Tuesday, October 28, 2008

A Glimpse All The Way Into Next Week

What should emerge from this wreckage is a major conservative party that acknowledges the idiocy of acquiescing to dumb mobs, a liberal party that realizes its future lies with inspiring centrists like Obama and not fringe-identity politics, and a lot of tiny angry splinter groups filled with nuts dedicated to one extremist cause or another.
- Ken Layne, Republican vs. Republican: The End of the Party

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Piker, do you honestly believe Obama is a Centrist?

Publius said...

Obama is a hard-line liberal and probably a closet Marxist. He's never reached across the aisle on anything his liberal ideology might ppose, never voted for a centrist bill and never sponsored any centrist policies.

He postured, preened, and posed, but he's never really actually come through.

He'll attempt to govern like Ayers on steroids.

There isn't a THING "centrist" about him.

If you want someone that has taken centrist positions, McCain is your man.

piker62 said...

With respect to both you guys, you think George Bush was a pretty good president - he lost you when HE went centrist. Right? Just for calibration purposes.

Anonymous said...

Piker, do politicians move more towards the Right, or the Left when they get ingrained in DC life?

Bush lost me when he began spending like a drunken sailor.

piker62 said...

what an entertaining sidestep. Dance, monkey, Dance! Hahahahahaah.

Sorry, where was I? Politicians tend to go centrist when they're in office, because it helps them get more votes by being all things to all people.

You know, the most clearly identifiable expense in governement right now is that darn war, (wars, I guess) and we could certainly keep costs down by dialing that activity back a little.

Anonymous said...

Really, they move to the Center? Gan you give me examples of Pelosi, Reid, Boxer, Schumer, Kerry, Kennedy moving to the Center?

I'd argue that Politicians generally move to the Left once they are in.

Joe Lieberman being an exception.

And how did I sidestep? You asked me when Bush "lost" me, and I told you.

piker62 said...

Ask Code Pink and Cindy Sheehan what they think of Pelosi, especially as regards votes about the War.

I'm interested that you think that politics itself has a bias toward the left. How do you explain a phenomenon like that? My opinion is that you're far enough right that the center looks like the left to you.

Anonymous said...

The war is ONE issue, Piker. One.

I think politics in general does lean slightly to the Left. The longer one spends in DC, the more jaded they become to all the money and programs being tossed around.

piker62 said...

So you believe that corruption itself is a trait of Democrats. That is, if a politician becomes corrupt, they are becoming Democrat. Am I mischaracterizing your argument?

Anonymous said...

Where did I say anything about corruption?

piker62 said...

I was jumping to a conclusion -"The longer one spends in DC, the more jaded they become to all the money and programs being tossed around." - seems to imply corruption to me. Is it just the time spent that turns them liberal?

Anonymous said...

I can best explain by offering an example from my past.

I used to manage a popular sports bar in Phoenix. On a busy night, we'd see $10,000-15,000 in cash on a Friday night.

I'd sit down in the office, bundling $20's into packs of $2,000. There would literally be "bricks" of $20's all around me.

Over time, it stopped being $10,000 dollars, and became "bricks" to us. Because we were around it all the time, it's significance diminished.

I think there is a similar happening in D.C. A Freshman Congressman/Senator goes from State/Local politics/business, and is suddenly looking at budgets that have more zeros than thay have ever dealt with before.

They become jaded. $10,000,000 here, $45,000,000 there, to keep the wheels spinning loses its "shock" factor. The dollars become just numbers. It becomes easier to spend them.

It's the reason why casinos use chips instead of currency-it's easier to "spend" a red chip, than a $20 bill.

As most programs are socially-related, and those programs are generally started/funded by the Left, it becomes somewhat of a natural occurance that many on the Right move toward the Center. And why many on the Left move more to the Left.

piker62 said...

All right, I can see the logic in your position. And it's true that most government spending is socially related, by definition.

Publius said...

Wait, I never said that Bush was a "pretty good president!"

I think he did a few things well. I liked his faith based charity approach, I like his modern medical ethics board, and I liked his tax cuts and his first part and last part of how he conducted the War on Terror (but he made a mess of the middle part).

But, for the most part, I feel his domestic policies were horrendous. He was a failure at education and Social Security. He also failed with getting judges appointed, though the few he did get in were mostly good.

I also think he pushed presidential authority too far, he failed to solidify the so-called torture policy, he failed to properly ground his terror policies in law and never worked well with Congress on any of those items. He also failed to advocate properly in front of the people for any of his policies. His office was one of the worst at communication in a long time.

So, there you have it in a nut shell.

Publius said...

Oh, and I agree with WAMK. The longer someone stays in DC the more they become big government socialists. And, yes, socialism is a corruption of the American system. It is wrong, incompatible and immoral for an American to wish for socialist policy.

Bush, however, cannot be said to have "failed" as a big govt guy. He RAN as one, governed as one in Texas... he always was one. This is why Bush was never a real conservative in the first place.