To back up John’s post below, this recent editorial from the Johnson Country Sun pretty much says it all:
[W]hat in the world has happened?The Republican Party has changed, and it has changed monumentally.
You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election. They lose in low turnout primaries, where the far right shows up to vote in disproportionate numbers.
To win a Republican primary, the candidate must move to the right.
What does to-the-right mean?
It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.
It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.
It means anti-stem cell research.
It means ridiculing global warming.
It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.
It means immigrant bashing. I’m talking about the viciousness.
It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.
It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.
It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education.Note, I did not say it means “anti-abortion,” because I do not find that position repugnant, at all. I respect that position.
But everything else adds up to priorities that have nothing to do with the Republican Party I once knew.
That’s why, in the absence of so-called traditional Republican candidates, the choice comes down to right-wing Republicans or conservative Democrats.
And now you know why we have been forced to move left.
This isn’t losing Walter Cronkite and middle America. In regular times the Johnson County Sun would make Cronkite look like an acid-crazed flower child. A party that pushes the Sun Democratic has well and truly sent its reasonable people to the showers.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Bush was right- he’s a uniter, not a divider. Everyone except the craziest 200 Americans (and probably 70-90% of his immediate family) is going to be united against him by January 2009.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Mind you, Darrell, scs, and the other spoofs don’t count against that 200 figure.
Thomas
Well, no, not really. There are only a couple of issues that divide liberals from conservatives in Kansas, and Steve Rose and his family have always been on the liberal side of those issues: Rose is prochoice, and has always supported prochoice candidates when at all possible; and Rose is in favor of ever-increasing spending on education, and has always supported candidates who promised to spend more on education. Now, when the Kansas Republican party dominated the state–meaning that the Republican candidate was almost assured of victory in the general–the party had liberals and moderates and conservatives. That’s changing, and that’s probably good for everyone. It isn’t good for Kansas to have a weak Democratic party. But the change just means that liberal Republicans and some moderate Republicans have moved to their natural home in the Democratic party.
Rose has favored Congressman Moore in every race he’s run in the 3rd District in Kansas. He favored him when he ran against a moderate Republican and he favored him against conservative Republicans.
Perry Como
And as we all know, nothing offends conservatives more than education.
The Other Steve
The biggest issue in the past several years that’s been dividing conservatives and liberals in Kansas is Evolution.
This editorial is right, if you don’t stand against Evolution you cannot get a Republican party nomination in Kansas.
To say otherwise is being dishonest.
Zifnab
So what you’re saying is that, even in Kansas, the media is liberal. Am I mistaken?
Jess
Hey kids–
check out the cover story of the latest Rolling Stone–very interesting, hard-hitting article titled “The Worst Congress Ever.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/worst_congress_ever/page/1
craigie
OT, I know:
Does anyone have a link to a downloadable version of the ad? I don’t mean the YouTube flash experience, I mean a QT or mpeg version I can put on my own computer.
Anyone? Thanks.
yet another jeff
I guess that means the Sun has to clean up the Democratic party now since they’re now Democrats.
Punchy
Being in KS, I can say it’s clear that this state is starting to finally get its shit together. We’ll know for sure in a few weeks, if Ryun and Phillip Klown get bounced. But they DID go vote the KSBE whackjobs outtie and replaced them with normal, my-uncle-of-my-uncle-is-monkey pols.
One more swift kick of the “Jesus should teach in every district” KSBE Commish out the door and we’re well on our way to “normalcy”…
David
Craigie: If you use Firefox, you can download the file from YouTube. Get the VideoDownloader extension.
Thomas
No, OtherSteve, the biggest issue dividing liberals and conservatives is not the tempest in a teapot over state science standards. It’s education funding and taxes.
Perry, I’ve got nothing against education, and I’m conservative. I am not in favor of ever-increasing spending on anything.
Zifnab, Steve Rose isn’t “the media” in Kansas. The Sun is a free newspaper, for godsakes.
ThymeZone
What’s happening to the GOP, as evidenced by the turmoil in Kansas …. just a symptom of a bigger thing.
The bigger thing is this: How do you govern a country where a non-trivial and active portion of your population thinks things like “the earth is 6000 years old?”
How do you a govern that, and especially in view of the fact that if you challenge the idea that the earth is 6000 years old and that people who believe that are being willfully ignorant (which they are), then they will accuse you of being every bad thing in the book, and claim that their “right” to believe such a thing is sacred.
In other words, you have to share the country with … and possibly be governed by … people who believe nonsense and superstition.
Can the American Experiment survive that?
Just wondering.
ThymeZone
How do you govern when people can’t construct a sentence, as I apparently cannot in my previous post?
I chalk it up to the fact that my fingers don’t work and I am typing with my thumbs. That’s my story and I am sticking to it.
“How do you govern that, especially in view of the fact …”
That’s what I meant.
Zifnab
That’s where I tend to disagree with you, Thymezone. If a non-trivial and active portion of the population thinks the moon is made of green cheese, that’s not really a big problem. But when they elect a swindler to office, a man who’ll take and give massive bribes on the national level for nationwide political control just to get “the moon is made of green cheese” into their HS science textbooks, then you have a real problem. When said people can be marched up and down the street in support of said candidate, when they can be turned out in droves to vote for said candidate on this one issue, when they defend said candidate to their dieing breaths no matter what sins he’s committed in office, then you have a real problem.
It’s the demagoguery. The stupid demagoguery. The idea that “one man and one woman” is worth spending your children’s inheritencies, your environmental legacy, your very god given freedoms of habeus corpus and speech and press and religion on, is the problem here.
The Other Steve
But Tim… the Republicans only did that because it was for the Children(tm).
craigie
David:
Thanks!
Learn something every day…
The Other Steve
Why is it, Thomas, that the voters keep rejecting you and your concerns?
For the past 10 years you guys keep trying to get wingnuts on the board, and everytime it becomes clear who they are, the voters oust ’em.
Why are you so afraid of being honest?
RSA
Zifnab writes:
That’s true, but ThymeZone has a point as well, that a better-educated population should be better equipped to resist demagoguery. I think of his example of young Earth creationism as a symptom. If a large number of people take something ridiculous on faith (i.e., because people in authority or old books tell them it’s so), then persuading them of other ridiculous things becomes much easier for someone who at least professes to having bought into the same beliefs.
tBone
A tempest that’s been going on for 7 years now. That must be a big teapot.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
It’s big enough to include Dover, Pennsylvania. That place must be at least 1,500 miles from what was traditionally viewed as the border of Kansas- who knew that geography standards were also under assault in Kansas schools?
Perry Como
At least we’re ahead of Turkey.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
My bad- according to Mapquest, Kansas City is a mere 1046.05 miles from Dover, PA- a short jaunt of 16 hours, 37 minutes by car.
Evidently, Kansas isn’t the only state where geography lessons are in order. Evidently, my home state of Delaware needs to start teaching its students orienteering and the calculation of distances. (Then again, southern DE did have a bunch of hicks hooting for joy at driving the Jews out of their town a couple months ago, so it’s not all THAT surprising.)
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Don’t forget Poland!
Afghanistan, too! And the less said about Burkina Faso’s education system, the better. (Do they even have one?)
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Okay, in all fairness, Poland’s education system is probably better than ours. My point still stands, whatever it was.
tBone
Physical distances are immaterial. Kansas City and Dover are linked by an expressway the moonbats here will never be allowed to drive on – Interstate Almighty. Sorry, lefties – it’s a toll road, and you either burned or banned the only acceptable currency.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
As you can see, both sides have their crazies. So aren’t we all equally at fault, here? One side takes LSD until they think Reagan helped the Contras ship cocaine into LA, the other side thinks that dinosaurs used to let Adam and Eve ride around on their backs. Somewhere in the middle lies reality. But can’t you liberals accept that YOUR side has morons, too?
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
It’s probably whatever the non-scientific equivalent of a wormhole is. You know, the same passageways used by Santa Claus, when he needs a vacation to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
tBone
It’s the non-scientific Truth, is what it is. Wormholes are lefty lies promulgated by drug-addled Communist science fiction writers.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
And acid-crazed flower children, like Walter Cronkite and all those moonbats who kept investigating some phantom scandal called “Iran-Contra.”
ThymeZone
My point exactly. And the “better educated” part is where the “willful ignorance” comes in. It’s not as if a proper education is out of reach. It’s that these people don’t want to be properly educated.
How do you govern — or be governed by — people like that?
The Other Steve
What’s this I hear about GDP only going up 1.6% this quarter?
tBone
You bow down and submit to a Higher Power, moonbat. It’s not complicated.
Perry Como
sqrt(x * x + y * y) ?
Math is a tool of the Devil. Multiplying letters is an abomination of nature.
Aaron
Hillary Clinton once said:
“I didnt leave the GOP. The GOP left me.”
Welcome to Hillary Country.
Gary Ruppert
Ooh, ooh! Can we cut Star Wars, then?
Gary Ruppert
Whoops! That is to say…
The fact is that Kansas is just Frisco on the Prairie and the fact that this paper has become a left-wing BDS-spewing Michael Moore propaganda mill should surprise nobody.
tBone
Damn. Thought we might have had a genuine wingnut here, but it’s just another dirty spoof.
Zifnab
No THAT is where I can starkly break ranks with you ThymeZone. If the huddled masses are guilty of anything, it is not a failure to seek out an education. Schooling is a top voting issue in almost every election. We have three major broadcast networks and another three or four major cable news networks. There are veritable industries founded on books, local colleges, internet knowledge storehouses, and the like. Google is not a Fortune 500 company because people shy away from information.
But over the past 15 years, lying has gone from a means of conveying information to a freaking artform. I can’t tell you how many times in my youth, walking down the streets of UT at Austin – a bastion of liberalism, science, and understanding – I doubted evolution. Me. College educated. Well-read. Civilized and cultured. Lead to doubt one of the bedrocks of scientific understanding – on par with gravity and number theory – because I’d been so ruthlessly bombarded with right-wing propoganda.
What is a poor little woman from Kansas who doesn’t even hold a diploma to her name supposed to think, or to teach her children, when the only thing she’s EVER been institutionally taught is that mankind sprang from God’s Bossom 6000 years ago.
ThymeZone
Not sure I follow exactly. Are you saying that the “6000 year old earth” club is the victim of misinformation?
I disagree, if you are saying that. I hold them accountable for the state of their information. I am convinced that everyone is ultimately responsible for his or her own information inventory. Sure, you can get wrong info, but once questions are raised, then you have a responsibility to keep digging and to get the best and latest info available …. or else, keep your mouth shut and let the people who HAVE done that do the talking.
At some point, we own our own intellectual integrity. We are at that point once we have the means available to do the exploring, and the awareness that it needs to be done.
Thomas
zifnab, that’d be an unusual Kansan. Kansas schools teach evolution, and have done so for generations. We also get TV, newspapers and magazines, and internet access here in Kansas.
Other Steve, haven’t I made it clear that I believe in evolution? What’s unclear about that statement?
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
I knew tons of people who didn’t believe in evolution in law school. Tons. Not to be partisan about it, but I’d have to say that roughly 40% of the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society fell into the disbelieving-evolution-by-virtue-of-religious-lunacy camp.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Okay, yeah, that was pretty partisan. We need more bipartisanship in our religious lunacy. And, to be fair, after law school I met a couple liberals who didn’t believe in evolution, either. They didn’t have the excuse of making it all the way to law school with this level of ignorance, though.
That’s not even going into the overt racism and other forms of idiocy that some of the law students espoused. After law school, I developed a low opinion of the vaunted intellectual superiority of those obtaining advanced degrees in America’s education system.
Zifnab
Which works in theory, but as I’ve said, the right has gotten very good at lieing. Sure, they teach evolution in HS at the base level, but in Sunday School they teach creationism. Who do you believe? A lackluster teacher or a fiery Sunday School mom?
Take a look at “The Panda’s Thumb” and The Discovery Institute. Sure, the book and the institute have been throughly debunked on both the factual and philosophical layers, but not everyone in Kansas tunes into the debate 24/7. Raise a kid on creationist bedtime stories, reinforce it through high school, send him off to a Christian College, and don’t be surprised when he disbelieves good solid carbon dated proof.
I’ve seen too many smart people fooled. Co-workers. Friends. Relatives. People I would, in every other way, respect. But because they’ve been raised in the echo chamber, they come out swinging for ID because they simply don’t know any better. It takes years of arguing and postulating and fact-checking and debunking to get these people to come around. But I can’t really blame them, because they’ve had years of lieing and lieing and lieing to put them in that position in the first place.
ThymeZone
True. But I don’t think it’s ID they are swinging for. I think it’s superstition, and the right … even the necessity …. of ignoring facts in favor of superstition.
Faith is not just belief in the absence of other information, it is belief DESPITE contradicting information. Despite evidence to the contrary.
That’s willful, and that’s why I hold all mental adults responsible for the quality of their belief systems.
It’s one thing to have only wrong information. It’s another to have both right and wrong, and refusing to make a proper distinction. Nobody is a victim in that situation, assuming a healthy mental capacity and the availability of resources.
You have to fight to keep thinking the earth is 6000 years old in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Nobody can do that to you, you have to do it to yourself.
ThymeZone
And a damned good one. Bravo.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
It’s amazing how many people are fooled in the other thread. I’ve got at least two people who seriously believed me when I blamed Clinton for Darfur.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
.
Nevermind, they finally caught on. It took them a pretty long time, considering how they’re regular posters and so am I.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
You said it. It’s even more of an abomination than man-on-dog sex.
Zifnab
If this were “wrong” and “right” information regarding the stock market or gravity or global warming, I’d be with you. You can test those things. I’m betting that by the end of 2005 we had a lot more true believers of climate change coming out of Louisana.
But the arguement for evolution happens on a different level. People don’t really “see” evolution happening around them. We’ve yet to create life from non-life, though we’re getting closer. It’s not something that can be debunked without a few years of biology. And when you’ve got that, there’s a whole new line of IDers ready to take up the arguement for creationism at the HS Biology classroom level.
It’s very difficult to pluck the “truth” from all the science talk. How does a layman on the street argue with a “doctor” who has carefully laid out a powerpoint’s worth of data “debunking” Darwin?
sglover
No THAT is where I can starkly break ranks with you ThymeZone. If the huddled masses are guilty of anything, it is not a failure to seek out an education. Schooling is a top voting issue in almost every election. We have three major broadcast networks and another three or four major cable news networks. There are veritable industries founded on books, local colleges, internet knowledge storehouses, and the like. Google is not a Fortune 500 company because people shy away from information.
Gotta disagree with you here. Do you know what was, for me, one of the most demoralizing aspects of the run-up to our Glorious Mesopotamian Adventure? It was that how the Cheney administration was able to pass off lie after lie, distortion after distortion, at a time when it was never easier for anyone to consult entire libraries of information from all over the world! I believe that the upper 2-3 tiers of the gevernment belong in front of a war crimes tribunal, but they never had anything like a Soviet-style information monopoly. They were able to launch their strategic disaster because the citizenry just couldn’t be bothered to stop the damn thing.
Let’s be honest about the dirty little secret about the American “love” of education: Deep down, most people think of schooling as nothing more than a path to a better job. People get passionate about school taxes and school board elections because they want their kids to get nice, lucrative office jobs — and who can blame them? But it’s a mistake to believe that the majority of citizens is very interested in cultivating inquiry or curiosity or healthy scepticism.
ThymeZone
Hmm, I think we are off track a little. No “science talk” is asking people to figure out whether the earth is really 6000 years old. No scientist worth his salt would suggest that the 6k earth is an actual possibility.
People have already voted that science trumps superstition. When most ID’ers have a sick kid, do they take him to a faith healer?
The ones who do? They’re crazy. Literally, nuts. I don’t have a way to deal with them, but at the very least, they stay out of government. We can’t have government by those people. However, there aren’t many of them, whereas there are many of these:
The ones who don’t, and take their kids to a real doctor. They’re willfully ignorant, and those are the people I am talking about. They are responsible for their ignorance. They have the capacity to choose between fairy tales and facts, but refuse to do so deliberately in order to cling to their superstitions, or to the trappings of them.
ThymeZone
That’s a valid point, and the fact you are pointing to creates a divide, a schism between those who are willing to do the work and gather and process the information, and those who are not willing … for whatever reason.
This divide between those with knowledge and those who despise knowledge is the basis for the distance between fundamentalist Islam, and us. Between Dobsonites, and us. Between those who would trash the courts and the universities and science and process, and the rest of us.
If we can’t win that contest in our own country, how are we supposed to win it on a world scale?
Area Man
Will the real Thomas please stand up? Earlier, we had “You’re just pissed because we banned you at RS” Thomas. Now we have the “Never heard of RedState, who’s that?” Thomas.
Good luck with that.
The Other Steve
In this same thread Thomas was against Evolution before he was for Evolution.
I think he just has difficulty knowing who he is and what he believes in.
jcricket
Everything written in the Johnson County Sun article quoted in this post is a dead-to-rights result of the Christianist/evangelical takeover of the Republican Party.
This is also the reason there are no “moderate” Republicans left anymore, and why John finds himself adrift, abandoned & attacked by the party he once supported.
Pooh
Well, when you consider that Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds and John Yoo teach ConLaw (though I bet the students at Berkley love Yoo’s class since it’s so short. “The Constitution is what W says it is. Class dismissed”), one has to ask whether it’s the ingredients or the chef…
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Could be the recipe, too, if you’ve read most of the Supreme Court decisions they’ve come out with since the Nixon appointees rose to the fore. (At this point, do we even HAVE a fourth amendment at the federal level in this country? And if so, will its vestigial remains survive the decade? Will future generations look on it as a quaint anachronism not unlike the Third Amendment?)
Thomas
You can ask John whether I’m the same Thomas as the one you’re referring to. As I said, I’ve never posted at redstate. Also, to repeat myself, I don’t have any problems with evolution.
And I’ve never had a problem knowing what I think.
Pooh
Thinking about what you “know” on the other hand…
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Finally, a clear voice cuts through the fog of confusion on these difficult issues. Would that all of us shared your certainty!
Zifnab
I’m pretty sure we still keep hard and fast to the 3rd Amendment. I know Keith Olbermann was confident that if the rest of the Constitution goes up in flames, the 3rd will stand tall till the end because Halliburton makes way more money when only they provide the housing.
As for the Fourth, I think that went down to whatever Amendment we passed declaring a War On Drugs. Something like “No man shall be deprived of his liberties unless there is a vaguely reasonable suspicion that he possesses more than 1/10th of an ounce of marijuna.”
capelza
Because I am a perverse person sometimes..when confronted by the “The earth is 6000 years old” folks who in the same breath tell me how backwards the Iranians are (so 12- century those “Arabs”) I point out to them that one of the vice-presidents of Iran is a female paleontologist and that they do believe in an old earth, and new findings in geology and archaeology from the neolithic and beyond are touted in the Islamic state controlled press.
Now this in no way endorses Iran, but it was interesting to read (my hobby is Hellentistic Asia and I come across this stuff and started reading their press to see how they view the world).
It kills me that the U.S. is even having this “controversy” when a backwards nation like Iran isn’t. But hey! at least we aren’t Turkey!
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
The 2nd is probably pretty safe too, to be honest.
That wasn’t an amendment, that was a Reagan-era press conference and a couple after-school specials. Way, way more important than some fucking document written by a bunch of dead WASPs in wigs- we had Nancy Reagan arguing for the 4th’s repeal! Nancy Reagan! AND Mr. T! Either one of them could have kicked Thomas Jefferson’s ass, so you’d better do what they say if you know what’s good for you.
Vincent Bemowski
Please take note of the immature responses from Democrats. They have no real answers to charges of moral corruption within their Party, and within their souls. The difference between the rhetoric of a Democrat and a terrorist is almost non-existent.
Democrats claim that although they are critical of President Bush, they support our troops in Iraq. But they are liars. Our troops are volunteers who believe in their mission, and have great respect for their Commander-in-chief, whom they overwhelmingly voted for in the last Presidential election. Cowardly Democratic politicians won’t go to Iraq and speak-out against our President because they know they would be booed off our military bases.
Immoral, hypocritical Democrats also believe people have the “right to kill” millions of unborn human beings through abortions, yet they consider themselves “good” people! I voted for John Kennedy, and would have voted for Bobby Kennedy, but after these great men, a moral sickness corrupted and darkened the soul of the Democratic Party, and that “soul” gets more corrupt and darker with every passing year.
Veteran, U.S. Army
Website: Catholic Messages USA
http://www.catholicmessagesusa.com/
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Amen.
Except for Guantanamo, the base we’ll be sending them all to after this election.
Mind you, even JFK was a philanderer. Still, the abortion charge will haunt the Democrats for centuries. Freedom camps are too good for these mass murderers. We should send them all to Waziristan to hang out with their good buddy, Osama. He’d know what to do with them…
A nice touch, but you might want to tone the rest of it down. People get wise fast if you lay it on too thick at the get-go. Then again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Blurting it out can add to the hilarity factor. Well, whatever floats your boat. To each artist his own artistry. Good luck!
tBone
I liked it. Completely detached from reality and logic, and all the more entertaining for it. See, Filty McNasty, this is how you do spoof. Take notes.
Dave_Violence
What does to-the-right mean?
It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.
Yes, those right-wingers Bill and Hil Clinton and the Gores certainly personify this.
It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.
I often hear right-wingers praising the great American universities like Harvard, Yale, and MIT.
It means anti-stem cell research.
Is that bad?
It means ridiculing global warming.
OK, that one you get.
It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.
Not only that, but gay-bashers aren’t even arrested in red states.
It means immigrant bashing. I’m talking about the viciousness.
No, it means illegal immigrant bashing – there’s nothing wrong with that.
It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.
Really? I don’t recall any right-winger demanding a Quibla in the all-purpose room recently.
It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.
It does?
It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education.
It does?
MNPundit
When Sullivan posted this, a reader replied to him that based on the demographics of the area and the history of the paper, this really was a far more centrist-to-lefty paper and not indicative of a sea change.
mds
The 2nd is probably pretty safe too, to be honest.
You’d think so. Yet the attempt to keep gun registration information separate from Sensenbrenner’s Real ID database that creates a de facto national ID card was voted down. Only one Republican (Paul of TX…woohoo!) voted in favor of the Dem-sponsored amendment. And I guarantee you that if this President ever tries to use the new martial law powers he signed Oct 17, gun confiscation will be high on the agenda when suppressing “conspiracies.”
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
That’s pretty interesting, actually. I think that needs to get some more publicity. Has the NRA run anything on this?