Craig is just one of thousands of examples. I think the lack of defense is just a reflection of the pulse of the country.

Another one that cracks me up is the way the two sides take the same attack, and defense, for similar issues as if the other never happened.

Clinton and Lewinsky
Rep: It's about lying under oath, it's about a president purgering himself.
Dem: It's an attack! It's no one's business what he does! It was no big deal!
Rep: No, this is really important and should matter to everyone!!!

Scooter and Plame
Dem: It's about exposing an undercover agent for revenge
Rep: No it's not, she wasn't undercover, this is a bunch of crap so Joe Wilson can get his face in more magazines! It was no big deal!
Dem: No, this is really important and should matter to everyone!!!


Half of you are quoting me already to reply: "But the Plame thing DID MATTER"

And so the wheel spins...

Disco Stu wrote:I think this swings more to the right for the reason that conservatism is to the right, liberalism is really in the center and socialism is to the left. The entire gammut is offline and those on the right want to believe that the "left" is left of center when it really IS center.

|--Socialism----Liberalism-Center-----Conservatsim--|

It really doesn't get more conservative than the GW group besides electing Bill Donahue as president. It gets MUCH more liberal past the Clintons, Edwards and Obamas. And people who think they are in the center are really just unaware conservatives.

I won't vote for a Republican because they represent the many being controlled by the few (social control by religion and economic control by the rich). The problem is that there is really no wavering off of that. I think you'll find much more diversity among liberal views than conservative ones.

I think this is all a matter of perspective. Edwards/Obama are at least as far to the left as GWB is to the right. Frankly, I'd argue Edwards is further from the political center in this country than Bush is.

How do you just decide that liberalism is the center?

jerseyhoya wrote:

Disco Stu wrote:I think this swings more to the right for the reason that conservatism is to the right, liberalism is really in the center and socialism is to the left. The entire gammut is offline and those on the right want to believe that the "left" is left of center when it really IS center.

|--Socialism----Liberalism-Center-----Conservatsim--|

It really doesn't get more conservative than the GW group besides electing Bill Donahue as president. It gets MUCH more liberal past the Clintons, Edwards and Obamas. And people who think they are in the center are really just unaware conservatives.

I won't vote for a Republican because they represent the many being controlled by the few (social control by religion and economic control by the rich). The problem is that there is really no wavering off of that. I think you'll find much more diversity among liberal views than conservative ones.

I think this is all a matter of perspective. Edwards/Obama are at least as far to the left as GWB is to the right. Frankly, I'd argue Edwards is further from the political center in this country than Bush is.

How do you just decide that liberalism is the center?

I am stating my opinion, which I think is much closer to fact than the general consensus. You mention the political center of this country which is much different than the general political center overall. I tend to think that this country leans to the right on the mean, but the median is much more to the center and to the liberal side. I think there are a ton of different reasons why a lot of these voters don't vote or vote conservative despite being closer to the ideology of the liberals.

You don't get much further to the right than some of these ultra Christian Coalition groups, but you can get much further to the left than most of these "far left" blogs are even at. I think we should have a socialistic base which puts me out in the lefty looney bin.

Or, you could argue that conservative = eliminate social security, eliminate welfare, ban alcohol, enforce segregation/allow discrimination, and liberal = social security, welfare, affirmative action, legal alcohol and marijuana. In which case, we have no conservative party in America, and Republicans and Democrats are fighting over how far left of center we should be.

ashton wrote:Or, you could argue that conservative = eliminate social security, eliminate welfare, ban alcohol, enforce segregation/allow discrimination, and liberal = social security, welfare, affirmative action, legal alcohol and marijuana. In which case, we have no conservative party in America, and Republicans and Democrats are fighting over how far left of center we should be.

That is the exact kind of strawman that the right makes to try to justify the position.

VoxOrion wrote:You can't imagine voting for a war guy who would give tax breaks to millionaires. I can't imagine voting for someone who is pro-abortion. There's no point in pretending otherwise.

Okay, but this is a little different than categorically refusing to vote for a Democrat or a Republican; it assumes (I'd like to think correctly) that I would be okay with voting for a Republican whom I don't find offensive on those issues--and for the record, I'm not anti-tax cuts, I'm just anti-all tax cuts, all the time, in any and every circumstance--and the same for you with Democrats of, say, the Casey family mode. (As an aside, nobody's "pro-abortion"--though I guess that the Dobsonites who'd rather keep the abort rate high than allow contraception and sex ed in schools might be, as the Mao people said, "objectively pro-abortion.")

The problem here I guess is that, as I think you wrote recently, we're now pretty much in a parliamentary system; you might appreciate Harry Reid's stance on abortion, but I suspect you'd prefer he not be Senate Majority Leader because it means he gets to set a Democratic agenda (though not pass one, as we've seen). This is, of course, yet another reason to hate the politics of the '90s, when this all hardened into reality and moderates/indies either switched parties, retired or died off.

VoxOrion wrote:Where reflexive partisanship is stupid is when you automatically defend some action (not stand or policy) just because it was "your guy", or automatically assume the worst because it's the "other guy".

Conservatives were running around trying to make "light" of what happened there. Why? It's stupid. Three/four years later they aren't - why not? Because they aren't inherantly okay with that {I know you disagree, but bear with my point} - they just didn't like the idea of a Democrat/liberal "win" so they defended it. Ditto for NOW and the whole Clinton thing. Instead of following the predictable pattern they supposedly stood for when the Lewinsky thing came out, they played dumb and shifted focus to whether or not it was anyone's business what he was doing, blah blah blah.

I believe you and I both have the bad habit of over-generalizing from our own views. I appreciate that you're not okay with routine, mindless torture as an instrument of policy--but, yeah, I do believe that most Republicans are.

Also, while I don't think you're really setting up an equivalency between Abu Ghraib and leaking Plame's identity on the one hand and Bill Clinton's sexcapades on the other, I would suggest that those of us who were outraged at the first two things and "defended" the third had something else going on besides reflexive partisanship. (I realize I'm doing exactly what you predicted some overwrought lefty would do--but as I bore with you, please do the same with me.)

Abu Ghraib was a crime against international law and the national honor, and the Plame story represented a legitimate national security concern (a two-pronged one at that, both because it ruined an anti-nuclear proliferation asset, and sent an extremely chilling message to people in the intelligence services that if you broke with the company line, your career was wrecked--a big deal for anyone who wasn't married to a rich guy like Joe Wilson). Both came up, sort of, in the context of the 2004 election; both seemed relevant to whether the president should get another term.

Clinton's getting blown by the intern *was* embarrassing and shameful--but for him, not the country. And had it been used as an indictment of Democratic values or whatever in the 1998 or 2000 elections, that would have been fine by me. (Probably tough to pull off with Gingrich basically doing the same thing in the Rayburn Building stairwell, but never mind that.) What upset us--including a lot of us who thought Clinton should have crawled into a hole and stayed there--was that the Republicans tried to use this to depose a sitting president.

Yes, he perjured himself. (Though the whole reason he was in that situation was because Hillary was too stubborn and stupid to pay off Paula Jones for pennies on the eventual dollar, as far as legal expenses and general agita--yet another example of her lousy judgment, though not something Obama and Edwards really can use.) And there should have been consequences for that. But the impeachment was, in the real world, absurd and unnecessary; they already had his agenda blocked. And on the scale of presidential lies, this wouldn't even register.

The unhinged partisanship drove the whole thing into something much more than it really was. Without the likes of Rush Limbaugh inveighing against Clinton's immorality on the radio, and Tom DeLay seeing an opportunity to seize power behind closed doors, there wouldn't have been an impeachment. This can't be said about Abu Ghraib/torture, and it probably can't be said about Plame.

ashton wrote:Or, you could argue that conservative = eliminate social security, eliminate welfare, ban alcohol, enforce segregation/allow discrimination, and liberal = social security, welfare, affirmative action, legal alcohol and marijuana. In which case, we have no conservative party in America, and Republicans and Democrats are fighting over how far left of center we should be.

Before 1994, this is pretty much where I felt the country was - debating the limits of western liberalism.

Since the 1994 election though, I think this country has been debating the limits of western conservatism, with the problem being that some, like your typical National Review writers or conservative talk hosts, think that no degree of conservatism is too far - you can never cut taxes far enough, you can never eliminate too much government, etc.

Although I opposed it, I believe the sea-change in political thought that the 1994 election brought necessary - the nation had been clamoring for things like welfare reform and a balanced budget amendment for too long for those things to go unaddressed. A representative democracy is supposed to at least address the will of the people, if not ratify it.

In the mid to late '90s, America got to address these issues with Bill Clinton in the White House to moderate the excesses and a Democratic cabinet to enact the changes. If, like me, you fear the excesses of conservatism but nonetheless believe in the ideal of representative democracy, this was close to an ideal situation. And so we got welfare reform that didn't seem to put truly helpless people out on the street. And the broad middle class' sense of fairness was addressed.

And other conservative ideas, which were bad, like a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, or unconstitutional, like term limits, got their day in the sun and then went the way of the Edsel.

And then conservatives, as I believe they always will, went too far, and the great middle class again got to see the wisdom of western liberalism. Put in very general terms, you don't have to enjoy paying taxes to appreciate the reality that most of us do better if we tackle the big problems together, which is the point of "big" government financed by income taxes.

A move towards liberal progress was, in my opinion, forestalled by the theft of the 2000 presidential election, and aggravated by the Sept. 11 attacks, masterfully manipulated by the Bush/Cheney government for its gain and acquisition of power.

But again, conservative overreach brought its own downfall, resulting in the 2006 congressional elections. (Only a cynic, which I am not, then could have guessed that the new Democratic Congress would be the next organization to stand in the way of liberal progress, but that largely is what happened.)

I await the 2008 elections with a basic belief that a majority of the U.S. voting population is ready for a return to sensible liberalism. Whether the winners of the next election will allow that to happen is another question.

This whole conservative/liberal thing though reflects the way in which ideologies are pretty warped in the US.

We've got people who call themselves "small government conservatives". I think that means substituting corporate power for state power. They say they are different from libertarians, because small government conservatives are maybe against abortion, and libertarians are not. Small government conservatives might also be against open borders, and other things. But that does seem to require an expansion of government.

You have your real libertarians, who I guess would be happy in some place without an effective state. Someplace like Somalia.

Then you've got your theo-cons, who call themselves social conservatives. These people want to get the state more involved in our everyday lives.

Then add in the neo-cons, or imperialists. They don't like other countries, so the best thing to do is to take them over.

These people all call themselves conservatives, except maybe the libertarians, but they are not really conservatives at all. Their unification in a single political party is more or less an accident, having to do with unique features of American history--the issue of slavery and subsequently civil rights, its geography, the two great awakenings, and the lack of any real socialism or its antecedent feudalism.

This is why Huckabee drives people nuts, and why his candidacy is such a problem for establishment Republicans. Even though I think Huckabee is unlikely to win the nomination, he's already shown that there's nothing really holding so-cons to the rest of the Republican coalition. You can buy off the leadership maybe, but rank and file evangelicals won't. They have absolutely no reason, for instance, to favor free trade, and plenty of reasons to oppose it.

Those who now call themselves conservatives would destroy everything for the sake of their ideology. They are all products of what Oakeshott calls "The Politics of Faith", the idea that the proper arrangement of institutions can perfect human society. In this they are no different from Marxists or Fascists or Rousseauists. The basic idea if only we could eliminate error from our political arrangement, we would not need to waste time with the messy business of politics.

Oakeshott contrasts this with the politics of skepticism. The skeptic in this schema is always ready to say, "wait a second, you don't know what you're doing. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone."

I think that's conservatism. A real conservative at this point would be extraordinarily reluctant to mess too much with social security. On the other hand, he or she would not be willing to institute single payer health care.

The one thing that Americans on the right that is conservative (and liberals have started to catch on) is that federalism--letting states do things--might be a good approach. Will Romney care work? Let's see how it plays out in Massachusetts.

And Disco Stu is more or less right--if you look at Western democracies as a whole, there's a lot of room to the left of the Democratic party. Not so much to the right of the Republican Party. (Anyone want to start a constitutional monarchy party? Sign me up!)

TenuredVulture wrote:These people all call themselves conservatives, except maybe the libertarians, but they are not really conservatives at all. Their unification in a single political party is more or less an accident, having to do with unique features of American history--the issue of slavery and subsequently civil rights, its geography, the two great awakenings, and the lack of any real socialism or its antecedent feudalism.

Yet it's the Democrats who traditionally have been tagged with the "it's not a party, it's a coalition of interest groups" charge--not unfairly or inaccurately, I'd add. The truth is that both parties are coalitions forced by circumstance into a greater degree of discipline and coherence than their ideologies necessarily call for, especially in the last 15 years or so.

TenuredVulture wrote:Those who now call themselves conservatives would destroy everything for the sake of their ideology. They are all products of what Oakeshott calls "The Politics of Faith", the idea that the proper arrangement of institutions can HAMELS human society. In this they are no different from Marxists or Fascists or Rousseauists. The basic idea if only we could eliminate error from our political arrangement, we would not need to waste time with the messy business of politics.

Oakeshott contrasts this with the politics of skepticism. The skeptic in this schema is always ready to say, "wait a second, you don't know what you're doing. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone."

I think that's conservatism. A real conservative at this point would be extraordinarily reluctant to mess too much with social security. On the other hand, he or she would not be willing to institute single payer health care.

What's weird is that what you describe makes sense for the theocratic Republicans; their motivation is faith which is by definition (well, Judeo-Christian definition) messianic and taken with the notion that humankind is perfectable. But it absolutely doesn't make sense for the "free-market fundamentalists"--people who really should know better than to believe in the Tax Fairy. It's like they picked up the messianic political mindset by osmosis.

TenuredVulture wrote:The one thing that Americans on the right that is conservative (and liberals have started to catch on) is that federalism--letting states do things--might be a good approach. Will Romney care work? Let's see how it plays out in Massachusetts.

This is the reason why Thompson wouldn't scare me nearly as much as Giuliani or Romney; he at least gets federalism and the concept of limited government. Maybe that early exposure to Nixon taught him something about the hubris of power. Or maybe it's just that he's really, really lazy.

TenuredVulture wrote:And Disco Stu is more or less right--if you look at Western democracies as a whole, there's a lot of room to the left of the Democratic party. Not so much to the right of the Republican Party. (Anyone want to start a constitutional monarchy party? Sign me up!)

But you said you weren't leaning toward Hillary... sorry, but when you tee it up so well, I gotta swing.

[quote="dajafi"]

Clinton's getting blown by the intern *was* embarrassing and shameful--but for him, not the country. And had it been used as an indictment of Democratic values or whatever in the 1998 or 2000 elections, that would have been fine by me. (Probably tough to pull off with Gingrich basically doing the same thing in the Rayburn Building stairwell, but never mind that.) What upset us--including a lot of us who thought Clinton should have crawled into a hole and stayed there--was that the Republicans tried to use this to depose a sitting president.

Yes, he perjured himself. [/(quote]

This isn't really the debate we're having and I don't want to get us off course.

But I think it's debatable whether Bill Clinton committed perjury. Now, did he lie under oath? Yes. But about something that was not illegal and not appropriately the source of any government investigation. Not all lies under oath are of equal import, and I don't believe all rise to the definition of perjury.

I think to commit perjury, the lie has to be to cover up or deny a crime. Clinton's activity with Monica Lewinsky was not criminal, nor was it related even tangentially to a crime. Therefore, lying about it was not perjury.

VoxOrion wrote:....Nothing bothers me more than the celebration of these half-wit "undecided" voters in late October. You mean to tell me you can't make up your mind? Are you illiterate? Are you just waiting for some kind of half-assed scandal to break in the 13th hour? Or are you just "undecided" as a continuation of our celebration of relativity and medocrity (or so that fatty from Fox News will stick a microphone in your face)?...

consider that you're assuming 'undecided' describes something meaningful outside of the realm of news bookies' need to keep score. For example, try substituting 'abstaining' for 'undecided'; or 'ashamed to cast a perfectly good ballot for any of the contending nincompoops'.

A decision not to cast a vote is a vote. And a meaningful one, whether or not you 'know what it means'.

I'd consider it if I believed it were true, but I don't. It's absolutely true that the middle of the road voters (i.e. people who aren't committed to one party or another) have a significant impact on national elections, and that the 24 hour news cycle is trying to find ways to highlight that - but I believe the celebration of them in that last month/weeks ends up having the effect of encouraging limp-fish indecision as a virtue. Who can't decide who to vote for in 8 months? That implies a ridiculous level of flexability in one's values that I can't imagine, and certainly don't believe is virtuous.

Maybe a helpful way to think about this: we all seem to be relatively well informed and have a pretty good sense of what's important to us in terms of political values. Has anyone here really agonized over a vote, in the sense of "should I support the D or the R"? I doubt it.

(For reasons of both geography and ideology, my version of this is generally "should I support the corrupt and/or stupid and/or personally repulsive Democrat, or should I vote for the lefty third-party freak whom I'd be afraid to let into my home because s/he would never leave?" I generally vote for the freak, then run at top speed from the polling place.)

VoxOrion wrote:I'd consider it if I believed it were true, but I don't. It's absolutely true that the middle of the road voters (i.e. people who aren't committed to one party or another) have a significant impact on national elections, and that the 24 hour news cycle is trying to find ways to highlight that - but I believe the celebration of them in that last month/weeks ends up having the effect of encouraging limp-fish indecision as a virtue. Who can't decide who to vote for in 8 months? That implies a ridiculous level of flexability in one's values that I can't imagine, and certainly don't believe is virtuous.

Ive always joked that the leader of the free world is usually decided by the wishy washy.

The bigger question is one of practicality. I don't think anyone here believes that a vote for a third party candidate accomplishes anything (with the possible exception of Perot, who forced the candidates to change to be more like him). Most of the time, if you're voting for the third party candidate, it's probably hurting the chances of the candidate you most identify with otherwise.

What is one's duty when voting? Voting conscience, no matter whether the vote cast accomplishes nothing? Or voting practically, which means showing up to ideally vote for a candidate you support, or less ideally, showing up to vote against the candidate you know you don't support?

What's the intent? To contribute to immediate accomplishment, or to be "true to oneself" (a loathsome saying if I ever heard one). It's sort of a question regarding 'sins of omission' - if you can't stand torture, then isn't it a 'sin of omission' to throw your vote in a direction that enables the torture guy?

dajafi wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Those who now call themselves conservatives would destroy everything for the sake of their ideology. They are all products of what Oakeshott calls "The Politics of Faith", the idea that the proper arrangement of institutions can HAMELS human society. In this they are no different from Marxists or Fascists or Rousseauists. The basic idea if only we could eliminate error from our political arrangement, we would not need to waste time with the messy business of politics.

Oakeshott contrasts this with the politics of skepticism. The skeptic in this schema is always ready to say, "wait a second, you don't know what you're doing. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone."

I think that's conservatism. A real conservative at this point would be extraordinarily reluctant to mess too much with social security. On the other hand, he or she would not be willing to institute single payer health care.

What's weird is that what you describe makes sense for the theocratic Republicans; their motivation is faith which is by definition (well, Judeo-Christian definition) messianic and taken with the notion that humankind is HAMELS. But it absolutely doesn't make sense for the "free-market fundamentalists"--people who really should know better than to believe in the Tax Fairy. It's like they picked up the messianic political mindset by osmosis.

Somewhere Oakeshott describes Hayek's libertarianism as an embodiment of what he calls the politics of faith. I can't find the exact quotation, but basically the idea is that not having a program is itself a program. The key word in your description is "fundamentalism".

VoxOrion wrote:I'd consider it if I believed it were true, but I don't. It's absolutely true that the middle of the road voters (i.e. people who aren't committed to one party or another) have a significant impact on national elections, and that the 24 hour news cycle is trying to find ways to highlight that - but I believe the celebration of them in that last month/weeks ends up having the effect of encouraging limp-fish indecision as a virtue. Who can't decide who to vote for in 8 months? That implies a ridiculous level of flexability in one's values that I can't imagine, and certainly don't believe is virtuous.

There are also piles of empirical evidence that these undecided voters are hopelessly ignorant about politics. So, our elections are determined by the least knowledgeable voters.

TenuredVulture wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:I'd consider it if I believed it were true, but I don't. It's absolutely true that the middle of the road voters (i.e. people who aren't committed to one party or another) have a significant impact on national elections, and that the 24 hour news cycle is trying to find ways to highlight that - but I believe the celebration of them in that last month/weeks ends up having the effect of encouraging limp-fish indecision as a virtue. Who can't decide who to vote for in 8 months? That implies a ridiculous level of flexability in one's values that I can't imagine, and certainly don't believe is virtuous.

There are also piles of empirical evidence that these undecided voters are hopelessly ignorant about politics. So, our elections are determined by the least knowledgeable voters.

I resemble that remark.

VoxOrion wrote:I'd consider it if I believed it were true, but I don't. It's absolutely true that the middle of the road voters (i.e. people who aren't committed to one party or another) have a significant impact on national elections, and that the 24 hour news cycle is trying to find ways to highlight that - but I believe the celebration of them in that last month/weeks ends up having the effect of encouraging limp-fish indecision as a virtue. Who can't decide who to vote for in 8 months? That implies a ridiculous level of flexability in one's values that I can't imagine, and certainly don't believe is virtuous.

While I have no problem with undecided voters (not everyone follow politics like they should). I do have a problem with people who haven't chosen sides on the war who are undecided. If you are undecided, then you obviously don't lean towards conservative or liberal on most issues, thus, you would probably vote on the most pressing issue, which is the war. If you haven't made up your mind yet, you are an idiot.

BuddyGroom wrote:

dajafi wrote:
Clinton's getting blown by the intern *was* embarrassing and shameful--but for him, not the country. And had it been used as an indictment of Democratic values or whatever in the 1998 or 2000 elections, that would have been fine by me. (Probably tough to pull off with Gingrich basically doing the same thing in the Rayburn Building stairwell, but never mind that.) What upset us--including a lot of us who thought Clinton should have crawled into a hole and stayed there--was that the Republicans tried to use this to depose a sitting president.

Yes, he perjured himself.

This isn't really the debate we're having and I don't want to get us off course.

But I think it's debatable whether Bill Clinton committed perjury. Now, did he lie under oath? Yes. But about something that was not illegal and not appropriately the source of any government investigation. Not all lies under oath are of equal import, and I don't believe all rise to the definition of perjury.

I think to commit perjury, the lie has to be to cover up or deny a crime. Clinton's activity with Monica Lewinsky was not criminal, nor was it related even tangentially to a crime. Therefore, lying about it was not perjury.

Clinton was acquitted of the perjury and obstruction charges.