President Trump Thread...

[jsmith6919]

Turns out she is a conservative that just makes fun of the libs. Here is another of her videos. She is funny. And spot on.

 

[townsend]

Miami Herald | MiamiHerald.com


Republican leaders have help their party divide the country.
LEONARD PITTS JR
JULY 05, 2017 1:39 PM
Republican Party has ‘flat out lost its mind’
BY LEONARD PITTS, JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com



Dear Colleagues:

We’re doing it again.

Remember last year’s campaign? Remember how dogged and relentless we were in covering Hillary Clinton’s sloppy handling of her emails? Remember the comparatively free ride we gave Donald Trump despite his repeated demonstrations that he was unserious, unsound and unfit? Remember all the hand wringing afterward about how we had embraced a false equivalence?

Apparently, we learned no lesson from that..

I keep reading and seeing all these stories on America’s political polarization, the great divide between left and right. Ted Koppel did a couple such reports for “CBS News Sunday Morning,” Robert Samuelson wrote a column on it for The Washington Post, Andrew Soergel pondered the question in U.S. News and World Report.

We have explored the role of social media, the loss of the Fairness Doctrine and the city/country divide in creating this break. But no one — at least, no one I’ve seen — has explored what seems to me the most glaringly obvious factor. We are not, after all, divided because Americans pulled back from the center and retreated into extremism.

No, we are divided because one party did. And it wasn’t the Democrats.

Our political thinking being as fixedly bipolar as it is, many people will read the foregoing as an endorsement of the Democratic Party. It emphatically is not. Democrats are very often disorderly, disputatious, and downright dumb, not to mention stunningly bad at deciding and conveying what they stand for.

In other words, they are pretty much what they were 30 years ago. The same cannot be said of the GOP. Consider a few recent headlines:


The Republican White House closes press briefings to cameras. The president issues coarse, sexist insults to the hosts of a morning news show. We learn he allegedly threatened them with an unflattering story in The National Enquirer. He tweets a juvenile video of him “wrestling” a cable news network. Oh, and a guest on a “news” program he admires claims America has kidnapped children and used them to establish a secret colony. On Mars.

That’s all in the last few days. And it’s been a pretty average last few days. By next week there will be a new list, equally outrageous. This is reality now.

A party that once provided a sober conservative counterweight to the Democrats’ more liberal impulses has flat out lost its mind, given itself over to rage, fear, schoolyard taunts and bizarre conspiracy theories. Which leaves me impatient with those who frame our political divide as if the issue were that left and right had equally abandoned the center. No fair observer can believe that.

To the contrary, it becomes more obvious every day that we are where we are because something is very wrong with the GOP. To not acknowledge and report that, apparently out of some misguided notion that doing so wouldn’t be “fair and balanced” is, in itself, deeply unfair and unbalanced. In our terror of being called biased, we in media have neutered ourselves, abandoned our watchdog function.

We end up having mannered debates over whether to call the president’s dozens of lies lies. Meantime, America’s international prestige is eroding, its government is paralyzed, its friends are worried, its enemies emboldened.


Enough. You will never find answers where you are scared to ask questions. Here’s what we should be asking:

How did the GOP get this way? And how can the right right itself?

Yes, I know some people will call those questions biased. Fine.

But I call them journalism.

 

[Cotton]

"Republican leaders have help their party divide the country."

Helluva writer.

 

[townsend]

"Republican leaders have help their party divide the country."

Helluva writer.

He's won a Pulitzer.

 

[Cotton]

He's won a Pulitzer.

Sad.

 

[Cotton]

 

[Cowboysrock55]

He's won a Pulitzer.

I'm not sure that gives any credibility to an opinion piece by an outspoken Liberal. One who has a long history of race baiting.

 

[townsend]

"Republican leaders have help their party divide the country."

Helluva writer.

I'm not sure that gives any credibility to an opinion piece by an outspoken Liberal. One who has a long history of race baiting.

Yup everything is meaningless and inane nebulous criticisms that can literally be lodged against anyone.

Meanwhile Cotton RTs bullshit from the least of the least common denominators, but like this Pulitzer Prize winner made a typo so what he says is meaningless.

This is "conservatism" in a nutshell, and it's why Trump is the perfect representative for it.

 

[Cotton]

Yup everything is meaningless and inane nebulous criticisms that can literally be lodged against anyone.

Meanwhile Cotton RTs bullshit from the least of the least common denominators, but like this Pulitzer Prize winner made a typo so what he says is meaningless.

This is "conservatism" in a nutshell, and it's why Trump is the perfect representative for it.

What bullshit did I RT? Just because you don't want to hear it doesn't make it bullshit. Speaking of typical.

 

[Cowboysrock55]

Yup everything is meaningless and inane nebulous criticisms that can literally be lodged against anyone.

Meanwhile Cotton RTs bullshit from the least of the least common denominators, but like this Pulitzer Prize winner made a typo so what he says is meaningless.

This is "conservatism" in a nutshell, and it's why Trump is the perfect representative for it.

Anything that doesn't agree with your ultra liberalism is not "typical conservative"

 

[townsend]

Anything that doesn't agree with your ultra liberalism is not "typical conservative"

"ultra liberalism." Shut the fuck up.

Remember that time I talked about abolishing currency? Or seizing corporate assets for the betterment of the people? Remember when I said workers should seize the means of production? Remember when I voted for Jill Stein because Hillary Clinton is a moderate?

You're right people who disagree with me aren't conservative. Because I'm conservative. I believe in debt reduction and the benefit of checks and balances. I believe in the freedom of religion, and that slow methodical improvement of a government is much better than rapid change without an understanding of the consequences. I've read, and agreed with, more works of Milton Friedman this week than the average "conservative" has in their life.

But fake team sports conservatism is exactly what people who disagree with me practice. Because it's extremeskins style delusional support of team GOP. There's no governing philosophy, just "us good, liberal bad".

Modern "Conservatism" isn't conservative at all it's virulent anti-intellectualism that flies in the face of the libraries of work that economist and philosophers baked into the actual conservative movement. That's why Pulitzer winners are bad, but anonymous twitter accounts are fine, and it perfectly sums up the content of the article I posted in the first place.

 

[skidadl]

When you emotionally remove yourself from this thread it is pretty entertaining.

 

[peplaw06]

These can be spun the other way too. She mentions that the Democrats are pro-free speech, unless they don't agree with what you're saying. Then she says sarcastically that Democrats think it's totally okay to burn the flag or not stand for the national anthem. So I guess Republicans are pro-free speech unless you're doing one of those two things?

 

[Cotton]

These can be spun the other way too. She mentions that the Democrats are pro-free speech, unless they don't agree with what you're saying. Then she says sarcastically that Democrats think it's totally okay to burn the flag or not stand for the national anthem. So I guess Republicans are pro-free speech unless you're doing one of those two things?

I think your comments about free speech are fair points.

 

[peplaw06]

I think your comments about free speech are fair points.

How about her comments that Democrats love growing government? The bigger the better, I think she said. Republicans are hardly proponents of small government. They may pay lip service to it, but in practice, they're just as big-government as the Dems.

 

[townsend]

How about her comments that Democrats love growing government? The bigger the better, I think she said. Republicans are hardly proponents of small government. They may pay lip service to it, but in practice, they're just as big-government as the Dems.

The sad fact is that Republicans don't actually have a governing philosophy so all they have is shitting on the other team. The sadder fact is Democrats are starting to do the same thing. "Have you seen the other guy" is going to be the 2018 midterm slogan because politics has irreversibly gone the direction of catering to the least informed.

Essentially we're suffering through an ESPNization of political discourse.

 

[Cotton]

How about her comments that Democrats love growing government? The bigger the better, I think she said. Republicans are hardly proponents of small government. They may pay lip service to it, but in practice, they're just as big-government as the Dems.

Republican politicians may be big government leaning, but not nearly as much as the Democrats. And, conservative people that vote Republican are in no way shape or form big government leaning.

 

[townsend]

Republican politicians may be big government leaning, but not nearly as much as the Democrats. And, conservative people that vote Republican are in no way shape or form big government leaning.

They absolutely are exactly as big government. Right now they're fighting for greater federal oversight of local law enforcement and are complicit with shameless land grabs along the border for a wall that isn't about to happen, they're trying to install protectionist legislation to restrict free markets, and are even trying to micromanage who uses which bathrooms.

Let's not forget that the Bush administration installed a lot of rules to shit on civil liberties for the "war on terror".

And voting for them just shows that "small government" isn't actually a priority for "conservatives" they just like chanting the slogan.

 

[Cotton]

They absolutely are exactly as big government..

 

[peplaw06]

Republican politicians may be big government leaning, but not nearly as much as the Democrats. And, conservative people that vote Republican are in no way shape or form big government leaning.

I agree that most GOP voters don't want bigger government... at least from what I can tell. But there's a huge disconnect between the voters and the party, because the party as a whole hasn't been shrinking the government for years.

TrumpCare is the latest boondoggle. They're taking a failing health insurance scheme, making slight modifications to it, bailing out insurance companies, and putting their stamp on it. It's like they're trying to take credit for building the Titanic after it has hit the iceberg.

If you want real conservatism from GOP politicians, you have to depend on Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and the rest of the House Freedom Caucus. Sadly, they're hugely outnumbered.