republicans for doing so.
By the same token, an ardent pro-lifer that criticizes others for their pro-choice work is fine by me. But if that ardent pro-lifer criticized Democrats for voting down a parental notification bill one year, and was conspicuously silent when fellow Republicans voted down a similar bill the next year, then I am scornful.
You see? It’s not at all about neutrality with respect to the issues. It’s about sticking up for your real beliefs, even when that inconveniences your own political party.
- Rick