Letters to the Editor
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Bush is Reagan on steroids
Take Ronald Reagan, subtract his ability to change course, add the Manichaean worldview of Reagan's lying biographers, and what have you got? George W. Bush, the embodiment of modern conservatism, far more than Reagan was.
I'd put it another way. Take Ronald Reagan, give his party control over both houses of Congress, subtract the constraining force of the Soviet Union in foreign affairs, and subtract the need to worry about a Special Prosecutor Law, and you've got Bush to a tee. Same bloated federal spending, same rank corruption, same mentality that the government is there to serve your friends and clients, same overarching concern for tax breaks for the rich, same disgusting disregard for the rule of law, same callous violence visited against the lives of civilians in "evil" countries. Reagan just couldn't approach Bush's glorious failure because he was held back by external constraints. Bush is simply an illustration of "Be careful what you wish for", applied to conservatives.
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anti-slavery vote
Torture is wrong. Wars for profit are wrong. Spying on Americans is wrong. These are the issues that matter to me, guess that's not the correct attitude or something.
Me too. Pathetic, isn't it? To have to vote to get the US back to some baseline humanity?
Like declaring: I'm gonna bite the bullet this time and vote against slavery. And dammit, if you've got an hour or so, I'll try to convince you slavery is a bad thing, too.
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"shooter042" the rat jumps ship as well....
Apparently he didn't get the memo that Government is here to serve the country, not that conservatives were meant to serve him....
Hope you can swim, "shooter". ;-)
... That aside, what are you folks going to do now that you can't run against Bush?
Run against the folks that are trying to out-Dubya Dubya. You know, like the guy that wants not one, but two Guantanamos, or the guy that's going to do whatever torture he can think of, and then kick the guy in the balls for good measure afterwards, just to show he won't be as wimpy is Dubya.....
I know, I know, "shooter", this plays just fine to the atavistic Neanderthals of the Republican party, but the primary is just the first test.....
But keep on keepin'n on, "shooter" and the rest of you wingnuts. We do appreciate your efforts to keep digging.
Cheers,
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If you look at Bush from the right vantage point
he looks like a ______________________.
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@WT
To the extent that maybe you are saying Jefferson Davis was n businessman, whose slavery-based agribusiness has a lot in common with Leland Stanford and then on down the line, okay.
The people who became the original KKK were to Jefferson Davis' agribusiness what family farmers sucked into Iraq are to ADM and Halliburton -- cannon fodder, who didn't happen to die of being on the wrong side of a war. Most of them had never owned slaves, which cannot have been said of Davis.
I'm not excusing anybody (and don't want to, the KKK were murderers), least of all the modern conservatives that go around à la Jeff Foxworthy pretending they have something in common with rednecks, or the Southern Strategy people who control them. But remember that not everybody who disagrees is all one unity, not every antecedent to the modern red-stater was a conservative. And that many of the Democrats in Congress that passed the admirable Great Society list that Paul put up over the weekend fit the bill for such a broad-based antidromic inheritance wave.
During the campaign the President said he had a plan to end the War in Vietnam in 100 days. I wish to inform the President he has two weeks left. Democrat Strom Thurmond, U.S. Senate, 1969
(quoted from memory)
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What else are they going to do?
If they don't disown him he's theirs. If they do disown, we hammer. All in all, a nice dilemma of their own creation, a self-created gift to those who would fight their authoritarian plans.
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Great post Glenn.
Now for the application of what we know.
What needs to come out of the mouth of every Democrat when some skeezy neo-con lover with an (R) next to their name says Bush isn't a conservative is to pull out quote after quote after quote of moments when their particular opponent or speaker held to this president like a drowning man to a plank of wood.
Bush really put the Democrats in a bind over everything. He politically cornered us on this war, and has used the media to frame any debate in his terms.
Someone said earlier that Dems need to force the debate to be talked about on our terms. That's a huge deal. It comes down to using different language entirely in some instances. Even down to the word "Terrorist" or "war". The use of language to frame a debate has been Rove's strong suit, and Democrats just need to start talking a different language.
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@ ondelette
Agreed. I'm not trying to tar you personally with that brush, just because you might think of yourself as a conservative. I stand by my point, though. The exploitation of crackers, who did the dirty work for the gentlemen while they sat on the veranda fanning themselves and chatting up the ladies, was a feature of the Southern aristocracy way before Jefferson Davis.
Why was it in the interest of a Virginia mule skinner, or a Georgia cracker to fight for Jefferson Davis anyway? The honor of his state? Well, if no less a scholar and gentleman than Robert E. Lee seemed to think so, can you blame them?
The Southern aristocracy is gone, of course -- the war put paid to them for once and all -- but the bourgeoisie which succeeded them adopted all their airs, including the habit of using poorer whites to enforce the uglier parts of Jim Crow. This I don't have to speculate about; I've seen it with my own eyes.
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No Surrender Adnato
"It must be a magical word this word "conservative." We have people clinging to it and incorrectly ascribing positive positions to it. Let me ask you a question their MacK - What the hell are the "liberal" positions to those issues you have listed above?? Is it "liberals" that consistently ignore the rule of law? Do liberals think the 4th amendment should be done away with? Liberals must be the ones that want to throw out Habeas Corpus and.... why do liberals hate all that is good?"
Why do you want to surrender to Rove and his buddies - the guys who have hijacked language to make Liberal a dirty word. Why let them claim the adjective and noun conservative, when they simply are not . . .
Call them what they are radicals, extreme radicals. Don't let them co-opt conservatives by dishonestly suggesting they are conservative.
As to your questions -- Is it "liberals" that consistently ignore the rule of law? many liberals support and supported civil disobedience -- does that make them consistent?
Do liberals think the 4th amendment should be done away with? Some do, depending on the issue. Liberals are for change.
Liberals must be the ones that want to throw out Habeas Corpus . . again it depends, at times in history PROGRESSIVES have had a more restrictive view on habeas corpus
why do liberals hate all that is good? They don't, but they try less to require people to be "good," "straight," "sexually conventional," of a fixed religion. I suppose that makes them enemies of the "good"
The oddity in the current environment is that being "liberal" makes one conservative (in the proper meaning of the word.)