I love what I imagine must be Maggie Haberman’s completely deadpan delivery of “Really.”
To get idea of the worldview from ‘the other side’ and just how broken they are, here’s a Freeper post (posted on a different forum; the emphasised text is a link to Free Republic, which i’m not including here):
Georgia Peach posted:
Democrats Seek to Make the Enlightenment Die in Darkness
If you just accept that everything progressives say is a lie designed for the sole purpose of enhancing their power, your life will be a lot more pleasant. You are going to be able to relax, secure in the knowledge that you are not hearing things, that up is not down, that you are not crazy, because you understand that each individual syllable leftists utter is a self-contained capsule of pure deception. And once you embrace that reality, you will see clearly that as a conservative dedicated to truth, personal liberty, and our Constitution, your only course of action is to destroy their putrid ideology and crush their hideous pinko dreams before their beady eyes.
Maybe that will convince them that they should return to a politics based upon rights and reason instead of pure power, but if it doesn’t, so what? You’ve still destroyed their putrid ideology and crushed their hideous pinko dreams, and thereby kept yourself and your fellow patriots from the perma-serfdom or worse that they intend for us. No, we won’t lose unless we give up, and the only way we will give up is if they pester us into submission.
Time to get conserva-woke to the new reality. Time to stop pretending that leftists are participating in good faith in what was the old paradigm of American politics. They aren’t, and we can’t go on as if they are. Understand that; don’t be some whiny, bow-tied conserva-dork pretending our current system is anything but the Octagon – and we better choose to be Chuck Norris. We’re just blessed that those who wish to make us serfs decided to conduct their coup using unelected bureaucrats and PC nagging as their primary weapons systems. Luckily, we now have all three branches of the government and a whole bunch of AR-15s.
Advantage: real Americans. Now is time to press it.
ShivaX
6379
Cause no one would think about treating other people like human beings, that’s crazy talk.
MikeJ
6380
Isn’t this basically something Armando would post (half-jokingly, but only half), with the labels reversed? How often have I seen people here post about how the Republicans are all about power, party over country, need to fight fire with fire, etc?
ShivaX
6381
Look at what the Republicans do once they come into power. All their supposed beliefs suddenly disappear and they do the exact opposite. I mean… Republicans are the ones saying “party over country.”
I mean look at their stance on things like State’s Rights or the deficit. They’re the most important things ever. Until they win an election, then they completely ignore those things… when they aren’t doing the opposite of what their supposed beliefs are.
But I’m sure that George Will was just playing the long game and has been a secret liberal for nearly 50 years.
One sides shamelessly, even malevolently, lies - lie about their intentions, lie about facts, partake in gross and obvious hypocrisy, and/or denies reality. And there are posts all over this forum that demonstrate exactly that. This is not “bothsidesism”, and in fact it’s that “both sides do it” that has us in this predicament in the first place.
MikeJ
6383
I don’t see the two sides as symmetrical, and my sympathies definitely lie with one side. However, the kind of diatribe you posted is definitely something that both sides engage in. The desire to paint the everyone on the other side as a monolith that uses underhanded tactics as a matter or course, never acts in good faith, is completely beyond reason, and must be responded to by extra-political means is not exactly rare on the left either.
Hey, I’m realistic enough to be fair. Democrats do similar things. “End the use of Gitmo.” “All troops out of Afganistan.” “Help the middle class.” “Help workers unionize/workers rights.” “Reject the wire-tapping of American citizens.”
I know I’m pulling a lot of Obama’s failures there, but you could add the steadfast Democratic party values and then look back and see just how many things were missed over time.
Affordable education?
Preventing gun violence?
Fixing campaign finance and lobbying abuse?
Financial system reform?
I’m not saying the balance of lies is even, but rather that both parties do it. Paying lip service is a fact of politics.
… All of those things are primarily blocked by the GOP, who have been able to block any major Democratic initiative for 21 of the last 23 years. So what you’re really saying is, “Dems failed to achieve their idea of utopia in 2008-10, therefore they’re liars.”
While they didn’t achieve utopia either, I’d say look at the Democratic record from 1933 through the 1960s instead.
A fair note. However, to be fair we should also include the same period of time and the Republican record? I know they have failures but I’m sure there were some promises fulfilled, however misguided.
EDIT: To your point, yes, Democrats have been blocked in a lot of things since '08. But it’s not just their motives being blocked. I would say a ton of blame lies in neither party working together to pass just about anything, much less the will of a single party. I was actually amazed the ACA made it through.
ShivaX
6387
They never really had power until Reagan. Who ballooned the deficit from which we never recovered. After Bush 41 lost to Clinton all pretense of keeping any promise died.
Democrats are mostly inept. They try to do what they say for the most part (though I wont remotely give Obama a pass on civil liberties), but they don’t end up leveraging their power and then they just get obstructed. Meanwhile the GOP will say one thing is super important and then not do it at all or do the exact opposite of what they said. And they do it repeatedly.
State’s Rights is a massive one. They’re all for it when they aren’t in power, one could even say it’s basically the foundation of their supposed ideology. Once they take power one of the first things they do is leverage federal power to force states to do things they want them to.
And in the end, unless their constituents hold their feet to the fire for it, nothing will ever change. Good luck on that happening.
So depressingly true, @Misguided
ShivaX
6390
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, (A)nd if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
-Thomas Jefferson
Oops, sorry Tom.
Timex
6392
So, I guess this means I root for Kushner? Weird.
We’ve been dealing with Kushner types in Washington for 50+ years. We can survive him easily enough.
Bannon is pure chaotic evil.
There is no doubt, Kushner must win.
Skipper
6394
Copied from another thread, but I agree with you @SlainteMhath, this was the conversation on Morning Joe today:
Listening to it this morning gave me pause because if Bannon/Priebus were gone, and things actually did start to steer more moderate in the Trump administration, would I be able to give him a more favorable view?
I wouldn’t. He has no ideology, no principles. He’s a senile, evil old man that craves adulation and believes what the television tells him. Even if the damage from him can be mitigated by changing his wranglers, it doesn’t change what he is.
Kushner being married to Ivanka is his trump card (no pun intended). Ivanka coming to the White House as a special unpaid un-titled consultant makes perfect sense now given the extent of the Bannon/Priebus vs. Kushner conflict. She holds more sway over Donald than anyone.
While I completely agree that Donald Trump is a senile, gas-filled, narcissistic imbecile whom I would never be able to view in a favorable light, I can also say that those same properties could be exploited by the right camp (in this case Kushner and Ivanka) to convince Trump to follow a more moderate agenda that would have a much less detrimental impact on the country overall. The trick would be to play to his need to be popular. If they can get rid of Bannon, Priebus and all the hard-right crew, they could have Trump take some baby steps towards being more moderate, the press would fall all over themselves to praise him as acting much more Presidential, and Trump would eat it up.
It is a very sad situation when America has a President that is so easily manipulated. Trump literally has no morals, no ideology and no loyalty to anything. He will do and say whatever it takes to gain approval from the masses and feel like he is “winning” and popular. Given the two choices, I’d rather have Kushner and Ivanka manipulating that than Bannon and Priebus.
