Letters to the Editor
Picko
Published Letters: 265 Editor's Choice: 11
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I love you too, Thomas Garman, but...
[Read the article: How the Christian right could defeat Rudy -- and make Hillary president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I really don't think I was engaging in undue generalizing. In fact, if you read my post you'll see that I threw in a number of qualifiers to acknowledge that you can't talk about the religious right as if it's a monolithic entity. However, some people seem to think that because of this, you can't talk meaningfully about the relgious right at all.
I think it is almost a matter of historical record that prior to Bush Jr., many evangelical leaders thought they were getting the short end of the stick in their political alliance with the Republicans. For instance, the evangelical vote was one of the forces that catapulted Reagan to election, but in retrospect it turns out that Reagan didn't deliver on a lot of their agenda. Let's face it - he's the guy who put Sandra O'Connor in the Supreme Court, among other things. George Bush, Sr. was no favorite of many on the religious right. The religious right is a powerful player in the Republican party, but you can go to many sources to see that beneath the surface, many religious right leaders have been consistently frustrated with the Republicans' (perceived) failure to do enough to push their agenda.
As for the nonsense you spout about the Democrat's only paying lipservice about pushing an expansion of SCHIP, I'm not quite making out the logic (if there is any) to your argument. The Democrats obviously want to pass an expansion of a popular healthcare program - that's their bread and butter when it comes to getting votes. Indeed, one of the surest ways the Democrats have of winning wavering voters is to convince people that the Republicans are on the verge of cutting these sorts of programs. Even though the Democrats might have known that their proposal was not going to survive a veto, that doesn't mean that they didn't have a good reason to force President Bush to veto it.
And I think you are grossly generalizing when you say that parents' failure to have health insurance that covers their kids is due to some moral failing on their part - as if one explanation covers all the thousands and thousands of cases! That's just easy moralizing on your part. I imagine it must not be a problem for anyone you know or care about, which allows you dismiss the problem so safely and so smugly.
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Villification is what they do best...
[Read the article: How the Christian right could defeat Rudy -- and make Hillary president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think it's futile to look for a Democratic candidate who is not going to be villified by the Republicans. That is what they do. They have taken Gore and Kerry - two extremely boring centrist candidates - and turned them into Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. There is no candidate that they won't do this to. If the Democrats somehow resurrected Ronald Reagan and got him to run as a Democrat, the Republicans would still find a way to turn him into the Great Beast.
One of things that no doubt drives them crazy about Bill Clinton is that they tried this on him, and he somehow managed to stay popular enough to win two presidential elections.
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I take it back, Thomas Garman - I don't love you
[Read the article: How the Christian right could defeat Rudy -- and make Hillary president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The funny thing is that in my commentary I didn't explicitly make an argument for or against SCHIPs. I was simply making the observation that Democrats do have a discernible interest in passing an expansion in the program, since it can be expected to benefit their electoral prospects. So, whatever else you want to say, their actions are not merely lip-service. Clearly you didn't catch this because you were more interested in picking an ideological fight. Whatever you might think, it's really not all that difficult to comprehend the underlying "philosophy" behind the Republicans opposition to social programs (although for a minute there I really couldn't tell whether you were espousing this philosophy or merely parodying it) - I have heard this sort of conservative cant before countless times, and it doesn't become any more persuasive the more you hear it. In any event, I can tell that you're a person not worth arguing with, because you believe what you believe, and I'm sure I'm not going to change your entrenched views of the world.
I will say this for you, though: you do have a rich fantasy life.
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Wrong?
[Read the article: How the Christian right could defeat Rudy -- and make Hillary president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Would that be the same Zogby who called the election for John Kerry perchance?
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Maybe so...
[Read the article: How the Christian right could defeat Rudy -- and make Hillary president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But i don't think we should base our voting on polling data in any event. It's just too hard to evaluate whether the methodology of any given poll is sound. (We always complain when politicians choose their stands based on polling data, but don't we fall into the same trap when we choose our candidates based on "electability?") My opinion is that in the primaries Democrats should vote principle but in the general election we should vote party. Which means voting for Hillary Clinton if she ends up being the nominee.
Honestly I'm not thrilled with any of the candidates we're running. They're better than the Republican field, of course, but I can't get whole-heartedly behind any of them.
But I don't think it helps for Democrats to go around calling each other "dumb ass" or proposing fifth column theories about the DLC. If you want to persuade someone that supporting HIllary Clinton is wrong, insulting them is perhaps not the best way to go about it.
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Of course God changes
[Read the article: Huckabee: "I'll stick with God"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The God of the medieval Catholic Church is not the same as the God of the 20th century Christian fundamentalist - hell, it's not even the same as the 20th century Catholic Church!
Let's please stop pretending that God is an universal, ahistorical concept!
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Well, obviously Romney is a Moron, er ... I mean a Mormon...
[Read the article: Barack Obama, jihadist?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If it weren't obvious that this was an intentional mistake, I would worry about what sort of hilarious bloopers Romney will make with foreign-sounding names when he's conducting international diplomacy as president. Fortunately, he'll never be president, so I don't have anything to worry about.