I read this letter from a Jets fan in Deadspin and it perfectly summarizes my feelings towards the Republican party.
The Butt Fumble changed my involvement as a fan. Before, I was disheartened, disappointed, let down by the hope of two AFC championship appearances. Now, I’m reinvigorated, excited to see how terrible this season will be. It’s like reading about Amanda Bynes, or seeing Donald Trump get elected President. It’s better than actual sports. It’s a full-fledged rebellion against sanity and rationality.
One day, when the dying vestiges of our culture raise up a flag in surrender to the greater forces of the future, I hope that flag has Mark Sanchez colliding into another man’s butt on it.
I’ll admit: an increasingly crazy Republican party may not be good for the country. Replacing Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander with stone cold wingers might be bad for the Senate. (Though also too, it might be good in the long run.) But I enjoy watching the craziness happen.
So this report from Ohio brought a smile to my face:
Kasich had worked to expand Medicaid coverage, a key component of the Affordable Care Act…..[F]or conservatives, the expansion has brought nothing but anger, not least because Kasich has defended his actions in biblical, moralistic terms, describing the move as something demanded by his Christian faith.
“In our Bible, compassion means the money comes from you,” Zawistowski told The Daily Beast. “Medicaid is for single women with children and for the elderly, for people who can’t work. What they are calling Medicaid expansion is health insurance for people who don’t want to work. You are not expanding Medicaid. This is a whole new program and it is with borrowed money.”
Love the anti-compassion stuff, love the idea of a Tea Party bible.
I like this too:
Neil Clark, a Republican lobbyist in Columbus, echoed Borges, noting that in a state so divided, Kasich and others were right to ignore the extremes of the party.
“I guess for some people in Ohio, unless you are a card-carrying Nazi you can’t be a Republican,” he said.
DaveinMaine
“Medicaid is for single women with children and for the elderly, for people who can’t work”
Didn’t realize that was written into the legislation…
ranchandsyrup
Oh my Godwin he’s gonna get such a talking to from Jonah Nepotistaberg. 11th commandment!
Also, I liked this (sorry in advance to raven and other Dawgs fans but it made me chuckle) from Deadspin:
Georgia: This state has winning pro teams like the Falcons and Braves, and yet the people there choose to spend all their fan capital on a college team that can’t even win its own conference. Are you people fucking stupid? (JUST KIDDING I ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER IS YES.) Alabama fans are justifiably batshit crazy for the Tide because they win stuff. You win nothing. It makes no sense. It’s like being a Washington Generals fan.
postmodulator
Do you know how right-wing a guy has to be to be a Republican lobbyist in Columbus, Ohio?
And he thinks the guys on his own team are Nazis?
? Martin
But Nazi’s are socialists. At least, according to all of the Republican nazi’s I’ve heard from.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
How do we square the ruthless efficiency of the Nazis with the hapless Butt Fumblers?
elmo
“For whatever you did for the least of these, that also you did for me. Except for lazy deadbeats who need to get off their asses. Don’t do shit for them.”
– Tea Party Bible.
Botsplainer
The consequences of 40 years of propaganda from Dick Vigueries, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Robertson, 30 years from Jim Dodson, Rushdoony and Donald Wildmon, 20 years from Limbaugh and 10 from Fox and the lesser lights.
In this environment, the Skinner box inhabitants view any public good as intrinsically evil.
JW
@? Martin: Nazis weren’t socialists. Exactly the opposite. Much more like carding industrialists.Sort of what is going now in this country.
Comrade Dread
It consists of one book: The Gospel According to Ayn Rand.
It is the bestseller in all the realms of Hell.
pharniel
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoaaaaaaaaa! Let’s not get crazy here.
Ohio would also accept the KKK and/or John Birch society.
pharniel
How the hell is this not seen as Book of Mamon? Like…literally a bit of ‘good news’ about how having all the money in the world and being rich means you’re awesome and ‘chosen’ is exactly how you’d expect a demonic form to take?
I know it was pre-internet but how is the Prosperity Gospell even tolerated?
Or is that the normal xtian right reaction to Ayn Rand?
Chris
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
This.
That’s really the only thing that vaguely disturbs me when I hear our conservatives being compared to Nazis.
“Confederates” is just fine. A much more accurate appraisal of their inefficient stupidity.
Redshift
I eagerly await his identifying the passage where it says that. I suspect it’s from the book of “because I said so.”
There was this one guy who said “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” If you hate taxes, you hate Jesus.
Ted & Hellen
This is a brave, edgy post, DougJ.
Keith P.
I think Zawistowski is mixing up Medicare with Medicaid. Medicaid is for poor people of all ages, not just the elderly; Medicare is for the elderly and those like myself who have a long-term illness (I’ve been on dialysis for 2 years, but after 33 months, I’m required by law to ditch my private insurance and move over to Medicare)
Chris
@Redshift:
The thing that makes that quote really beautiful is that “Caesar” wasn’t just “the government.” It was also a foreign government, a pagan government, an oppressive government, and arguably (given the amount of the known world under Rome’s control at the time), that most dreaded of Beasts among American right wingers, a one-world government.
piratedan
I keep reading the thread title in Dan LaFontaine’s voice……
scav
@Chris: Furthermore, the reforming faithful kept those bits alive, as in this bit from The Second Helvetic Confession (Calvinist Reformed end of things apparently)
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
Though, to be fair, the ruthless efficiency of the Nazis was greatly overrated. It took quite a while for them to figure out that shooting individual Jews in the head was going to take a very long time and cost a lot of money.
I have a really good book called The Nazis: A Warning from History (companion book to the BBC series of the same name) that dispels a lot of the myths about Nazi history.
Interestingly, they do share something with the Confederates, though: Nazi society was built on slave labor, and one of the ways they kept ordinary Germans on board was that housewives could get their very own teenage (Jewish or Polish) slave to help around the house, while their husbands could get slave labor to help at their businesses. Slavery was much more widespread than people realize.
Betty Cracker
This is why I live in Florida.
Judge Crater
The “give me more war” war-bloggers (Blackfive) are also coming unglued. Neoconservatism has failed at every turn. The world of “good guys” and “bad guys” has disappeared and their lust for “projecting power” via cruise missiles and boots on the ground is dissolving with every speech by John Kerry. As the latest polls show, Americans have finally realized that the war on terror, as conceived by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, is a disaster. If attacking Syria is pointless, then what about Iraq and Afghanistan and all our other crackpot adventures in the middle east.
Jingoism won’t die easily, but Syria may be the tipping point.
Gene108
One thing that has surprised me about Obamacare is no dire right-wing predictions about an “Obamacare recession” in 2014, when the law fully goes into effect.
Would be cover for Congressional Republicans screwing up the economy by either not passing appropriations bills or not raising the debt ceiling.
Also, too when will Republicans start campaigning on Obamacare being their idea and they should get credit for it? I mean these are the guys who stated, “if liberals were in charge of things during WW2, we’d have lost”, with a straight face, 10 years ago, while trying to privatize Social Security because it was about to fail (in 2047).
DFH no.6
@Chris: I don’t know, “Nazi” works for me. Or, better and more broadly, “fascism/fascist”.
Check the famous “14 points of fascism”.
Every one of them fits modern movement conservatism in America (and it’s political wing, the GOP) to a “tee”. Every damn one.
Sums up today’s conservatives in America nicely and succinctly.
I’ve always called the motherfuckers “fascists” cuz that’s what they are.
And none of this “fascism is only Italy under Mussolini” nonsense. Bullshit on that – the Nazis were fascist, as were Franco’s falangists, and, well, most modern rightwing “juntas” like the various banana republics, et al.
Along with our own modern American conservatives. Fucking fascists. I don’t think “Confederate” covers it quite as well.
Villago Delenda Est
Jesus is rolling over in his grave.
Villago Delenda Est
@DFH no.6:
The Nazis were fascist with a race angle.
Which means that that is precisely what our “conservatives” are.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gene108:
Well, he’s right, you know. They did lose. Berlin and Tokyo were laid ruin.
cmorenc
Part of the ideological stupidity of the tea party faction is due to the substantial portion of fundamentalist evangelicals within their midst – the sort of folks who are especially likely to send their kids to religious academies instead of public schools. It’s a disturbing eye-opener to visit the websites of some of these schools and read their descriptions of their approach to the educational curriculum. In particular, read the promotional description of the bekka books, a set of textbooks used by many fundamentalist Christian academies. Here’s what Bekka Books has to say about their history texts:
Now mathematics:
OK you knew this was coming, Science:
I have nothing against religion and holding religious beliefs, but holy crap, the only difference between this kind of thinking and some of the worst abuses of the church during the late medieval period against science and rationalism is that modern Christian talibangelicals haven’t (yet) acquired enough power to imprison and corporally punish heretics.
Patricia Kayden
@Villago Delenda Est: It’s almost like Rightwingers forget that Jesus was born in a manger to poor parents, lived on the streets, was buried in a borrowed grave and said that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.
He was not pro-rich/anti-poor like they are. They need to read their own Holy Book.
Villago Delenda Est
@JW:
That was, indeed, Martin’s point. The Rethugs say “But the Nazis were SOCIALISTS, it’s right there in their name!”
Yes, and the German Democratic Republic was a democracy!
piratedan
@Patricia Kayden: they’re heavy into some old testament, the new one, not so much
Spaghetti Lee
If it leads to Kasich losing to Randroid Q. Crazypants in the primary and R.Q. Crazypants losing to a Democrat in 2014, I’m all for it. But I’m not as gung-ho about ‘egg on the crazy’ as some people. It’s kinda like playing with matches, innit?
Suffen ACE
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: How do we square the ruthless efficiency of the Nazis with the hapless Butt Fumblers?
The Jets started last seaon 1-0. This was the equivalent of beating Denmark. The Butt Fumble = losing Stalingrad.
Chris
@DFH no.6:
Fair enough. I do remember reading Paxton’s book (in 2010 at the height of the teabagger wave) and thinking it was uncanny how much his book reminded me of the present.
Though I will say, IMO, the reason “Confederate” doesn’t pack the same punch is simply that the word has enjoyed a wholly unjustifiable rehabilitation in popular history that “fascist” has not. Substantively same thing.
Ben Cisco
I was going to snark on this, but I see now I’m waaaay too late for that.
Roger Moore
@Redshift:
I hope you realize that there are a whole host of interpretations of that passage. The Bible itself points out that the genius of Jesus’ statement is that he was able to say something that everyone present could interpret to support their existing position. There are plenty of prosperity gospel people who have managed to twist it to say that you don’t have to pay taxes. Just remember that the Bible is literally true until it disagrees with what you want to believe, in which case any strained interpretation is OK.
flukebucket
@Redshift:
I’m pretty sure that is from the second chapter of “shut up, that’s why”
dedc79
Speaking of Deadspin and football, their “Why Your Team Sucks: The New York Giants” is pretty hilarious, especially the part at the end with fan comments. For example:
sparrow
@Mnemosyne: Woah, what? I had no idea about the slavery angle… jeez. I hate it when I come to the conclusion that most people suck. :(
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
A good example of this is the “eye of a needle” analogy that Jesus made. The fundigelicals interpret this in a whole bunch of hilarious ways to get around the plain meaning of it in their endless efforts to replace Jehovah with their true god, Mammon.
LanceThruster
JGabriel
Josh Marshall has a proposal I like for what we can do with all these crazy GOP’ers:
I had the same idea when I first heard about these secessionary counties, but I wanted to call it something like Conservastan or Republistan.
Whinyassistan is so much better.
Face
I love how the Butt Fumble has been raised to the level of a proper noun. It’s got its own Wiki page.
Goblue72
@piratedan: Don not Dan. And I think that was the point. There’s an indie rom-com movie with Lake Bell just out about voice over actors called “In A World…”
Mike E
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, how “efficient” could they have been if my grandpa could outwit them?
My relatives would disagree with your premise, if they weren’t, you know. Killed.
I will say this much about hubris: In general, it is a tyrant’s blind spot for shizzle.
ETA I was gonna say something clever like, “Those repubs ain’t gonna Godwin themselves…wait. Nevermind”, but this Hitler business can get messy sometimes.
piratedan
@Goblue72: ty for the correction, credit where credit is due y’know….
El Cruzado
I had trouble accepting Prosperity Jesus, but I just can’t deal with Judgemental Jesus.
David Hunt
@Chris:
I read (though I can’t remember where) that the whole render under Caeser thing is clever logic game that Jesus was using to tell everyone “Don’t pay your taxes” while appearing to be a good conquered Jew telling everyone to pay the invading infidels their money. It comes from the whole “render unto God that which is God.” Dogma at the time was that everything belonged to God, so he’s saying that Rome doesn’t have claim to them, only God…so don’t pay your (Roman) taxes because they belong to God. So that interpretation has Jesus inciting a tax revolt buy being careful not to say anything overtly seditious. Not sure how I feel about that interpretation but it’s well within my understanding of how it might have gone down.
Of course, even if GOPers used that interpretation, the U.S. is not a conquered nation. Maybe that helps explain why the current GOP is so strong in what was the Confederacy.
JGabriel
The most surprising thing about this statement is Clark’s willingness to admit he’s only figuring this out now — several decades after most non-Republicans..
.
Mnemosyne
@Mike E:
Oh, I’m definitely not trying to say that killing 12 million people (6 million of them Jews) wasn’t horrible just because they weren’t very efficient at it until the last couple of years of the war. But one of the reasons they didn’t turn on the gas chambers sooner was that they were trying to eke as much slave labor out of those prisoners as possible.
ETA: Also saying, don’t underestimate the butt-fumblers — they can do a whole lot of damage even if they’re not efficient at it.
Roger Moore
@El Cruzado:
I don’t see why. Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “Those who live in glass houses should throw the first stone.”?
fuckwit
Huh, haven’t paid attention to football in a long time; I missed that butt fumble. Wow, there really is a wikipedia on it.
As for butt fumble, for some reason I’m thinking of a Thanksgiving day game in the early 1990s between the Cowboys and I don’t remember who, and it involved some dumbass picking up a dead ball when he shouldn’t have, and then a stupid 4th-down conversion by Barry Switzer that failed spectacularly.
So maybe the Jets have dislodged that Cowboys fuckup as the stupidest Thanksgiving day blunder, I dunno.
ranchandsyrup
@fuckwit: Leon Lett in teh superbowl vs. the Bills?
DFH no.6
@Villago Delenda Est: You are right. Racism is also of front-and-center importance to modern movement conservatism, very much so (just like Nazism).
But utilizing “Nazi” Godwins you, unfortunately. And even long before Godwin, calling conservatives “Nazis” tended to short-circuit discussions in a way that using “fascist” didn’t (and still doesn’t, I believe).
I think that’s due to the specificity of “our German enemy under Hitler, which we pretty much killed dead almost 70 years ago” obviously contained within the term “Nazi” while “fascist/fascism” is more likely to be understood (rightly, I think) in broader and more general terms.
Calling someone (or a group) “Nazi” brings to mind things like black-uniformed stormtroopers, death camps and the Holocaust, and Hitler with his funny mustache screaming imprecations in German. Hard to make that stick on the GOP for most people (true as we might see it).
“Fascist” though? That’s a more generally-accepted term for a subset (at least) of rightwing political beliefs and governance that’s still extant (at least long after Nazism).
Using the 14 points you can pin it right to the pasty forehead of modern American conservatism.
I fucking hate fucking fascists.
Frankensteinbeck
@piratedan:
I don’t see them keeping kosherate or freeing their slaves every seven years.
scav
Maybe this whole Caesers thing comes down to a disagreement over Salad Dressings. Jebus, what wit hall the anointing oils and the rush to bring him vineger on the cross is really more of a vinaigrette guy.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
If you look at the record, the gas chamber was mostly used for people who were deemed unfit to work when they arrived at camp. Those who were fit to work were kept alive as slave labor and worked to death. It was only at the very end when they realized they were running out of time that they started killing Jews who were still able to work. They were not so kind to political dissidents, Communists, gays, etc. who tended to be killed right away.
Mike E
@Mnemosyne: All in all, they pushed the outside of the envelop on genocide. Again, we can be thankful Hitler ignored his generals or the ETO coulda dragged on a good while longer; AH was quite the inefficient madman, too lucky to have persisted as long as he did, and at least some of his underlings took their foot off the pedal at key moments during that atrocity. The results, although horrifying, coulda been worse, I agree. But, still.
geg6
Completely OT, but having just come from The Dish, where Sully is in full meltdown over how Obama is now worse than Bush with the Syria situation and is echoing pretty much everything Cole has been writing the last few days, I’m sorely tempted to support the airstrike simply because the people opposed are always wrong about everything having to do with war and peace.
I still haven’t made up my mind as to what is the right thing to do here. I am not a fan of any kind of airstrikes that will just kill more innocent Syrians. However, I am quite disturbed by the use of chemical weapons and feel that there has to be a consequence for Assad for using them and to show the world that CW is unacceptable. Now that Russia is signalling that they are not completely opposed to UN action, I’m leaning heavily in the direction of a UN coalition using targeted airstrikes. But the do nothing crowd is too full of people whose judgment I don’t and never will trust on such issues, so I’m moving away from it at a fairly rapid pace.
piratedan
@Frankensteinbeck: but they’re all about sacrificing our sons and daughters….
the Conster
@Face:
Known here in Boston as “The Bumble”.
fuckwit
Finally, I have something to say about work and welfare.
We have an affluent society. We have all these machines, doing our labor for us. We’ve built this over the past 100 years with the futuristic promise that doing so will make our lives easy and safe and leisurely and healthy. That was what “progress” meant.
Instead of that paradise-on-earth, what have we got? A few REALLY FUCKING OBSCENELY wealthy fuckers, the 1%, hoarding all the spoils, and refusing to share with the vast number of people whose labor (and whose parents labor, and parent’s parents labor, don’t belabor the point) allowed this massive accumulation of wealth. And then us, having to listening to the idle rich kleptocrats telling us to work harder.
We should all be able to sit on our dead asses and live lives of leisure. Work is increasingly obsolete. We have machines to do all this shit now. Very much of it is automated, “online”, etc. This as I recall was the leftist utopian goal back 100 years ago or so: what “progressive” meant, to use technology and equality and socialism to improve everyone’s lives.
I’ve been told that trying to spread the wealth only as far as Americans is a very first-world way to look at it though, and really even the poor among us here are stilll the top 25% of the rest of the world, so we really should be sharing with them and help lift them up too. But the point still stands: the techno utopia we’ve been building can, if we don’t act like Galtian douchebags, help all humanity live in health, comfort, plenty, and security.
The idea of WORK YOU LAZY FUCKER OR YOU DON’T EAT is just not plausible anymore, and I think more and more people being connected with gadgets that do amazing things, just makes that point more clear.
Work is increasingly unnecessary and disconnected from actual value to humanity, and the things that really need doing (i.e. eradicating disease in the poorest areas of the world) are not the jobs that pay the highest, rather, the jobs that pay the highest are the most useless and trivial things imaginable.
LanceThruster
WWMRD? (What Would Mitt Romney Do?)
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
Then they need to reread Genesis 22. Leviticus 18:21 is also apropos.
piratedan
@Roger Moore: feel free to bully pulpit them, my ability to have folks recognize their own cognitive dissonance is low because I still have kids…..
Mnemosyne
@Mike E:
Oh, they absolutely modernized genocide and applied modern technology to it (thanks to the fuckers at IBM). They took it to a whole new and horrific level.
But there’s always been this “German efficiency” myth about the Holocaust that just doesn’t hold up upon scrutiny, which also helps explain some of the supposed “holes” that Holocaust deniers claim prove it never happened. Once you accept that, no, they weren’t very efficient and it took them several tries to figure out how to set up their assembly lines to slaughter people, then those “inconsistencies” that the deniers point to make a whole lot more sense and, more importantly, don’t “prove” jack shit.
EthylEster
@Roger Moore:
Um…where does the Bible point that out?
catclub
Bluster until Assad does it again, then hit. If no gas attacks, then the bluster has worked.
(too simple for dealing with false flag gas operations.)
JGabriel
@flukebucket:
Second book, not chapter. It’s a trilogy. The third part is called If You Don’t Do What I Say, I’ll Kill All You Fuckin’ Libtards With My Big Fucking Uzi (Which Is In No Way A Metaphor For My Pee-pee, You Degenerate Faggy Scumbag Commie Libtards)!
catclub
“echoed Borges” The blind writer from Argentina? Huh!
catclub
@EthylEster: “where does the Bible point that out? ”
When it says, after Jesus answers, “…and they were all amazed.”
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Sorry Jets fans, but you’re overprivelaged whiners. If you want to see true incompetence, watch the Lions. I know, because I was born and raised a Lions fan. They perfected failure long before the butt fumble came along.
taylormattd
@Ted & Hellen: you really are a dumb cunt.
dollared
@fuckwit: Thanks for saying this. And especially the last sentence. I don’t really think work is obsolete – there is plenty to do, although a 30 or 35 hour work week, 45 weeks per year should be plenty.
But it is mindboggling when you look at who gets paid $200k, $400k, $1M per year. Plastic surgeons and investment bankers. Shit…..
taylormattd
@geg6: ikr? My instinct is to oppose this because of the innocent dead and because I have doubts as to whether anything will actually be accomplished. But this simplistic garbage from the very same people who were spectacularly wrong last time is galling to say the least.
Paul in KY
@JGabriel: Won’t happen unless we can get Puerto Rico in as a state, so the 2 Dem senators from PR would balance out the 2 Repubs from Crazystan.
Belafon
@cmorenc: I wonder how they would deal with different versions of the fifth axiom of geometry?
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
With the news coming out of Russia and Putin’s recent TV interview, I’m starting to feel like we’re going to be able to shame the UN into action after all and not go it alone, in which case I’m expecting to hear these two words from Sully:
Meep. Meep.
Mike E
@Mnemosyne: Again, no, I don’t accept such critiques, since dead is dead. Everything else is dry academic data sifting.
W.C. Fields gravestone sez, “All things being equal, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” This is very apropos to the subject at hand.
IowaOldLady
For people who scream about the constitution, these guys have no idea of what it says about how a state gets admitted to the union. It’s all in their own little heads.
Suffen ACE
@Mnemosyne: I will say this. I may not want to get involved alone, with friends, or frenemies. But if Obama and Kerry have managed to get Russia to back off and allow a UN sanctioned strike against Syria, I will have to admit that would a diplomatic masterpeice. (Even if I hate the outcome.)
fuckwit
@dollared: Glad to hear it. But keep going with those numbers though. CEO packages, including stock, are in the tens, hundreds of mlllions of dollars. And then there are movie stars, pop stars, TV stars, and baseball/basketball/football players. Humanity is not served well by our top “earners”. Not at all. The system is so broken it’s not really a system at all. I started out life as a Republican and Libertarian, and every year I become more and more of a Socialist. Capitalism has its uses– like making cheap gadgets ubiquitous– but it also has fundamental, deep, serious flaws.
Suffern ACE
@IowaOldLady: Someday, the Senators of the breakaway states of Colorado-Excluding-Denver with join the state of Upper-Penninsula-Michigan-Plus-Wisconsin-North-of-Eau-Claire and change that.
Mnemosyne
@Mike E:
I’m an amateur history buff, but I can understand that other people aren’t as interested in it as I am.
After an event, sifting through it is all we have, preferably to try and figure out the mechanics of what happened and why and how to prevent it from happening again, if possible. I do think it’s also important to have as many of the inner workings of the Holocaust as publicly exposed as possible to prevent denialist assholes from trying to pretend it never happened.
eric
@Villago Delenda Est: uh, no he is not….hello!
catclub
@fuckwit: “And then there are movie stars, pop stars, TV stars, and baseball/basketball/football players.”
I have no problem with those getting every penny they earn, because they are truly popular, whether I like it or not.
As Babe Ruth said “I had a better year.”
Surgeons, I have mixed feelings about.
schrodinger's cat
@geg6: I made this post in another context, but it suits Sully and his outbursts to a T.
Take it down a notch, drama queen.
Sir Laffs-a-lot
@Betty Cracker: How’d the whole “Deliverance as experienced in a truck that won’t start” scene come out?
James E. Powell
@Keith P.:
You wouldn’t really try to explain something to a right-wing Republican, would you? I mean, there has to be some other way to kill time.
Kay
I think Kasich is just trying to bring his numbers up with women and independents. I think he has a weakness there. I’ve never been able to figure out who his “base” is. My guess is upper middle class white people? I know some of them and even they’re not all that excited, but maybe they are never a rabid “base”. An ambivalent base.
Also, I decided I hate the word “compassionate” because conservatives took it and made it somehow commercial to me. It’s a slogan now. Just pitch it in that bin for a decade and maybe we can rehab it ten hears from now. It’s like “commonsense”
James E. Powell
@Botsplainer:
You also have the effects of 40 years of almost nothing coming from the other side. Who was the last national political figure to stand up for poor people? Or who stated simply that we should not tolerate poverty?
dollared
@James E. Powell: To be fair, Clinton’s rhetoric was absolutely correct when he said that everyone who “worked hard and played by the rules” should have a decent life.
But then he NAFTA’ed and WTO’ed and financialized our society into fucking 20-30 million working people.
So I guess that takes us back to Jimmy Carter.
Betty Cracker
@Sir Laffs-a-lot: Roadside assistance rescued me! It was some sort of ignition lock misfire that the tow truck dude was able to defeat with a screwdriver. The problem hasn’t repeated, but the dealership is scheduled to replace the offending part gratis as it’s still under warranty. Thanks for asking!
James E. Powell
@Kay:
I’ve never been able to figure out who his “base” is.
Men who golf and the women who love them.
Matt McIrvin
@geg6: I’ve been reading James Fallows, one of the two guys actually worth reading at The Atlantic, who managed to sound like a genius on Iraq by talking to people who actually knew stuff. He’s very, very skeptical about the value of a Syria intervention, especially a unilateral airstrike. In particular, he’s been reposting correspondence from others:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/your-labor-day-syria-reader-part-2-william-polk/279255/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/syria-reader-part-3-robert-pastor/279339/
Polk thinks that there actually isn’t an airtight case that Assad launched the chemical attacks, and points out that the “international norms” Kerry and Obama keep citing don’t extend to an actual legal requirement, or, really, even legitimacy for an outside attack. Pastor thinks there are nonmilitary options.
I find that it is much easier to think about when the issue at hand isn’t whether or not Obama is the worstest president ever or the merits of Andrew Sullivan or Glenn Greenwald. That stuff is noise. Fallows pointed out early on that the most hawkish people on Syria were the same neocons who advocated invading Iraq, but with John McCain on the pro side of this and Sarah Palin on the anti side, we can keep citing nigh-infinite wrongness forever; there’s so much wrong to go around.
Sir Laffs-a-lot
@Betty Cracker: YAY!; next time take the dogs (and pack some bacon) then you’ll feel safer. :)
Mike E
@Mnemosyne: You miss my point. I don’t agree with this conclusion! And I don’t think engaging asshole crazy fucker denialists is the way to go. As far as my interests go, well…no WW II, no me. I’m not just an amateur, I’m a product. So, yeah, I know a lot about it. YMMV
catclub
@Matt McIrvin: I think an extended debate in congress would be just the ticket to keep Assad from doing it again, which is the goal, after all.
As long as they are debating and hemming and hawing, Assad is extremely unlikely to give any really good excuses, like another blatant gas attack.
Haydnseek
@Villago Delenda Est: The Nazi’s made a conscious effort to put the word “socialism” into the name of their party simply because socialism was so popular in Europe, as well as the US, in the 1930’s. It was simple marketing.
Kay
@James E. Powell:
They’re so funny here because they swing so wildly. They were all non-Republicans in 2005-2008. Then they went completely hard Right. Now they’re all ashamed of the Tea Party, and “moderates who hate both Parties.” It’s just me, me, me. If you’re not a Republican, why would you care how members of the base define themselves? There’s something self-aggrandizing and self-centered about all this loud soul searching.
Botsplainer
@James E. Powell:
Actually, the issue isn’t so much about poverty, it is about the middle class. True Progressives all too often segue immediately away from workplace safety and pay equity issues related to excessive upper management compensation and go directly to supporting the right of aggressive panhandling, feces-smeared homeless to hassle people on downtown sidewalks. Between that and their excessive Mumia worship, nobody takes them seriously.
Yatsuno
@James E. Powell: Elizabeth Warren. Which does not invalidate your point.
Villago Delenda Est
@Haydnseek:
Which helps explain why the Rethuglican base falls for it every single time.
Misamericanthrope
“I’ve heard all I want to and I don’t want to hear any more.”