Conservatives apparently hate Clint Eastwood now

Re: the Karl Rove reaction, I feel like we haven’t heard “Chicago style politics” for a while. I wonder if that’s going to make a comeback when the election start gearing up again.

I think this is a bad move on the right wingers’ part. They’re kind of setting them up against the recovery of a major facet of US Manufacturing.

From my perspective, it seems like they’re actually setting up Eastwood so that he’ll come out against Obama to “clear his name,” so to speak. He seems like too much of a curmudgeon to fall prey to this, but it might make great press if something like that happened later in the general campaign after this current hubbub has faded to a memory.

Even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada’s Pravda) called Chrysler (and GM) “Amerika’s Lada.”

Meanwhile, W, who technically began the auto bailouts (not to mention TARP), says he’d do it again.

Amazing how so many so-called conservatives conveniently forget that Bush initiated programs that they now blame Obama for, programs that they never said a word against when Bush proposed them. The fact that principles only matter when the other side’s in power is the absolute worst feature of modern American politics, in my opinion.

I read about the Eastwood hate this morning. It confounds me because:

a) Eastwood is a Libertarian and no fan of Obama

and

b) Is any statement that the US has brighter times ahead of it automatically pro-Obama now? Is the GOP now officially the Party of Despair?

I think if you listen to the ad knowing what kind of ad they ran last year, and without any pre-conceived political wacko conspiracy thoughts going, it is pretty apolitical.

Eastwood is to smart a guy to have done this knowing/thinking it was a pro-Obama message of some kind. And from what I read he was one of three people to read this ad, one of the others having been Bruce Springsteen. I forget who the third was.

Because many car factories are technically outside of Detroit, in neighboring towns and suburbs.

You forgot about the “Terrar Alerts”?

they want you to be afraid…be very afraid.

That’s not entirely true. A lot of conservatives opposed the bailouts, even when Bush was the one who led them. Look at the first post in this thread, where there is discussion (through the links, you can see the video) from conservatives (including Romney) saying that the bailouts were a bad idea. That was in 2008.

Yeah, I remember a lot of conservatives being against the bailouts too. I don’t see how they can still be against them, given how successful they were. Do they really wish we had lost our auto industry?

Democrats are for them. Therefore Republicans are against them.

Politics have become just that simple. Sigh.

I think that right there is the problem with said so-called conservatives.

Yeah, it’s sad. You don’t need to know the issues. You just need to know what the other side supports and that defines where you stand.

I never said all conservatives said nothing, just that most of them did. For example, congressional Republicans either agreed with Bush from the start or initially opposed the bailouts and TARP but were then convinced to support him. Had they chosen to block them, they easily could have–just look at the problems Obama’s had getting legislation through Congress. Their principles are far stronger when a Democrat has the Presidency, which to me says that they aren’t principles at all.

That’s a bit of a strawman. I oppose bailouts of corporations on (ahem) principle, but that hardly means that I wish for any industry to fail. What I want is a system in which those who reap private profit do not get to socialize their losses.

Firms that are supposedly too big to fail, or that are bailed out for political reasons, are firms that aren’t capitalistic at all. Instead, they’re a horrible hybrid that combines the features of capitalism and socialism in a way that screws everyone but the wealthy. When a company knows that the government can and will ride to its rescue because it can’t be allowed to fail, it can take risks that, if they pay off, generate wealth for its owners but that taxpayers foot the bill for if they don’t. That’s corporatism, or state capitalism, or whatever you label you like best, but it’s not at all a free market. If any company is truly, by some objective standard, too big to fail, it should be broken up by the government into smaller, more competitive units that can be allowed to go bankrupt without crashing the economy.

I don’t see how you can break up the auto industry, but I don’t pretend to know a lot about it.

I don’t really think one bailout is socializing the industry. It’s a response to a bad economic situation. If bailouts start to reoccur, I’d be inclined to be against them.

If bad business practices are about to throw us into a new Great Depression, I’m all for government intervention that reduces that to a severe recession. I’d like to take the long view and see that maybe periodic Great Depressions are needed to cull bad businesses, but my time on earth is limited and I’d prefer not to live through one.

I’d actually prefer outright socialization to bailouts because that would at least prevent the dynamic of private profits and socialized losses that bailouts create. As for reoccuring, Chrysler got bailed out in 1979/1980 and again in 2008, so it’s already happened.

My pet theory is that the auto industry is still getting killed by decades of huge trade deficits making for a terrible exchange rate.

I agree we should have nationalized the fucks along with the failing banks, but noooo, freedom means you get to stay in charge when you fuck up. Bah.