What have the Republicans brought to the United States during their rule?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by joepistole, Aug 26, 2008.

  1. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    What have the Republicans and their cheerleaders (Hannity, Limbaugh, Fox News, etc) brought to us during their reign? A doubling of the national debt, moving from a budget surplus to a half trillion dollar annual deficit. What else have the Limbaughs, and the Hannities brought us? And since they were so generous in brining us these things, why should we continue listening to them?
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    Well, since you asked ....

    Hannity? Limbaugh? Perhaps it's obvious, but they've brought us to the death of shame. Strange how the paranoid conservative fantasies of my youth have come so perversely true. The overarching security state? That was supposed to be brought us courtesy of liberalism. The death of integrity? Again, that was supposed to be liberalism. Sprawling government excess? You got it ... conservatives.

    But the blind bloodlust ... that one's all conservative. I know, I know ... Stalin. But that's the thing: Stalin rolled the Revolution to the right, and look what happened.

    The festering ooze that is the American conscience is a disease for a generation. Pardon me, please, if I'm not particularly grateful to Karl, George, Dick, and the gang for that one.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    Agreed, and why do their minions and lackeys continue to follow and serve them?
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    In America ....

    The simplest theory has to do with a long lament heard from conservatives, that the schools are going downhill fast.

    Greed is the reason people continue to follow the insane path. Think, analogously, of childhood dreams of being a sports star. Yet we know that less than one in a thousand college athletes ever make it to the professional ranks, and of those that do, very few ever achieve true stardom. On the one hand, many of us accept this aspect of our fate. Sure, playing a video game isn't the same as actually playing the real game, but people still get caught up in the sense of competition. To the other, most of us have at least one friend who is overweight, slow, and fragile, yet still seems obsessed with the idea of athletic greatness. These are the guys who want to go out in the snow on New Year's, after the Rose Bowl, and play football down at the local high school. They're the guys who will take a massive slug of vodka before accidentally giving their girlfriend a concussion in a "glorious" quarterback sack. (And, yes, it is possible not only for these guys to have a girlfriend, but also one who likes football; it's the damnedest thing.)

    Still, though, these poor souls don't actually believe that, at thirty-five they're suddenly going to be drafted and become a pro league rookie of the year.

    When it comes to money, however, people get really strange. How many people look at the pyramid scheme, see it for what it is, and then convince themselves that they are the one who will rise to the top? It's a strange phenomenon that working-class people should be Republicans at all, and even more so when they start singing the virtues of trickle-down economics.

    Somehow, they think they can turn the situation to their profit.

    This—to borrow a phrase—divorce from reality is at least partially attributable to the decline of our educational system. While Americans certainly aren't stupid, and are, culturally, prone to working themselves to the bone, specialization has outpaced general education. An obvious symptom of this is the shift toward vocational and technical education while arts programs suffer. To borrow another—and older—phrase, American education isn't well-rounded these days. As a result, critical literacy is suffering. Certainly, people can read the technical manuals and follow instructions, but they aren't as prepared to stop and question whether the information sounds right.

    Or so says me. The minions and lackeys are, indeed, victims of a terrible lie. And they're so set in their narrow, compartmentalized routines that they don't realize they're sinking, much less that they're dragging everyone else down with them.

    The fastest runner sets the pace in America.
    Then watches money win the race in America.
    They put greatness in your head in America,
    Then beat you blue and red, just like America.

    They're gonna put you in your place in America.
    They'll tell you to your face in America.
    They will buy all you can sell, in America,
    To own a little piece of hell in America.

    So cover your eyes and cover your heart,
    And pray for the ones you're tearing apart.
    And deep in the night you dream of a TV show.

    You can beat them by a mile in America.
    You'll be laughing all the while in America.
    They don't care how you do it in America,
    Just do it with style and a smile.

    So cover your eyes and cover your heart,
    And pray for the ones you're tearing apart.
    And deep in the night you dream of a TV show.

    We are all here to look over the edge.
    And then we fall in.

    So cover your eyes and cover your heart,
    And pray for the ones you're tearing apart.
    And deep in the night you know you dream of a TV show.


    Floater, "In America"
     
  8. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,931
    First off, no new World Trade Center 9/11 attacks.

    A improvement in the care of our Veterans.

    Now as for the supposed budget surplus, it was never there, if you read the fine print, those were projection for what are called the out years, for budgets that hadn't been written yet, not the current budget, and the current budgets hadn't paid of the current debt in the first place.

    So the debt was just handed off, to the next year, or the next administration.

    Which means the money wasn't there.

    Main Entry: out–year
    Pronunciation: \ˈau̇t-ˌyir\
    Function: noun
    Date: 1981
    : the year beyond a current fiscal year —usually used in plural except when attrib.
     
  9. Challenger78 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,536
    Who needs the world trade center , when you've got garunteed wastage in Iraq ?. that and a lot of money being spent.. down a black hole of contractors.

    So, who needs another 9-11.
    Oh, and In case I forget, Happy 7th anniversary of your fucking war on terror. (in 3 weeks) You twats.
     
  10. OilIsMastery Banned Banned

    Messages:
    3,288
    World peace, harmony, hope, rainbows, unicorns, cupcakes, and chocolate chip cookies.
     
  11. Kadark Banned Banned

    Messages:
    3,724
    Tiassa,

    For the most part, your points are factual, but I think it's unfair to label the Republicans in power today as "conservatives". I don't think any of them have commendable track records as true conservatives (both during their time in office, and prior to), and their potential Republican successors, John McCain and perhaps Mitt Romney, have a discreet liberal history to them as well. Conservatism is about non-interventionism, sustainable spending, and restricting the government's control and influence over the "free market". Make no doubt about it: the Republicans have been disastrous during their reign, but it isn't due to their outward conservatism. In my opinion, a true conservative would help America substantially; namely, a candidate like Ron Paul.

    "Having pledged never to raise taxes, he has long advocated ending the federal income tax, scaling back government spending, abolishing most federal agencies, and removing military bases and troops from foreign soil; he favors hard money and opposes the Federal Reserve. He also opposes the Patriot Act, the federal War on Drugs, No Child Left Behind, and gun regulation. Paul is strongly pro-life, and has introduced bills to negate Roe v. Wade, but affirms states' rights to regulate or ban abortion, rather than federal jurisdiction."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul

    What a fantastic candidate! Deconstructing the Federal Reserve sham, abandoning the failure that is "No Child Left Behind", etc. He may have some libertarian tendendcies, but many of his policies reflect those of genuine conservatism, and adhere to the Constitution.


    Kadark
     
  12. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,383
    Why do sports fans (I am one) root for our local team and get emotionally entangled with the successes and failures of a sports team?

    Once you have picked your team it is your team you tend to stay loyal to them. "Us versus Them" is powerful stuff. Rationally the Republicans and Democrats are both a disgrace and should be discarded. The labels Conservative and Liberal have been counterproductive to fostering any real understanding of politics and therefore should be discarded. The nutty right wing media and the whishy washy corporate center-left media also have been counterproductive to fostering any real understanding of politics and policy options and therefore should be discarded. But "US versus Them" keeps us supporting our crappy teams against the hated enemies.
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2008
  13. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    I fear you may be very very correct. It is the independent voter that has kept this country on track through the years. I am not sure what has happened to the independent voter over the course of the last decade. Maybe they have been subverted by all of the Republican fear mongering and slanderous ads...don't know. But obviously it appears the independent voter seems to have vanished.

    What amazes me is that these so called conservatives still give much credibility to Hannity, Limbaugh, Fox...the very sources that gave us georgie II. The very guys that took us from budget surplus to a half trillion budget deficit and doubled the national debt...all the while touting fiscal responsibility.

    I am reminded of the old line from Star Wars, "So this is how liberty dies, to the thunderous sound of applause"...or something similar to that.
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2008
  14. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,479
    :roflmao::wallbang::jawdrop:
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    Incorrect. 9.11 was the second attack on the trade center.
     
  16. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,049
    Tiassa, i have always found it facinating watching concervitives try to get around the fact that the more educated you are the more left you vote.

    The only purpose of the term "liberal elite" is to try to turn this conection between education and the left wing into a bad thing and in the US at least it seems to have worked to the point where you dont even HAVE a left of politics.
     
  17. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    It kind of reminds me of the Nazis...they did not like education. They burned books. Mao felt threatened by educated people and they suffered his wrath. Stalin did not like educated folks either. Education seems to be the first victim of facists and social decline.
     
  18. Mr.Spock Back from the dead Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,938
    we know what the DemoRats brought us. al quidea, war in Czechoslovakia, global terrorism and the decline in moral values(criminals\terrorists rights outweigh those of their victims). and a bunch of other stuff.
     
  19. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,479
    well there goes t he chance of a rationial post right there but any ways lets continue.
    umthe dems tried to stop them also warned bush that they would be his biggest priorty and he ignored them. wanna try again and see if you get it right.,
    never heard of a war here but if it was it was probaly due to tension between the czechs and the slovacs,
    Your kidding right? The greatsest expansion of global terrorism happens under a repub and you blame the dems.
    Why does it not supprise me that you think giving people basic legal rights is a bad thing.
    in other words you couldn't make up more shit.
     
  20. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    (Insert title here)

    As one who disdains references to people like Hillary Clinton as a "liberal", you have my sympathies in this. But notions of liberal and conservative are somewhat transitional; they are constantly evolving in response to contemporary conditions. Would Jesus have gotten along with Muhammad have gotten along with Sir Isaac Newton have gotten along with Lord Byron? Then again, a prominent Marxist motto reflects the Book of Acts. The difference, of course, is a matter of stimulus and response: the challenges facing each age change, and demand different responses.

    Neoconservatism, for instance, ought to be regarded as a partial victory for liberal theories. While belligerence is the most prominent feature of neoconservatism, advocates note that the philosophy acknowledges the utility of deficit spending and social safety nets°. This is one of the striking features about President Clinton's concession to the Reagan economy; in rolling to the right, Clinton embraced a conservative economic theory that reflected the influence of liberalism and tried to harvest what he could from the trickle-down fallacy. Unfortunately, that maneuver did not play out as anyone might have hoped.

    As Democrats and Republicans alike play toward the "moderate center", we see all manner of contradictory indications. For genuine liberals, the point is clear: Our way doesn't play in Peoria. Conservatives may understand the same of their own outlook, but their response has been different. There is still a liberalism separate from the political structure, and the same can be said of conservatism. But the liberals are still looking forward, to things we have not yet accomplished°, while the conservatives are looking backward in search of a Golden Age to re-establish.

    Ron Paul is an excellent example of this ideological rollback. A hard money policy would throw the United States back to a myth that is perhaps antebellum, or maybe 1911 at the latest. And while this might sound appealing to people who dress themselves in "libertarian" rhetoric, it would more likely prove disastrous. Consider that the so-called "global pool of money" equals something around seventy trillion dollars°:

    That's a lot of money, right? $70,000,000,000,000. Twelve zeroes. Big number.

    So how do you back seventy trillion dollars in hard money?

    And then we must consider credit. Or, if you will, debt. Here's another number: Forty-eight trillion dollars. This is the estimated debt Americans owe, both public and private, equivalent to over two-thirds of "all the money the world is saving". It is approximately half again the value of fixed-income securities in the year 2000.

    And this $48,000,000,000,000 seems a challenge to returning to a hard money. A paradigm shift such as Paul suggests is dramatic in and of itself, but becomes gargantuan when forty-eight trillion dollars are caught up in the transition. A billion dollars here and there makes creditors very nervous; forty-eight thousand billion dollars could invoke a meltdown.

    So how does Paul's hard money proposal address this notion? That forty-eight trillion is derived from the very system Paul proposes to end; the way out of that massive hole is invested in the very system Paul proposes to end. What, exactly, will happen to that forty-eight trillion dollars? How do you represent that in hard money?

    There may well be a sensible answer, but in this Paul faces a problem that liberals are painfully aware of. Sometimes the best ideas involve subtleties that have no place in the contemporary cultural dialogue. That is, the idea is too complicated for mass consumption, too detailed to hold people's interest. And, given the specialization of knowledge among Americans, as well as a shortchanged and myopic educational system, it well may be that Paul's answer transcends the understanding of average Americans.

    Add to that Paul's disdain for the Department of Education. While there are certainly arguments of merit about the scale of the federal outlook on education, we cannot escape consideration of what happens if we throw out any sense of national standards whatsoever. A friend of mine went to a Christian school where one could spell through as thru and get it correct on the test because the administration figured that was the way of the world, and everyone would be using the simpler spelling in twenty years. The state legislature of ... I think it was Louisiana once proposed that, for academic purposes, π should equal 3.0, in order that students could get better test scores. Kansas wanted God to be taught as a scientific principle, thus undermining the scientific method. In the end, allowing such ridiculous standards in a patchwork arrangement will destabilize American society. Students in cosmopolitan centers would, largely, fare better in college acceptance and placement than students from rural or religious schools. This would sharpen economic and ideological gaps between Americans, thus reducing sociopolitical cooperation. American performance would decline. The damage would be insidious, and recovery would take generations.

    And, frankly, it seems a ridiculous proposal to sacrifice entire generations just so we can, today, take satisfaction in saying, "At leas' there ain't no guv'mint tellin' us what a circle is."

    A triumph of freedom today. Wud u lik fryz wi' dat?

    In overturning Roe v. Wade, just how far back would Paul like to set the Constitution? The nineteenth century? And how libertarian would he be to demand that everyone acknowledge a specific religious definition of what is or isn't alive and thus deserves rights? You are right to call Ron Paul a true conservative, but he would rather pretend to be a "libertarian".

    Generally speaking, though, conservatives have moved at least into the twentieth century, and some are trying to adapt to the twenty-first. Perhaps at a given moment of choice—probably an abstract point in history—we might have argued whether to take the left fork or right, press ahead or turn back. But, having committed ourselves to a certain path, we have traveled a certain distance and invested tremendous resources. We should not pretend for a moment that, in turning around and backtracking, we can easily recover those resources, or simply wave a magic wand and teleport back to the fork in the road.

    If the conservative leadership is no longer made up of "true" conservatives, what does this mean? Two options come to mind, but I won't limit it to that. Either ...

    • ... the definition of a true conservative has evolved, or ...

    • ... true conservatives are stuck somewhere back in the nineteenth century.​

    I suppose we could also look at it as if the number of true conservatives are dwindling, but it seems to me this perspective would suggest that true conservatives are stuck somewhere in the past, and the popularity of an 1840s revival is waning.

    And it is my opinion that we should be thankful for that.

    But that's just me.
    _____________________

    Notes:

    ° the utility of deficit spending and social safety nets — See The Neocon Reader. Irwin Steltzer, ed. Grove Press, 2004.

    I confess that I cannot recall specifically which essay makes the claim, but it's somewhere in the early part of the book.

    ° things we have not yet accomplished — While we tend to use the word "Luddite" as an anti-progressive pejorative, the Luddites were actually more progressive than we have, into the twenty-first century accomplished. One easy example is job retraining: the Luddites wanted job training for workers whose jobs were eliminated by new technology. It would certainly benefit society to undertake such an effort, and its not as if we've made no progress toward that end, but we still have not met the Luddite demand nearly two centuries later.

    ° seventy trillion dollars — This number refers to fixed-income securities.

    Works Cited:

    Chicago Public Radio. "The Giant Pool of Money". This American Life #355. May 9, 2008. http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242

    See Also:

    Horsey, David. "Our $48 trillion debt". Drawing Power. May 19, 2008. http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/davidhorsey/archives/139261.asp

    Wikipedia. "Fixed income". Updated August 21, 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_income
     
  21. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,931
    Never said it wasn't, what I said was no new attacks, there hasn't been a successful attack on America since 9/11.
     
  22. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,931
    And what do you know of the V.A. system, pray tell, your still home with mama.
     
  23. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    16,479
    enough
     

Share This Page