Comments Posted By John O
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The (long) road back to Conservative relevance is pretty clear to me: Cut the Defense budget, declare an end to the WOD, claim that is not the government's business to decide who marries whom, tax the uber-rich if it is necessary to balance the budget, support regulation of the crooks on Wall St., and spend some money on health care and infrastructure and energy independence.
Cut the Defense budget a mere $150B/year and the money is there. Not only that, we'll still be spending more than anyone on the planet (by a mile) to protect ourselves. Combine that with diplomacy, anathema to conservatives now, and you'll have fewer people who want to hurt us. Win-win.
Good luck with that.
Comment Posted By John O On 2.11.2009 @ 20:20
Fong is right. There is simply no intellectual consistency in the GOP right now, and for someone who mistrusts power in all forms, that's a scary thing.
Comment Posted By John O On 2.11.2009 @ 20:13
Oops.
"...Christian, straight, and rich."
Bygones.
Comment Posted By John O On 2.11.2009 @ 20:07
There are all kinds of conservative principles that I could get behind, if I define them as my grandfather's conservatism. Fiscal restraint, English as national language (slowly adopted), "get the government off people's backs," (who said that?), cautious and at least remotely isolationist-lite military foreign policy, etc., etc.
But I can't get behind bigoted homophobic war-mongering uninformed morons no matter their political leanings.
You dance with them that brought you, Rick, and you were part of the cheerleading crowd at the root of Baggism at one point. Deal with it.
Without the racist, homophobic, Christianist wing of the Party, the GOP would already be Whigs. And they're slowly but surely dying, demographically.
Sad. I really want a viable opposition party. With, you know, ideas beyond "tax cuts for everyone but the Defense Industry," and "Get the government off the backs of everyone who isn't Christian, straight, and poor."
P.S. Anyone who can't see that Obama is a pragmatist centrist-slight-leftie has some blinders on that I'm just plain not qualified to treat.
Comment Posted By John O On 2.11.2009 @ 20:03
Words hurt no one but the insecure.
Comment Posted By John O On 8.02.2007 @ 20:58
Well, that was an interesting post.
I like Amanda a lot, though disagree with her all the time. I too use profanity on my blog (occasionally) and in real life much more frequently.
But I am just a blue-collar kid who grew up playing a lot of unsupervised sports. Profanity was art in the adolescent sense, and often very, very funny. Perhaps this is why it has never bothered me. Or could it be that it takes strong and sometimes harsh words to stimulate the discussion? That works for me, too. And as far as I know, no one was ever obligated to go visit Pandagon. As with politicians, we should keep people's personal thoughts and belief system apart from their political skill, or effectiveness or lack thereof at the jobs they are hired to do.
I might not use the words Amanda did about the Catholic Church, but I don't understand how the points she makes about the Church are not at least debatable. It isn't like the Catholic Church is without sin. And that goes for all religions, though not being a historian I find it hard to recall any wars and massive death started by the Buddhists.
My personal God, for example, worries far more about overpopulation than abortion, since the former represents a far greater threat to His/Her children. It doesn't take a scientist or even a moderately high IQ to see that. I mean, consider all the horrible things that happen to good people, every single day. God is CLEARLY no micromanager.
And reading both sides, right now the argument that the right-leaning blogs are grasping at strawmen a bit more than are the left blogs, possibly because the facts about Libby/Cheney, the mainstream media, and the nature of the Middle East are coming into clearer focus, is pretty hard to refute. I considered Edwardsgate one of these examples, and it was hard not to dismiss those who went for those scalps as morons in a larger sense, regardless of political beliefs.
And there's something else I don't quite ever understand: Isn't God going to vindicate you in the end? Where is the actual faith? Where is the peace that comes from knowing?
Can one not "hate the religion, not the zealot?" Sound familiar? For homophobic people who have discovered someone they liked was gay it sure does.
I have friends and acquaintances of all major faiths. Sometimes I take 'em on on religious grounds, often making them uncomfortable. So what? They know it isn't personal. And I know how far I can go, because they'll tell me.
I have faith that I will be vindicated in the end.
The internet age has made life very surreal.
But I think we should all stay out of each other's personal deals, unless they become relevant to our lives. It was fairly clear to me the two bloggers were not going to convert Edwards into a profane Catholic-basher. But I'm nutty that way.
Just sayin'
Comment Posted By John O On 8.02.2007 @ 20:51
