a new whining republicans thread

[Jenny_Jackson]

Actually, it's more like this: They always represent someone's interests. Sometimes they don't rep yours and sometimes they do. Lucky for you when they do, tough titty when they don't.

Actually, Politicians represent the very richest people and companies who gave generously to support their election campaigns. (Can you say BOUGHT?) So if you sent your $20 to Senator X does that mean anything compared to GM handing him $500,000 through various sources to get around the election laws?

Your $20 don't mean shit. Will they change the election laws to repair this disparity between Rich and Corporate self interest and the public? Hell know as long as the politicians get to stuff some of the cash in their pockets as "expense reimbursements".

 

[Stella_Omega]

My $20 means mare when it combines with thousands of other people's $20.

For one thing, each $20 means one vote.

http://www.couragecampaign.org
http://www.actblue.com
http://truemajority.org
http://boldprogressives.org/home.html

 

[sr71plt]

I think Irezumikiss bottomlined this part of the discussion brilliantly.

 

[Huckleman2000]

Hah! Finally, after 3 pages of this stupid wrangling, someone says something that makes sense. There isn't a dimes worth of difference between Dumbocrats and Repuglicans. They're all politicians that love being an exalted class and exempt from virtually any legislation they enact...and they'll lie, cheat and steal to stay in power.

It's way past time people should be looking out after themselves instead of waiting for Washington to do things for them. There's too damn many people sitting in the wagon instead of pulling it.

Oh Christ. The Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff of political debate.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Actually, it's more like this: They always represent someone's interests. Sometimes they don't rep yours and sometimes they do. Lucky for you when they do, tough titty when they don't. When they do rep your interests, if they can do so without sacrificing enough of a percentage of your personal convictions to make your interests selfishly swallowable ahead of other people's non-represented interests, then even better for you. Best case scenario, those interests benefit the larger population as a whole. But eventually the circle will complete itself, the pendulum will swing against you and you'll have to live off of what you hopefully saved up during the feast for the famine.

That's just life being life. We're never going to have the perfect politician, party system or government that satisfies everyone. You either accept as much as you can, change what you can change and make do with what you got, or take yourself off the grid totally and go live on an island in the South Pacific with an ecosystem that will sustain your existence until you die and leave the most minimal carbon footprint imaginable behind by becoming part of a coral reef.

In case you didnt notice, America has become 19th Century Czarist Russia. Virtually everyone is a princess or duke or countess, feeding at the public trough and selling their influence to oligarchs who stuff you (peasant) into a small apartment and a pissant job.

 

[sr71plt]

In case you didnt notice, America has become 19th Century Czarist Russia. Virtually everyone is a princess or duke or countess, feeding at the public trough and selling their influence to oligarchs who stuff you (peasant) into a small apartment and a pissant job.

Excuse me. You are a decade behind the times. The Bush administration took the public trough away. Those who are feeding at such a trough now are doing so in church basements. And they ain't feeling like princesses or dukes.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

My $20 means mare when it combines with thousands of other people's $20.

For one thing, each $20 means one vote.

That's the problem, Stella. Your $20 means he gets one vote, but his eye is still on representing the $500,000 contribution, not your $20.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Excuse me. You are a decade behind the times. The Bush administration took the public trough away. Those who are feeding at such a trough now are doing so in church basements. And they ain't feeling like princesses or dukes.

Aunt Shabby youve lost your mind. Bush spent 8 years wanking or stepping on his dick, and did virtually zip about Wall Street, Congress, insurance companies, banks, and folks like Donald Trump. And when the SHIT SANDWICH was ready he was first in line to help all these folks out. I assure you that Suffolk County NY (the Hamptons) has no idea there's a recession.

 

[Stella_Omega]

That's the problem, Stella. Your $20 means he gets one vote, but his eye is still on representing the $500,000 contribution, not your $20.

My one vote plus thousands of other one votes means he's still in office.

My $20 plus thousands of other $20s means money that's worth listening to.

That's what grassroots is. Remember grass roots movements? Everything old is new again...

 

[sr71plt]

I assure you that Suffolk County NY (the Hamptons) has no idea there's a recession.

And I assure you that they have a much greater idea there's a recession than I do with my cushy government annuity.

 

[Stella_Omega]

And I assure you that they have a much greater idea there's a recession than I do with my cushy government annuity.

Housing values have dropped there, just like everywhere else.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Housing values have dropped there, just like everywhere else.

The water company there is pretty busy connecting to new homes. Unemployment is almost nuthin.

 

[sr71plt]

Nothing like living in a rich university town with no mortgage and no intention of selling the house for a couple of decades to ward off the effects of a recession. The Hamptons are in a panic compared to where I am.

(Of course, I'd grant that living in a trailer near Tampa is probably even cheaper.)

 

[IrezumiKiss]

I assure you that Suffolk County NY (the Hamptons) has no idea there's a recession.

Don't let the people still sniffing after the celebrity hoi polloi like they still mean the same thing they did three years ago fool you. The Hamps and the area "brand" is hurtin', baby. Not only is Hamptons Magazine thin as a Wheat Thins wafer these days, if I wanted to, I could put on some designer threads from last year's collection and waltz straight into a joint that used to be exclusive with velvet rope, no problem.

 

[TE999]

Oh Christ. The Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff of political debate.

I think ol' Wagstaff should run for president...damn, he's dead too.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Nothing like living in a rich university town with no mortgage and no intention of selling the house for a couple of decades to ward off the effects of a recession. The Hamptons are in a panic compared to where I am.

(Of course, I'd grant that living in a trailer near Tampa is probably even cheaper.)

I'll bet youve never 'wall walked' in a trailer or lived in a 'sheet-room.' In my collection of stuff I have a photo of a tarpaper shed I lived in as a kid. My old man lived in a tent during the Great Depression.

 

[Liar]

My one vote plus thousands of other one votes means he's still in office.

My $20 plus thousands of other $20s means money that's worth listening to.

That's what grassroots is. Remember grass roots movements? Everything old is new again...

Here's one thing I never seem to be able to add up. The thing your $20 pays for, or Big Corps $500k pays for, is financial muscles in the next election campaign. (Unless we're talking bona fide corruption, of course, money straight into the poli's pocket. But for the sake of the argument, let's not go there.)

How much bloody muscle does one need? The only thing you can buy with it is ads. Once you gain enough traction to be a major contender, that should be moot, and regular media will give you all the attention you need.

I know that whenever there's an election here, I do three things. First, I go online and read the major parties' election programs. They all have them, well tailored cliffnotes of spin on how awesome they are going to be in power. Second, I watch whatever televised debates there are. And third, I read up one left wing and one right wing newspaper and let them summarize the policies of the different options. Then I choose what suits me best (or what sucks the least, as it may be).

If the size of the campaign coffin, and the ability to yell from every street corner and buy tv ads is a more deciding factor than what you actually want to to with the mandate, doesn't this not only indicate that the election system is broken, but also the electorate?

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Here's one thing I never seem to be able to add up. The thing your $20 pays for, or Big Corps $500k pays for, is financial muscles in the next election campaign. (Unless we're talking bona fide corruption, of course, money straight into the poli's pocket. But for the sake of the argument, let's not go there.)

How much bloody muscle does one need? The only thing you can buy with it is ads. Once you gain enough traction to be a major contender, that should be moot, and regular media will give you all the attention you need.

I know that whenever there's an election here, I do three things. First, I go online and read the major parties' election programs. They all have them, well tailored cliffnotes of spin on how awesome they are going to be in power. Second, I watch whatever televised debates there are. And third, I read up one left wing and one right wing newspaper and let them summarize the policies of the different options. Then I choose what suits me best (or what sucks the least, as it may be).

If the size of the campaign coffin, and the ability to yell from every street corner and buy tv ads is a more deciding factor than what you actually want to to with the mandate, doesn't this not only indicate that the election system is broken, but also the electorate?

The money is used to buy the best hired guns, editorials, tv time, and players your opponent also needs.

 

[trysail]

How, in spite of the incurable imbecility of the great masses of men, are we to get a reasonable measure of common sense and decency into the conduct of the world? The Liberal answer (much more clearly stated by H.G. Wells in "The Outline of History” than by Mr. Walter Lippmann in … "Public Opinion” is, in essence, simply a variant of the old democratic answer: by spreading enlightenment, by democratizing information, by combatting what is adjudged to be false by what is adjudged to be true. But this scheme, however persuasively it may be set forth, invariably goes to wreck upon two or three immovable facts. One is the fact that a safe majority of the men and women in every modern society are congenitally uneducable, save within very narrow limits—that it is no more possible to teach them what every voter theoretically should know than it is to teach a chimpanzee to play the viol da gamba. Another is the fact that the same safe majority, far from having any natural yearning to acquire this undescribed body of truth, has a natural and apparently incurable distrust of it … A third (and it is more important than either of the other two) is that there exists no body of teachers in Christendom capable of teaching the truth, even supposing it to be known … The inevitable tendency of pedagogy … is to preserve and propagate the lies that happen to be currently respectable, which is to say, that happen to be salubrious to the current masters of the mob.

-H.L. Mencken
“Demagoguery as Art and Science”
The Smart Set
April, 1922, pp. 138-139

The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups. The business of victimizing them is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has its masters and its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, i.e., a licensed blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then, raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to it. There are no legal or other bars to the free functioning of their will, once it emerges into consciousness, save only such bars as they themselves have erected, and these they may remove whenever they so desire. …

… They know what they want when they actually want it, and if they want it badly enough they get it. What they want principally are safety and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to sacrifice everything else in order to get them. The science of politics under democracy consists in trading with them, i.e., in hoodwinking and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants, and what the enterprising minorities behind him want. The bargaining is conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with music by the choir, but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of a mule. It lies quite outside the bounds of honour, and even of common decency. It is a combat between jackals and jackasses. It is the master transaction of democratic states.

-H.L. Mencken
Notes On Democracy

 

[Liar]

The money is used to buy the best hired guns, editorials, tv time, and players your opponent also needs.

See that's my beef... What do they need them for? At some point, doesn't it only become media diharrea?

 

[trysail]

See that's my beef... What do they need them for? At some point, doesn't it only become media diharrea [sic]?

That's exactly what the United States of America manufactures these days, Liar. That IS our Gross Domestic Product. We have an economy based entirely on paper shuffling, home pizza delivery, noise production, illiterate football players and suing each other— that's all that's left for us to do after complying with regulatory fiats, economic dictates, environmental requirements and political correctness.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

See that's my beef... What do they need them for? At some point, doesn't it only become media diharrea?

You dont want your opponent to use them, so you buy them or your opponent buys them. The whole thing is mercenary. And Americans are dummer than a bucket of piss.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Which means you never get to D. You just think you do.

No you just think I don't. In reality there is no D or A,B,C either, only people and politicians. To the people the politicians lie, cheat and steal their way into power. They will do anything to stay in office to become career politicians. The people are like sheep and follow and vote for those politicians that promise them what they want.

Obama promised you Hope and Change and you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Bush promised something to his sheeple and they fell for it also.

How's that change working out for you so far? It's obvious his D and your D aren't even in the same ballpark.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Obama is twisting arms today to get ObamaCare passed.

The GOP's cosmetic opposition is nonsense, they secretly want ObamaCare to pass BUT insist that the insurance companies be bailed-out by 100% participation. The Democrats want ObamaCare passed but demand a public option so they can control the money the public pays for coverage; Democrats need the money to pay-off their sponsors.

All that remains to be decided is which side has enough money to bribe the 'undecided' Democrats.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

No you just think I don't. In reality there is no D or A,B,C either, only people and politicians. To the people the politicians lie, cheat and steal their way into power. They will do anything to stay in office to become career politicians. The people are like sheep and follow and vote for those politicians that promise them what they want.

Obama promised you Hope and Change and you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Bush promised something to his sheeple and they fell for it also.

How's that change working out for you so far? It's obvious his D and your D aren't even in the same ballpark.

Well, if today's American age is making your life shitty, then what can I say, sucks to be you. I'm doing quite nicely after the Change, way better than I was doing before it. Nothing Obama's planning or doing so far is hurting my bottom line or affecting my personal goals.

Sorry for not living in the liberal-based misery and depression that you wanted to hear. Maybe in 2016 when President Palin starts making policy I'll get back to you.