Mollie Hemingway has a great piece up at The Federalist explaining what a debacle the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act turned into in the House of Representatives.
Even if you were certain you didn't have the votes to pass it, why pull the bill? All pulling the bill does is give people the impression that it's extreme when it's actually pretty mainstream; in fact, a virtually identical bill passed the House in 2013 without incident. Late-term abortion bans always poll extremely well; even many folks who don't call themselves"pro-life" are still in favor of banning late-term abortion. So why not just hold the vote on this bill regardless of whether or not you think enough votes are there to pass it, and then let whoever is extreme enough to vote against it show themselves for what they are?
Why in the world did Speaker Boehner let this happen? I want to give the guy a chance, but this is the kind of stupid shit that keeps pushing me into the anti-Boehner camp. Just take the easy win when you have it, Mr. Speaker! Please stop trying so hard to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. ( I'm glad that he invited Bibi to speak to Congress and all, but I don't think it was part of some master plan of his to give Obama a nervous breakdown, so I can only give him so much credit. And, really, it should've been a no-brainer anyway. )
Many conservatives are calling for Representative Renee Ellmers to be primaried in 2016 as punishment for throwing a spanner into the works with her flip-flop on late-term abortion. Ace even goes so far as to say that we should vote for her Democrat opponent if she somehow survives a primary challenge. I used to think such ideas were insane, but I have to admit he makes a surprisingly persuasive argument.
Showing posts with label indecision. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indecision. Show all posts
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Where have the 2004 voters gone?
I don't remember any Republican in 2004 telling me that it would be the end of America if John Kerry won the election. 2012 was another story... it seemed like I was being told every single day that it was the most important election in our nation's history. Yet Mitt Romney still fell short of Bush's vote tally by about two million votes, despite the stakes being much higher this time than they were back in 2004. Where the heck did all those Republican voters go? How on earth does someone show up to vote against John Kerry but stays home when a president with a record worse than Jimmy Carter's is asking for a mulligan?
Republicans already have enough of an uphill battle winning over all the stupid and/or crazy voters out there... why make it any harder? If you watched Romney wiping the floor with Obama in that first debate and came out of it thinking there was no difference between those two men, then you need to get your head examined (preferably by someone other than Dr. Ron Paul).
Conservatives need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we'll be out of power for the next 40 years. I'm not saying we should nominate nothing but squishy moderates, I'm just saying we shouldn't be so quick to tar everyone with the RINO brush. We can't let ourselves get as hysterical as some of the freaks on the other side, and then let that hysteria turn into apathy if we don't get our way on everything... we can't afford apathy in the face of political zealots who are quite happy to destroy the country so long as the GOP gets blamed for it.
Update: Hmmm... Ramesh Ponnuru has an interesting take on the so-called "purge of conservatives" from committees in the House that has so many people calling for John Boehner's head.
Update: Hmmm... Ramesh Ponnuru has an interesting take on the so-called "purge of conservatives" from committees in the House that has so many people calling for John Boehner's head.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Our long national nightmare is NOT over
So... Obama somehow managed to win a second term, despite having a record that should have gotten him tossed out on his ear. What happened here? I mostly agree with Ace's list of things that hurt Romney, but what's going on beneath all that? The root problem, as I see it, is that we have far too many voters in this country who simply can't be reasoned with.
Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers. They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News. They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions. If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.
For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking. They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out. They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do. You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them. The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.
And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all. They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically. They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them. They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC... and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture. They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default. Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first. That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.
These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight. And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year. I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.
Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale. I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong. This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry. As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale. You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter. I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination. Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom. I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.
That was 1984. I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama. We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems? This isn't just about the next election. I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.
Update: Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes. Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from. Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco. Oh well. Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.
Update: Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama. It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.
Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers. They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News. They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions. If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.
For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking. They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out. They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do. You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them. The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.
And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all. They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically. They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them. They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC... and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture. They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default. Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first. That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.
These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight. And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year. I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.
Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale. I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong. This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry. As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale. You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter. I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination. Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom. I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.
That was 1984. I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama. We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems? This isn't just about the next election. I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.
Update: Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes. Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from. Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco. Oh well. Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.
Update: Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama. It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.
Monday, January 2, 2012
The idiocy of Iowa
I really don't understand the poll numbers that have been coming out of Iowa ahead of the caucuses there. Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are now close enough to each other to be within the margin of error, with Rick Santorum in third place, Newt Gingrich in fourth, and Rick Perry fifth.
I can see why Newt Gingrich might slide a bit in the polls, I have questioned for a while now how Newt could ever possibly maintain a lead in the polls for any great length of time. But why would Ron Paul be gaining so much momentum? I may have some libertarian tendencies, but there's no way I could ever vote for a guy who is crazy enough to toe Dennis Kucinich's line on foreign policy... his anti-semitic newsletters and flirtations with 9/11 trutherism aren't exactly sweetening the deal for me either.
And I'm constantly amazed at how well Mitt Romney always does in the polls. The argument for nominating him is always that he is the most electable, but how electable will he really be once the media's long knives finally come out? Romney's flip-flops already have much of his own party's base dissatisfied with him, but in the general election he would also be easily villified as a wealthy fat cat with a lousy record on job creation, and having Romneycare on his résumé will make it pretty much impossible for him to ever effectively campaign against Obamacare.
Another thing that bothers me, why on earth does Iowa always get the first say in our presidential elections? Obama beat McCain in Iowa by a margin of at least ten points, so why should Republicans be looking to Iowa as the first state to whittle our field of candidates down? I think it would make much more sense to give red states the first say in picking Republican candidates and blue states the first say in picking Democrat candidates, with states having the highest percentage of the vote for each party having the earliest scheduled primaries. If we did things that way, the GOP primaries would begin in Oklahoma and end in Hawaii... and the Democrats would begin theirs in Hawaii and end in Wyoming.
Update: Ace is still trying to make the case for Rick Perry... I think he makes a pretty good case, but when a kook like Ron Paul has twice the poll numbers that Perry has, it probably doesn't matter at this point. You can't reason someone out of a position that they never reasoned themselves into to begin with.
Update: Thanks to the Watchers Council for the honorable mention.
Update: Well, looks like Romney won in Iowa, but just barely, I still don't get it... why do we start there? What would the field look like right now if we were already talking about the results of the Oklahoma primary, and Iowa caucuses were still months away?
Another thing that bothers me, why on earth does Iowa always get the first say in our presidential elections? Obama beat McCain in Iowa by a margin of at least ten points, so why should Republicans be looking to Iowa as the first state to whittle our field of candidates down? I think it would make much more sense to give red states the first say in picking Republican candidates and blue states the first say in picking Democrat candidates, with states having the highest percentage of the vote for each party having the earliest scheduled primaries. If we did things that way, the GOP primaries would begin in Oklahoma and end in Hawaii... and the Democrats would begin theirs in Hawaii and end in Wyoming.
Update: Ace is still trying to make the case for Rick Perry... I think he makes a pretty good case, but when a kook like Ron Paul has twice the poll numbers that Perry has, it probably doesn't matter at this point. You can't reason someone out of a position that they never reasoned themselves into to begin with.
Update: Thanks to the Watchers Council for the honorable mention.
Update: Well, looks like Romney won in Iowa, but just barely, I still don't get it... why do we start there? What would the field look like right now if we were already talking about the results of the Oklahoma primary, and Iowa caucuses were still months away?
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
8 candidates, 10 words
We've had lots of debates, but I'm still not sure which GOP candidate to root for in the primaries... and I think I actually get less sure with each debate.
To help me sort out my thoughts on all the remaining candidates, I thought I'd try to force myself to describe each candidate in exactly ten words. Here goes nothing...
Newt Gingrich: Giant head. Funny name. Not exactly a one woman man.
Mitt Romney: Nice hair. Funny name. Taken every side of every issue.
Michelle Bachman: Nice name. Crazy eyes. Forever tainted by the Tardasil incident.
Jon Huntsman: Former Obama lackey. Current douchebag. Definitely in the wrong primary.
Rick Perry: Created lots of jobs. Awful debater. Forgets too many things.
Rick Santorum: A decent guy, but too conservative for Pennsylvania in 2006.
Ron Paul: Insane foreign policy. Screechy voice. Often answers easy questions incoherently.
Buddy Roemer: I keep hearing this name mentioned, but not sure why.
Not sure how much that actually helped me, but that was kinda fun... ok, now it's your turn! ;-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)