When it comes to partisan politics, does it matter? I see Dopers doing this all the time: hurling criticism at one side without holding the other to the same standard.
What he is saying is: bad policy is bad policy.
It seems to you that perhaps you have nothing else to stand on.
I’m a Democrat. I’ve voted for a Republican once and it was for mayor. I held my nose and voted for Obama (yes, I was a HC supporter as well) but I feel so disgusted with my party and so disappointed with my President that I see why people don’t bother to vote at all.
That is such a bogus position. It is the same one I hear every year from the Republican Jewish Coalition when they send me mail and take adverts out in the local Jewish news and try to guilt trip us because the majority of us support a party who has more anti-Israel members than theirs. It some how makes us ‘bad Jews’ to be a Democrat these days.
If the guy is a Republican and he really does believe in Republican values, it’s his job to try to reform the things he sees wrong in his party, not jump ship and start voting for positions he believes are not good for the country.
Now, if the Republicans were supporting some outright racist agenda or some such, I could see your argument. But they aren’t, and as some black commentators have mentioned, Barack Obama isn’t helping black folk, either. His current economic and educational policies have been hurting black America. I wonder when Kanye West will tell us that Barack Obama doesn’t care about black people, either? :rolleyes:
This post constitutes Exhibit A. The fact that you can deny that the Tea Party is an extreme (?) wing of the Republican Party and that the Tea Party’s stated policies (as far as they can they can be translated into Coherent) are largely racist, which Republicans must either denounce or else be counted as tolerant of racism themselves, proves my point better than any number of specific tail-chasing “policy initiatives” that I could painstakingly dredge up for your edification. You’re in denial, or pretending to be be in denial, and I won’t be your enabler.
Not that it matters, but this is silly. Most of the shibboleths of the SDMB majority are ideas supported by at least a third of the country, and in most cases a majority – from the existence of human-caused global warming to the efficacy of demand-side macroeconomic policy. It is true that most of the GOP now rejects these things, like they reject evolution, any form of taxes, and gay marriage. But that doesn’t make the SDMB radical. It places the SDMB squarely in the center of public opinion.
Left-wing radicals, by contrast, believe things like private property should be abolished, that Israel is trying to exterminate Palestinians, that North Korea is just misunderstood, etc. There are some SDMB members that believe these things, but nowhere near a majority. Really only a handful.
Perhaps you’re confused about where the center is, because recently the right-wing radicals have gotten a lot more mainstream attention. People are invited onto cable news to argue for an end to *legal *immigration, a return to the gold standard, and that military and not civilian officials should make the decisions about whether and how to wage war. You never see the equivalent left-wing radical ideas in the public sphere these days. And so you come to believe that it is somehow left-wing to believe things like you should get a warrant before wiretapping a conversation, or that we ought not detain people indefinitely without at least a preponderence of the evidence that they are involved in terrorism (which is itself an incredibly low standard that the Obama administration has fought tooth and nail to preserve amidst cries for a “some evidence” standard).
I have no doubt that there are racists among the TPers. But I’d like to see you list the top 5 TP policies, backed up by cites, and explain to us how they are “racist”.
Martin: I think **Richard **has it right. What you describe is a very vocal minority on this board. Certainly a larger percentage than in the US as a whole, but still a minority.
How is the Tea Party racist? We could get into a debate on whether the TP is extreme or not, but that debate would focus on whether their budget cut proposals are too much at this point in time. Where would race even begin to come in to a discussion of the Tea Party?
Yes, I’m sure that there are individual racists IN the Tea Party, just like I’m sure that there are racists that shop at my local supermarket. But nothing about the TP or my local supermarket encourages or supports racism.
Maybe someone else will take the daunting task of educating me on how an organization that has a stated purpose of reducing federal spending (whether you agree or disagree with that aside) is racist or supports racist policies.
Of course when someone presents evidence of racism within the Tea Party, the response is always, ‘Oh, there might be some racists; but since the Tea Party is a grassroots party, there’s no central policy. Gotcha!’
Right, and it’s easy to just present it as a fait accompli that the Tea Party is racist but there’s actually little evidence of that.
The tea party is what I would call “fiscally immature”, and they have no conception of how governments are run fiscally, so they are obsessed with things that actually have virtually no bearing on their day-to-day lives. As an individual citizen of the United States it actually shouldn’t, just going by your self interest, be your number 1, overriding concern that the Federal budget be balanced at a cost of sacrificing essentially everything else.
The Tea Party is very anti-illegal immigration, and that is another position that here on SDMB is often equated to racism. With that one I do think there is some element of racism at play, but I think it is dramatically overstated.
The answers to those questions isn’t indicative of racism.
You can definitely believe that “if blacks would try harder they would achieve more” and not be a racist. I think it’s more of a classist thing that is wrapped up in race because blacks are disproportionately poor, and the tea party does probably believe that most poverty is the result of lack of motivation and effort (that makes their position stupid, but not necessarily racist.)
I’ve gone down this rabbit hole before. It is genuinely the case that leftist extremism dominates political discussions here. The only way you can view leftist extremism as a minority position is when you count all the posters who mostly stick to non-political topics in GQ, Cafe Society, The Game Room, IMHO, and MPSIMS. So in raw numbers you may be correct but talking about the political debaters there is a majority of extremists here.
It primarily appears in the anti-immigration, pro-wall-building (but only against the Mexicans, not the Canadians) nativism that is a basic part of their public agenda today. While couched in economic terms for appearance’ sake, it’s also blowing a dog whistle.
Do we really need to get into the teabaggers and their rally signs and bumper stickers and their obsession with Obama’s birth certificate, and how every one of their candidates is catering to them?
**Richard Parker **already answered this with a few examples of *true *leftist extremism, almost none of which you’ll even find here. Repeating your assertion does not support it; in fact it tends to provide an example of simple-minded demonization rather than actual discourse or debate.
