Reagan’s biggest accomplishment was leaving office without the taint of failure that accompanied all but one other Republican President in the past 100 years (I mean, he did some bad and illegal stuff, but the economy was reasonably good and we beat the commies on his watch so Iran-Contra wasn’t, like, a -gate or anything). But Ike wasn’t conservative enough to support the ridiculous positions the post Reagan GOP want to take.
Was Newt a product of Newt, or a produce of the rise of cable news?
I think Reagan in a way was responsible for our current mess- because of his removal of the Fairness Doctrine. It led directly to news you can agree with- which always leads to hyper-polarization.
Whaaaaaat.
I always thought the US news sucked because you guys never had such a policy.
But to find out you had one and repealed it due to issues of 'free speech’s is mad. Now you have Fox news outright lying every night about issues and no way for their viewers to have the slightest hint that Fox isn’t being entirely truthful.
I respect Timex’s position, though I can’t really agree with it. After all, I did vote for Reagan in 1980 (the only GOP presidential candidate I’ve ever voted for), and in that year, he certainly was embraced as a breath of fresh air. But by 1984 I was done. Yes, that electoral map looks pretty slam-dunk decisive, but it’s illusory. And yes, the election was a total blow out. But nearly 38 million people voted against him, and the trend continued; Bush Sr. was far less successful, and then Clinton obliterated the GOP for two terms. One can certainly argue that Reagan’s appeal was mummery, and when the show started to wear thin, the audience started to wake up.
Much of the 1984 blowout was squarely the fault of a dreadful Democratic ticket. Mondale was, perhaps, the worst candidate in the history of the Democratic party, certainly in the modern era. Even George McGovern got four more electoral votes. The 1980 election was pretty much a given, due to Carter’s personality, the dire events of the late 1970s, including Iran and Afghanistan, and the end of the Watergate hangover.
Reagan may, or may not, have been a great president in terms of ability or accomplishments. He is and remains a towering symbol, and his importance in the history books is assured if only for that. Personally, I’m in the camp that holds him responsible for the crimes of his advisers, cabinet, and staff (at one point it seemed everyone associated with him was getting indicted, except him), regardless of what you think about his intelligence or accomplishments. How “good” the eighties were depended entirely on who you were and where you were. White yuppies did great. Non-whites, and working people, not so much.
This American Life looks at how facts have become partisan.
The idea that folks have managed to believe that the fact checkers are all biased, really highlights some kind of infinite level of mental ruination.
I had a conversation this weekend with a Trump supporter (or should I say Hillary conspiracy theorist), who, when I said that so much has been debunked, and how I go about researching I often start at Snopes. She dismissed snopes as Partisan.
I would like to see some examples of this because I’ve always relied on snopes and if it would stoop to bending their truth depending upon Partisan politics, I can’t imagine they’d be around very long. But I just don’t recall any great fury over anything snopes has called.
That is a common right wing complaint now, that Snopes is partisan and therefore nothing on it should be believed. I have run into that several times lately. I am sure Rush or Hannity have said something.
My crazy aunt posted this. Give it up guys - they caught us.
Literally everything is “partisan” now. Except Breitbart, they’re the bastion of truth and honestly.
I’m not even kidding. If it isn’t an extreme right-wing website, it’s “biased.” National Review? Liberal. WSJ? Liberals.
I like Ira Glass’ summation that we’re living in a post-truth America now. Facts are no longer things we agree on and argue policy over. We disagree on facts in general, therefore all proposals are valid.
It’s post-post-modernism run amok! I blame the the litcrit folks.
Something for all of the conspiracy people:
“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
David Brooks (finally) gets it:
Today’s
dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions.
You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and
simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment. In search of
that mass right-wing audience that, say, Coulter enjoys, **conservatism **
> has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education
> and disdain made-for-TV rage.It’s
ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was
ruined by the forces of commercialism, but that is the essential truth.
Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by
its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to
Trump.
Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over
everything else. The very essence of conservatism is the belief that
politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are
pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But
**recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican **
> Party.
Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come **
> in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most
white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of
humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.
That
leads to the third big change. **Blinkered by the Republican Party’s **
**> rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge **
> and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.For
years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from
stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household
fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years,
conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe
in using government as a tool for social good. Trump demagogy filled
the void.
And then he writes something like this, which shows he really doesn’t get it:
Brooks completely forgets what he wrote 2 weeks ago.
If
I had to sum up the election of 2016 in one clause, I would say it has
been a sociological revolution, a moral warning and a political summons.Sociologically,
this campaign has been an education in how societies come apart. The
Trump campaign has been like a flash flood that sweeps away the topsoil
and both reveals and widens the chasms, crevices and cracks below.We
are a far more divided society than we realized. The educated and less
educated increasingly see the world and vote in different ways. So do
men and women, blacks and whites, natives and immigrants, young and old,
urban and rural.We
like to think of democracy as a battle of ideas and a process of
individual deliberation, but this year demography has been destiny. The
campaigns have pushed us back into our tribal bunkers. Americans now
seem more clannish, and more incomprehensible to one another…
…Our
partisan divides now menacingly overlap with our racial and class
divides, threatening to form a trinity of discord with horrendous
consequences.The
moral health of the polity is in even scarier shape. Any decent society
rests on codes of etiquette and a shared moral ecology to make
cooperation possible, to prevent economic and political life from
descending into a savage war of all against all.
I knew Steve King was dumb, but this is really something.[quote]“It was my first order of business on the morning after ObamaCare passed into law, March 24, 2010, to draft and introduce my full, 100% repeal of ObamaCare,” King said in a press release announcing the legislation. “By prohibiting the Supreme Court from citing ObamaCare cases, we will be truly eradicating this unconstitutional policy from all three branches of government so that the repeal will be complete.”[/quote]
Just another example of Iowa being garbage.
Hey now. Oh wait, we have Ernst and King. And Grassley. Nevermind.
Iowa is one of those states which always seems to get a huge amount of attention in national elections, and I’m baffled as to why.
Seriously, wtf is even in Iowa? I assume some people. And dirt. And…?
No offense to you if you’re there. You’re cool. But fuck your state.