:rolleyes: Given that you are an admitted Republican, the Right and the reasons why someone might be condemned for belonging to it are a basic part of this discussion. You can’t rationally simultaneously ask why people accuse you of something and then demand that people not tell you why.
And how do we know that unless you provide a link? Your judgment on what is and is not racist is clearly not very accurate if you don’t even recognize the racism endemic in the Republican party.
:rolleyes: I’m not interested in searching through all your posts and then searching through thread after thread to guess at what you are referring to. You’ve made a claim about what you were saying and are refusing to back it up.
First, I’ve never used that word. Second, being a Republican is enough to trash anyone’s character. And third, guessing is all anyone can do since you refuse to provide any links.
A notorious Uncle Tom, a suck-up, a lightweight and an embarrassment to the court.
Ah, Colin Powell. A man who was used and discarded, his reputation ruined.
And bringing up one or two black people hardly disproves the racism of the Republican Party, since that’s something they’ve been doing for years. You can tell where the black guy is at a Republican gathering is because the cameras are all watching him.
It comes down to this: the complaints against Obama are usually so nonsensical and irrational that we assume you are either completely brainwashed, a moron or you just personally do not like the guy for some reason. Personally when i see people complaining about historically low taxes or massive spending i don’t immediately assume they are racists, i immediately assume they are idiots but not every liberal is the same. When the grand majority of a group based entirely around taxes does not know that taxes have been lowered for most of them under Obama that’s not racism, that’s just plain stupid. When people blame the deficit on Obamas spending rather on Bush tax cuts and unpaid wars and rising healthcare costs that’s not racism, that’s idiocy.
In the 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration, the debt has gone up by a third. During the eight years of the Reagan administration, the debt rose by 186%. That means that under Obama, the debt is rising at a rate of about 13% per year. Under Reagan, the debt rose by about 23% per year, almost twice the rate of debt increase.
In terms of spending increases, under Reagan spending almost doubled from 1981 to 1989 – from $678 billion to $1.14 trillion – which includes a 40% increase in his first term alone. Not including the latest rounds of deficit reduction agreements, spending under Obama is projected to go up by about 26% comparing Bush’s last year of spending to Obama’s projected 2013 budget (that’s $2.98 trillion to $3.77 trillion). Therefore, spending in Reagan’s first term increased at a rate 50% greater than in Obama’s first term (as projected).
Some people blame Democratic control of Congress for the rise in debt during the Reagan years. You must admit that Democrats did not control Congress for eight years, because the Republicans (under Howard Baker and Bob Dole) controlled the Senate for six of those years.
It is clear that Reagan made the debt far worse, at a much faster rate, than Obama has. And yet, conservatives place him on a pedestal for cutting taxes (which, of course, worsened the deficits), and are prepared to castigate Obama to being one of the worst presidents ever due the rise in the debt under his leadership. But this doesn’t make sense… it is just a fact that Reagan made the debt far, far worse than Obama has. It’s in black and white.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t worry about the debt. But the heaps of conservative criticism of Obama (which runs a government with tax rates far lower than in Reagan’s terms) seems out of proportion to the conservative position on the Reagan legacy.
If debt and spending are such important issues, do you care to unscramble this puzzle for me? Why, if Obama is objectively less bad than Reagan on spending, taxes, and debt, is he viewed to be so much worse?
I was the one who made the comment and got (rightfully) warned for it.
I have already responded via PM to OBBN about the accusation and my reasoning for it. I also said I wasn’t interested in rehashing all of this publicly since it’s been done to death here. FWIW, my reasoning somewhat follows that outline by The Second Stone in his first and third posts in this thread.
You poisoned that well in the very first sentence of your OP. Well done!
Because there are Republicans to this day who still insist that Obama isn’t a “real American”, and that any proof to the contrary is all the result of one of the most massive conspiracies in history.
And because when you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
Bush didn’t sound anything like a hillbilly, hillbillies are Appalachian and sound vastly different from Texans (even Texans who don’t sound like “true” Texans such as Bush.)
Who knew we had so many Conspiracy Theorist Republican politicians? Isn’t it dangerous to keep those guys in office, since, as you say, they’re just looking for more conspiracies to believe in? Since they’re Conspiracy Theorists (not racists, no sir!), one can only imagine that they doubt that we landed men on the Moon, as well.
On this board you aren’t arguing with regular Democrats, I know a lot of regular Democrats. Union workers, blacks who are beholden to the party, moderates who were majorly turned off by some of the things that happened under the Bush administration, normal social-safety net advocates and older people who are desperately going to defend Medicare and Social Security to the last man and woman.
By and large what you have on the SDMB are not the 90% of the Democratic party who are actually mostly normal people, you have a small subset of the Democratic party that is ultra-radical. You have some outright communist/socialists (however they care to label themselves) like BrainGlutton and Der Trihs who, when the thread isn’t about Republicans will probably mention the fact that the Democratic party is just another right-wing conservative party and only the lesser of two evils.
What you need to understand about political discussion on this board;
[ul]
[li]Most posters that are frequent participants in the political debates here see the world in black and white. This means they latch onto any one of your positions and extrapolate it to mean you must support every position that falls on the same side of the political spectrum. It also means if you are someone who comes to independent opinions on each of the major issues they will not be able to really understand you and will assume you are lying when you say you don’t support certain positions on your side of the aisle.[/li][li]As a place majority-occupied by left wing radicals, they tend to think everyone is radical like they are. So if you come out as a Conservative you can’t just be a regular Conservative, to them there is no such things, all Republicans/Conservatives are Pat Robertson or Glenn Beck, and you will be pressed to defend the most radical positions of the Republican party regardless of your true position on those issues.[/li][li]There is also an obsession with President Bush II and Reagan. If you criticize anything about President Obama that Bush II or Reagan did during their Presidencies you will immediately be called a hypocrite. In a more reasonable place people will understand that no two time periods are identical for one, there are many things Abraham Lincoln did to win the Civil War that were massive violations of civil rights. I support those massive violations and through the lens of history view them as necessary. If Bush II had done some of the more egregious things Lincoln did in response to 9/11, I would have opposed those actions (“Extraordinary Rendition” and “Warrantless Wiretapping” and “Firing U.S. Attorneys” are child’s play compared to the stuff Lincoln did, btw.) So there is some validity that perhaps some of Reagan’s spending (happened during the Cold War, for example) might have been justified when say, Bush II’s or Obama’s wasn’t. [/li][li]The “Southern Strategy” by which the GOP captured the South will sometimes be brought up as “proof” that the GOP is inherently racist. This is a whole separate debate, but what I will instead say is that historically many of the Democrat Southerners were out of step with the rest of the party on every issue outside of race, and once the Democrats nationally decided they would not be the anti-Civil Rights party the racist Southern Dems lost a true home for their racist views, and the GOP was able to integrate them into the party. I do not see any major national party activities in the last 30 years in which the GOP has tried to implement racist policies. However on this forum virtually any action by the GOP is likely to be labeled racist, the “extreme” idea of trying to get some system in place to verify who someone is that is coming into a polling station is seen as veiled racism designed to disenfranchise blacks. In the real world even some of the worst run countries in Africa have started introducing biometric voter verification systems because it makes sense.[/li][li]Radicals on the left and the right share a lot in common with schizoid personality types. They see grand conspiracies every where, they see enemies every where, they believe in the most crack pot conspiracy theories and they are prone to believing in malignant and evil motives from opposing parties. This means you have genuine belief in Bush having stolen the 2000 and 2004 elections, for example. This is also where the idea that Bush has “manufactured” his accent comes from. I think it’s also part of the reason (in addition to some of the other points above) for the “all Obama opponents are racist” comes from. People who are that radical can’t fathom reasoned opposition to their darlings, but instead most ascribe genuine evil as the only reason you could oppose them. Because they are so deeply convinced that most of their enemies are always engaged in elaborate deceptions and running conspiracies they are very likely to think it entirely reasonable to assume that any Republican on the forums who is claiming to not be a racist is obviously just “covering” because that is what all Republicans do.[/li][/ul]
Once you recognize those things you will quickly not be bothered when some loony-tunes character from these boards labels you a racist. It’s akin to a street preacher or a doomsayer standing on a soap box yelling profanities at you, recognize that it comes from their instability and is not a reflection on you whatsoever.
I don’t care which party is currently courting the racist vote. They will always be among us, tempting the baser instincts of political ambition. If you feel you have been insulted, report it to the forum moderator. If that fails to satisfy, then perhaps the forum is not worth your sincere and well-considered input.
What I do care about is how those who control this country economically also feel entitled to control it politically. If going with that flow is what passes for “coming to my senses,” perhaps this forum is not ignorant enough for your ingenuous and unsubstantiated input.
The Republican party is the home of black haters and bigots. That does not remotely suggest that they all are that way, but that is where they reside. When a person gets real nasty against Obama in spite of the fact his policies are far too much in line with Bushs’s, it is not hard to see why people might wonder where the hatred is based. The racist signs at tea bagger rallies are not figments of anyones imaginations. Just praise Obama and give out your email and you will get horrible messages of hate. You would be shocked.