[noufie]

Jindal an average politician? He ran the state Department of Health at 25. He's the youngest sitting Governor in the nation. His is the only state that has seen a net growth of jobs this miserable year. He's a technocrat with an exceptional grasp on policy, which would be nice for a change. Bush was a legacy & Obama is an affirmative-action case. Jindal's not a great orator. But he's not George "Mumbles" Bush. We're not going to beat Obama in 2012 with charisma, anyway.

Get off the moderate high-horse. Schwarzenegger has discredited moderates. Republicans gave up on abortion & the environment for some fiscal discipline. California desperately needed a financial hawk to address their current economic mess. That didn't work. He thinks he can govern with quotes from his stupid movies. It's embarrassing.

Though some moderates are fine. See Governor Huntsman. We should just remember that moderates aren't always the answer. The growing bloc of self-defined American moderate voters reflects a growing lack of knowledge about politics. We shouldn't reward politicians who pander to these voters (*cough* Arnold). We need to educate the moderates to win their votes.

[Gelmax]

My take on this is that it's largely the result of Bush's presidency - the significant policy changes and controversial new directions taken during his reign have temporarily unified the Democrats, while the nasty ending to his eight years is causing considerable discord among the Republicans. Steele gets a lot of flak, but it's largely not really his fault - to me, he is a living example of the state of the Republican party as a whole right now. On the one hand, he's trying to broaden the party's appeal and expand the voter base by nudging things toward the center and trying to attract young people; on the other hand, he's worried the party's current noisy-and-dedicated supporters will revolt against him and bring disaster upon their own party so he's trying to pretend that he wants to move the party farther right to satisfy the Rush Limbaugh crew. Unfortunately, to pull something like that off properly would require the sort of genius he's clearly demonstrated he doesn't have, so he gets up on TV and tries to walk in two directions at once and ends up tripping over his own feet.

Meanwhile, a significant portion of the party thinks the proper way to get back to power is to rally behind someone even more conservative but with decent charisma, which is why they're jumping behind anyone who can manage to talk about how conservative they are on camera, even if they're the likes of Palin and Joe the Plumber. And, while dumb, this too was probably caused by Bush - he had eight years to implement all the conservative principles he wanted, and in the end it seems like neither the fiscal nor social conservatives really gained much from his rule, so the natural conclusions are either that conservatism wasn't working or that Bush was a lip-service conservative who didn't do enough and messed up what he did do, and most of the outspoken ones pushing for a move toward the right are in the second group, especially social conservatives who got a lot more nothing from Bush. He ruined it for the moderates, the centrists, and the big business/small government supporters, because the rest of the party doesn't trust them anymore and they'd rather support unelectable far-righties than risk drinking the Kool-Aid and getting burned again.

I don't really see the fall of the party in the cards, though. The Republican party is going to busily devour itself for a few years while all sorts of leaders try and fail to unify the party behind something: people like Steele will try and fail to unify the party behind securing long-term power before worrying about making big changes, people like Limbaugh will try and fail to unify the party behind whining about every little thing the left does, and various silly media figures will try and hilariously fail to unify the party behind a series of manufactured conservative celebrities like Joe the Plumber and Jonathan Krohn. As long as Obama's administration isn't widely percieved as factually doing worse than Bush's, though, none of that will stick; eventually some ACTUAL, SIGNIFICANT bad things that really ARE the Democrats' fault will happen (as opposed to the current ridiculous nitpicks that the recent right-wing talking points have been focusing on) the Republicans will quickly come back together behind their common goal of dethroning the Democrats again, after an election or two they'll manage to elect a center-right leader who pays lip service to the social conservatives, when things go bad once more the social conservatives will get suspicious of the rest of the party again, and the cycle will continue. Though they may not like being exploited for votes by the rest of the party, they don't have much choice - I don't see the social conservatives actually breaking away because there's absolutely no way a split right can hope to win the presidency.

[noufie]

lily-didn't mean to suggest that it's a left thing at all. Just that I understand the temptation for a Democrat to be dishonest about Republicans & vice versa.

And by all means, it was Republicans who were wrong in this case.

[Sapio]

They need to get back to there small government and anti-empire roots of the pasted, flush out the neo-cons in theirs ranks.

For a start.

[commanderkai]

lily wrote:

Quote:

Yet someone from the McCain campaign leaked reports that Palin thought Africa was a country. That's the sort of bad faith we'd expect from an intellectually dishonest Democrat.

Someone from the right does something wrong and you manage to say it's a left thing.

Apparently some on the right can be intellectually dishonest too.

Actually, if I remember correctly, that rumor was created by some NYT columnist and wasn't actually real.

[Psudo]

commanderkai wrote:

Actually, if I remember correctly, that rumor was created by some NYT columnist and wasn't actually real.

The source's name is Martin Eisenstadt.

[CKASlacker]

Sapio wrote:

They need to get back to there small government and anti-empire roots of the pasted, flush out the neo-cons in theirs ranks.

It's funny you should mention that - I recall being on another forum a few years back, and one small-government republican commented that he didn't have a party to support anymore, since the republicans in the W. administration were rapidly turning into a big-deficit, big spending, moral authority on all things. I certainly think the US would be better served by that sort of Republican party, unlike what they have now.

[Kjorteo]

The problem with the modern Republican party as I see it is that the coalition that makes up their base is failing, but they can't just eject factions without making themselves even smaller. It's easy for a fiscally conservative small-government types to say that the big-spending morality-enforcing evangelist wing needs to be excised, but that wing happens to be fairly sizeable. If one made a party solely out of the people who just want a small fiscally conservative non-interventionist government...well, it's called the Libertarian party, and it currently considers itself lucky if it can compete with the Green party, let alone Democrats or Republicans. If they factioned off to maintain some sort of ideological purity among factions while the Democrats didn't (after all, their current base coalition happens to be working quite well for them,) they'd be looking at something not unlike the Canadian model of when the PC and Alliance squabbled in the background while the Liberals completely dominated.

On the other hand, the conservative base factions seem to be getting more and more mutually exclusive and irreparably broken--no one from the Ron Paul wing would vote for a hawkish big-deficit God Warrior--so the Republicans are faced with the dilemma of either trying to work with a completely impossible broken base or to simply not have one, both of which are absolute guaranteed recipes for crushing electoral defeat. The lack of easy answers is probably why they are currently floundering and trying so hard to find a gimmicky conservative celebrity to get behind.

[CKASlacker]

Psudo wrote:

Kjorteo wrote:

Wait, libertarians don't like robber baron-style industrialists? But they don't like the government, either...who do they like, exactly?

Well... themselves, I think... Ludwig von Mises, Ron Paul... maybe Adam Smith, I'm not sure...

I think you're both being a little unfair to libertarians, but I'm not at liberty to speak for anyone other than myself, so I won't.

I think it's important to distinguish between the libertarian-right and libertarian-left -- there's actually a useful political quiz out there which differentiates between economic policy (right/left), and state power (top = fascist dictator, bottom = anarchy). I'm probably closest to a centre / down type, to give you an idea where I'm coming from.

I like liberty, be it personal or ecomomic. While I support the free market, I think the populace's liberty is best served by many small, independent suppliers, competing fairly over price, innovation, etc. I don't think it's best served by monopolies or oligopolies, where competetition is limited at best. If this requires a strong governmental arm to negate this, then so be it -- I fully realize this puts me at odds like many libetarians. Unfortunately, it seems the ultimate state of a company under capitalism is to *be* the monopoly -- making rampant profits without any competition. I don't think this is sustainable or desirable for obvious reasons.

To answer Kjorteo's question, I don't like robber-baron industrialists, and would (reluctantly) support a government to limit their economic activities, because I hold economic liberty of the populace in higher regard than a company's liberty to make vast profits.

[Kjorteo]

I like that political quiz. I took it as well, and according to it, I am basically somewhere around 90-100% liberal--complete do-whatever-as-long-as-you're-not-hurting-anyone social libertarianism, government regulations on the economic side. The Democratic party is by far basically the closer of the two major parties to that and possibly even the closest of all American political parties to that (the Libertarian party seems to have been hijacked by its own right these days,) though obviously they have a lot of work to do on the social front--they're not as overtly anti-LGBT as the Republicans, but they could be supporting those issues a lot more strongly than they are...and they lose major points for gun control.

I guess that puts me a little more economically liberal than CKASlacker (though I wouldn't know exactly without taking the test again and comparing specific policies or something,) though I think we're more or less in agreement on the general idea there, and the social side seems to match as well. Neat.

[Psudo]

CKASlacker wrote:

Psudo wrote:

Kjorteo wrote:

Wait, libertarians don't like robber baron-style industrialists? But they don't like the government, either...who do they like, exactly?

Well... themselves, I think... Ludwig von Mises, Ron Paul... maybe Adam Smith, I'm not sure...

I think you're both being a little unfair to libertarians, but I'm not at liberty to speak for anyone other than myself, so I won't.

You're clearly right. Kjorteo and I are teasing them rather than meaningfully criticizing them. Kjorteo and I are both pretty friendly with libertarianism as an ideology. I even voted Bob Barr in 2008 because I couldn't stand the two major party candidates.

Maybe I shouldn't be speaking for Kjorteo, but he'll correct me if I'm wrong.

CKASlacker wrote:

I think it's important to distinguish between the libertarian-right and libertarian-left -- there's actually a useful political quiz out there which differentiates between economic policy (right/left), and state power (top = fascist dictator, bottom = anarchy). I'm probably closest to a centre / down type, to give you an idea where I'm coming from.

I wrote my political quiz in part as a response to that quiz, which I found to be too simplistic. Not that it's bad; it states a very good point. But it ignores foreign relations and doesn't address the most commonly cited issues.

CKASlacker wrote:

While I support the free market, I think the populace's liberty is best served by many small, independent suppliers, competing fairly over price, innovation, etc. I don't think it's best served by monopolies or oligopolies, where competetition is limited at best.

I dispute that freer markets tend towards more monopolies; I assert the opposite. The largest monopolies in free market societies tend to be the most government regulated (telecom, insurance, utilities, etc). Absent government interference, companies that inflate their profit margins will be undercut by companies that do not, thus preventing the profit-bloated monopoly archtype from long enduring.

Though I wouldn't call myself one, I support objectivists over libertarians by this reasoning.

[Sapio]

CKASlacker wrote:

Sapio wrote:

They need to get back to there small government and anti-empire roots of the pasted, flush out the neo-cons in theirs ranks.

It's funny you should mention that - I recall being on another forum a few years back, and one small-government republican commented that he didn't have a party to support anymore, since the republicans in the W. administration were rapidly turning into a big-deficit, big spending, moral authority on all things. I certainly think the US would be better served by that sort of Republican party, unlike what they have now.

Well said, I agree.

[Kjorteo]

As much as I'm hesitant to step in and correct someone for giving me too much credit, I have to admit that my "wait, if Libertarians don't like industrialists, then who do they like?" question was a serious reaction, since that notion was fairly contradictory to the impression I had of them. If that was a joke, then I was simply too dense to pick up on it. Then again, that impression came from my assuming libertarianism and objectivism were fairly synonymous in regards to economics, so clearly I'm just exceptionally oblivious today. Sorry!

Anyway, I'm no economist, but my personal stance on the matter is that the free market is good in general, but basic things like safeguards against monopolies and minimum wage laws and such are a good thing. I'm pretty sure that compromise keeps me fairly solidly in liberal territory (as it is neither uncontrolled Republican free-market mania nor out-and-out Communism.)

[Proculation]

J'me sens comme dans le National Geographic

[Psudo]

Kjorteo wrote:

my "wait, if Libertarians don't like industrialists, then who do they like?" question was a serious reaction, since that notion was fairly contradictory to the impression I had of them. If that was a joke, then I was simply too dense to pick up on it.

Libertarians often don't trust industrialists and bankers and the J.P. Morgans of the world; that part was true. I base that conclusion on the criticisms libertarians raise to the Federal Reserve and fiat currency. Maybe the arguments I heard (from Ron Paul and others) were not reflections of mainstream libertarian thought, but they seemed so to me.

My reaction to your question was teasingly suggesting that libertarians don't really respect anyone; that part was probably not true.

I think the reasoning is that a private company follows the will of a thinking human being while a corporate conglomerate follows a mindless pursuit of short-sighted profitability and, thus, private companies are preferable. I'm not sure, though, because the reasoning makes very little sense to me.