Hey, Daddy was pretty smart. Hell, he had a Mideast war and turned a profit on it.
Nah, don’t think so.
I mean, if they had a clue, they’d realize that an investigation into the NSA would lead back to the great GOP comedy duo of Bush and Cheney, which would kinda defeat their purpose.
Yeah, but Jeb just doesn’t look like he’s up to running. My best guess is that they’ll try to resurrect Rubio once everyone’s had a chance to forget about his bad year in 2013. (I’d consider him to be in the Eastern Conference, btw.) And it may well work. Remember when McCain was dead in the water (and practically forgotten) in the fall of 2007? Everybody’s counting Rubio out (or simply forgetting that he exists). I say too soon by a good year and a half.
Given the kind of news Republicans have been getting, being forgotten about is probably the best they can hope for.
Yes, they learned that Bush is out of office and Obama is president, so bashing the NSA is now politically expedient.
Still, one wonders what role NSA surveillance will play as a midterms issue.
You’re being unfair to the GOP on the NSA. There is a genuine divide, between the more libertarian faction of the party and the defense hawks. The defense hawks/neocons are defending the program even though Obama is running it and the libertarians, of which there are like 3 times more now than in the Bush years, hate it. And I don’t think those Republicans particularly care if it highlights how wrong Bush and Cheney were. That’s kinda their goal. Makes it easier for Rand Paul to eventually occupy the White House.
Zero. Democrats, according to polls, have no problem with NSA surveillance as long as Obama is running it.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/21-5
As a matter of principle, Democrats trust government. It’s Republicans they don’t trust.
Wow. A line that is not only true, but wildly complimentary to the Democrats.
We all judge the world by what we see from our own minds. Sometimes that reveals more than we intend.
Making, all told: three, then?
Nah, about 50.
Hardly. It demonstrates extreme stupidity. If republicans controlling the government ruins the plan, then it’s a bad plan, given that we’re in a two party system.
Democrats should not support anything they wouldn’t trust the other party to use.
Like it or not, that notion just doesn’t work.
For instance, we need to have a military. For obvious reasons, I don’t trust the Republicans to use it in a responsible manner if they regain control of the government. But we’ve still got to have it. Similarly the assorted spy agencies. And privatization certainly doesn’t help: contracting out military services to Blackwater and spying to Booz Allen reduces accountability and creates an expanded set of private interests who will fight tooth and nail against cutting back the military and spy budgets.
And needless to say, I don’t trust the Republicans to do anything with Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare if they regain power, other than voucherize, block grant, and repeal them out of existence if they can get away with it. But the government’s the only entity that can do these things in the first place; there isn’t a better plan.
One thing that NPR mentioned when food stamps were recently cut was that the size of the cuts was roughly as big as all the charitable food aid done by all the charitable groups in the U.S, that it was the equivalent of keeping food stamps the same, but shutting down every church or other private food pantry in the nation.
The scale of our needs dwarfs what can be done through any other agency besides government. Maybe relying on government in a two-party system where the two parties believe such opposite things is a bad idea, but there isn’t a better one.
Those are different cases. Both parties agree we need a military, they just disagree on the us. Both parties agree on food stamps, Republicans just want to spend less than Democrats do.
Democrats don’t hate the military and food stamps when Republicans run those things, they just wish Republicans would run them more to their liking.
NSA, by contrast, and the whole Patriot Act thing, Democratic activists hated it, now they like it, and soon they’ll hate it again. On the bright side, that means that President Paul will get some bipartisan support to repeal a lot of it.
Have Republicans been consistent in their support for the NSA/Patriot act?
*pleaspleaseplease *nominate him as the GOP candidate pleasepleaseplease
Oh, he’ll lose, but that’s okay. I actually prefer Clinton to some of the GOP potentials. She’s a competent manager and not a special interest Democrat. Plus she can be trusted on national security. She’s hawkish as hell. Actually, if Paul was the nominee, the neocons would go to the Democrats en masse.
What a lot of you don’t seem to realize, in relation to this thread, is that winning elections isn’t everything. The parties in charge continuously change. What is more stable are the political trends, such as the liberal advances of 1933-1980, followed by decades of conservatives controlling the agenda. I’d argue that conservatives still control the agenda. What liberals should be asking themselves is why no matter how many elections they win, they never seem to be able to get much done other than to preserve the New Deal?
IMO, winning an election is about economic conditions, satisfaction or lack thereof with the party in power, and the skill of the campaigns. Elections rarely change what the public wants. That takes years of laying groundwork, through wins and losses. The seeds of the Reagan Revolution were planted with the Goldwater loss. Likewise, if the GOP is to be a successful libertarianish party, it will start with Rand Paul getting his ass handed to him in a general election. What will Democrats gain from a Clinton Presidency? Lower domestic spending? A more hawkish foreign policy?
So, all those elections where you guys lost, you didn’t really lose. And the ones you guys did win, you really did win. OK. Got it. Is this the one where America is actually a center-right country?
Will there be unicorns? I like my fairy tales to have unicorns.
Yeah, the Republicans want to spend less on Food Stamps. They want to spend nothing. That is why Democrats don’t want them running the program. They say they just want to improve the efficiency, make it work better, but all they do is cut people and finances. And once they have it cut down and starved for money, they say “See, Government can’t run this efficiently! PRIVATIZE IT!” Which doesn’t work in terms of cost or efficiency, but they don’t care. Government is smaller and they have pleased donors.
As for the NSA and the Patriot Act, I don’t know any liberal or Democratic activist that likes either one. I am constantly seeing Opinion pieces and commentary that hate both. And not just from left wing nutjobs. I’m a Democrat, only qualify as a liberal in most things by contrast to the current GOP, and have never been an activist, but I have been against the Patriot Act since before it was passed, and don’t like the way that Obama is currently been handling the NSA.
There are a lot of Democrats that don’t mind the current problems with the NSA, because they are in charge. Most of the Senate seems to be in that area. But they are also exactly the same people that you rightly point out are moving to the right, which is away from most of their party. Democrats have DINOs, just as Republicans have RINOs. And some of them honestly believe they are doing the right thing. But don’t take that to mean that all Democrats are okay with something just because the party leadership does.