Hating Republicans: why not look it up?
It’s very common for me to see a question – sometimes rhetorical and sometimes otherwise – that can be answered rather easily with a simple search. Most of the time I don’t mind doing that search, but I wonder why people don’t do it themselves more often. After all, one of the good aspects of the internet is that it gives us the ability to look things up quickly without hauling ourselves to the library and spending a ton of time locating the proper source. It’s all here at our fingertips – literally.
Sometimes the searching isn’t so simple, of course. But it often is. For example, I sometime read something like, “No GOP politician has ever spoken out against [fill in the blank] or supported [fill in the blank].” And yet all I have to do is take 30 seconds of searching to find quotes from GOP politicians doing just that.
So, what gives? Do we often think if we haven’t heard something it means it didn’t happen? There’s a cacophony of noise out there and only some of it filters through.
While I’m at it, I’ll mention something else, which is that a huge percentage of online commenters on the right hate, despise, and detest the GOP and especially its representatives in Congress. The sense of betrayal is epic, fueled by hundreds of truly disappointing, frustrating, and infuriating incidents. That colors perceptions of just about everything that happens in Congress, from the idea that Democrats always get what they want (no, they don’t, although they often do), to the idea that Republicans in Congress are utterly corrupt liars who only care about money and are in league with the Democrats but just aren’t honest about it (the “Uniparty”).
I don’t quite agree, but not because I don’t feel some of the same feelings. And it’s not because I’m so trusting of the GOP, either. I think it’s because I’m more cynical, not less, about the possibilities of government and of Congress. I’m actually pretty cynical about all politicians. But I think that means that at a certain level I accept that the people who enter politics have certain characteristics and motivations that many of the rest of us don’t share, or we’d be entering politics too. Those characteristics don’t tend to be noble, although a few of them are. Politics is always a pretty dirty business and I think there’s something inherent in it that means it’s not going to become clean, and that purists and idealists do well in politics only in the movies. In addition, I do think that some people in Congress are quite smart, hard-working, and dedicated, but it’s not the rule and I don’t think it’s ever going to be the rule.
Plus, the GOP hasn’t had anything but narrow majorities for a long time, and because members of the GOP tend to be less likely to toe the party line than Democrats are, you always will get some defectors here and there. When majorities are large – and the Democrats often used to have very large majorities during the 20th century, although not recently – a few defections don’t matter. When majorities are small (as the rare GOP majorities have tended to be since before FDR), defections do matter – as the Democrats found out during the last Congress, when Manchin and Sinema made the rest of the Democrats gnash their teeth with frustration at their refusal to get with the program.
So just a few people can frustrate narrow Republican majorities. John McCain did that with the “skinny” Obamacare repeal in 2017, casting the deciding vote against it. His defection seems to have been a surprise:
McConnell, who seemed to exhaust every trick in the procedural playbook to get to this point, seemed surprised and undercut by the result.
The defeat ends — for now — the health care debate in Congress. The chamber adjourned following the defeat, and there are no further Senate votes this week…
Republican senators said there was no consensus and no plan for what comes next on health care. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, warned of potentially severe political consequences for Republicans for failing to deliver on what has been the GOP’s unifying campaign pledge for the previous three elections.
“I sadly feel a great many Americans will feel betrayed,” Cruz told reporters, “that they were lied to, and that sentiment will not be unjustified.”
The “skinny repeal” was a pared-down version of Republican proposals to undo Obamacare with no plan for what to replace it with. It would have eliminated the individual and employer mandate and key taxes, defunded Planned Parenthood for a year and eliminated key protections of health benefits that were required under Obamacare.
The bill was deeply unpopular, but GOP leaders worked to assure members it would never become law. Instead, they wanted the Senate to pass it in order to advance the legislation to a third round of negotiations with the House to try to craft a final bill both chambers could pass.
Many of you who hate the GOP for this and so many other failures will probably say it was all a plot, that McConnell knew what McCain would do and colluded with it, and that the GOP never actually wanted to repeal Obamacare. What do I think? I think the Republican Party was divided about what was an acceptable alternative to Obamacare – they’d studied and proposed tons of them – and that McCain blindsided McConnell, with great relish. I think the confused-sounding agenda described in the last paragraph – “they wanted the Senate to pass it in order to advance the legislation to a third round of negotiations with the House to try to craft a final bill both chambers could pass”- is a reflection of the way Congress works when a party doesn’t have overwhelming and united majorities in both houses. I think compromise is hard, and members of Congress used to be better at it and voters more tolerant of it. Those days aregone.
And yes, I would like to see a much better leader in there than McConnell. But whom would that person be, and would that person actually want the office? Being Speaker is a complex, difficult, and mostly thankless task, especially with such tiny majorities. And although the job seems powerful and it is, the actual power can be thwarted by just a few members of Congress and then the Speaker gets blamed for it.
But ah, you say, the Democrats stay united. My answer is that they don’t always – again, see Manchin and Sinema – and also that Democrats are different than Republicans in temperament and in the willingness to go with the group.
In other words, Republican cats are more difficult to herd than Democrat cats.
Hate on the GOP in general or certain Republicans in particular all you want. But I think we should be realistic about what’s possible in Congress and especially with a tiny majority in one house of Congress. Also, if someone in the GOP (or anyone, actually) is reported in the media and/or blogs and/or social media as having said something that gets your goat, please look up the entire quote and its context. You may get some surprises.
I believe many Republicans are fearful of rocking the boat. They see how Trump is being viciously attacked and do not want to risk it happening to them.
Can there be any doubt that there is already embarrassing info ready to be released when needed?
And, the congressmen need to be concerned not only for themselves but also for the effect on their families. I wonder what Kavanaughs kids have to put up with.
Clarification: I don’t hate the GOP. I hate the GOPe….big difference.
react and regurgitate (liberals) verses reflect and research (conservatives)
react – respond or behave in a particular way in response to something.
AND
regurgitate – repeat (information) without analyzing or comprehending it.
VERSES
reflect – think deeply or carefully about.
AND
research – the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.
Agree, physicsguy. I don’t hate the GOP; I like and respect many elected Republican members of congress, governors, etc. But I despise GOPe, along with Conservtism, Inc. The Globetrotters/Generals analogy keeps coming up and it’s a good one. Much of GOPe and Conservatism, Inc. is perfectly fine with losing (both elections and policy battles), as long as their positions and revenue stream are secure. It is always easier to be in opposition than to actually govern, it is always easier to ‘stand athwart history yelling stop’ than to actually try to stop it.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly that there’s only so much Congress can do, narrow or wide majorities. There’s only so much the President can do (we learned this with Trump). There’s only so much a Trifecta control, along with a conservative SCOTUS could do.
The reason is simple: The Administrative State (aka Deep State, aka ‘The Swamp’). Honestly, the only way to meaningful drain the swamp would be to go back in time, to pre-Great Society at least; possibly pre-New Deal, and stop the Leviathan from developing in the first place.
And so, it’s good to stay restrained, even cynical, and focus on brighter alternatives. Florida under DeSantis is the shining example. Dynamic conservative governance, without apology or hesitation; something for other red and purple states to emulate. This is why I don’t want DeSantis to run in 2024. I want him to keeping building on his excellent track record in Florida and anoint a strong successor.
they find a dozen republicans to rubber stamp the gun bill, to pass the green new deal starter kit, to lavish money on ukraine, to pick any one of the three worst biden cabinet members,
like wimpey’s promise to popeye, the hamburger (border control, or school choice or any of a hundred gope priorities never gets paid)
“But I think we should be realistic about what’s possible in Congress and especially with a tiny majority in one house of Congress.”
So, they’ve been screwing us dry for decades but we should be content that now we might get a tiny bit of lube?
Mike
Ackler, yep, very conflicted as a relatively new FL resident. Love having DeSantis as governor and worry about him leaving for DC and who would follow in his place. Yet, he could be the hope we need for the country.
So, they’ve been screwing us dry for decades but we should be content that now we might get a tiny bit of lube?
Game, set, match.
Governance is like art — like movies, e.g. — most of it is mediocre and a goodly portion is downright awful. It’s hard to produce good art, hard to achieve good governance. Most of the politicians are simply out of their depth in terms of possessing the intellectual chops to govern effectively and achieve substantive results. You may say the system is stacked against them, but . . . but they ARE the system. Most of them are LeRoy Neimans; Rembrandts are vanishingly few.
It’s an old, old problem, as Plato’s writings attest.
I am among those who despise, and detest the GOPe and its representatives in Congress. It is not a ‘sense’ of betrayal but clear observation of hundreds of incidents of betrayal.
I can accept the normal human frailties of our politicians. But however common, lying and betrayal of their sworn duties is prima facie evidence of a grave moral failure. If you swear an oath upon the Bible, you have a moral obligation to fulfill it and when a public official exhibits a clear pattern of failure in their duty, they reveal their unfitness for the public office they hold. Yet ultimately, the public’s tolerance of these betrayals facilitate their continuance.
“And yes, I would like to see a much better leader in there than McConnell. But whom would that person be, and would that person actually want the office?” neo
McConnell’s personal failure is his corruption. The incompetence he exhibits, centers upon his lack of statesmanship. Which requires putting the country first over any personal or party consideration. McConnell is a superb legislative tactician but not a strategist. Both are needed but without an overall strategic vision, no amount of tactical brilliance means much in the long run.
That Republican Senators fail to insist upon the most Statesmanlike of their fellows for the Senate Leadership is at base and in the aggregate, the American public’s failure.
That I do not ascribe any of this to the democrats is not accidental. Criminal institutions are, by definition, unprincipled.
Manchin and Sinema made the rest of the Democrats gnash their teeth with frustration at their refusal to get with the program.
Their program was institutionalized vote fraud. A grand total of three Democratic members of Congress dissented from this program. By an order of magnitude within the Democratic caucus, there was more resistance to Obamacare and TARP. This is what has happened to the intramural culture of the Democratic Party in the last 15 years. Both Common Cause and the League of Women Voters supported this monstrosity, by the way. It’s not only in Congress that the culture of the Democratic Party is frankly criminal.
Most of them are LeRoy Neimans; Rembrandts are vanishingly few.
Well, Harry Truman once recalled that as he was sworn into office in 1935, he said to himself, “I can’t believe I got here”. Six months later he says to himself, “I can’t believe they got here”. The they in question were contemporaries of the men who balance the budget within three years of the close of the 2d World War. Mediocre legislators used to do that. They used to finance the government with a dozen or more detailed appropriations bills each year.
About 40% of the Senate Republican caucus favored McConnell’s latest monstrosity.
I’m enjoying something that is a bit more action than the regular, “let’s vote for the lesser of two evils”. About time the boat got rocked a little.
Can there be any doubt that there is already embarrassing info ready to be released when needed?
Yeah. I have lots of doubt. Oh, they’ll trot out accusations, and I can make a long list of them, for example Kavanaugh, Roy Moore, Matt Gaetz, Ken Paxton, Rick Perry, just a few off the top of my head without Google or listing all the ones about Trump. But why be embarrassed by accusations that are lies? And then there is those who themselves have no shame such as George Santos, Joe Biden, Eric Swalwell, Robert Menendez, or the Clintons.
I’m more concerned when I see my Representative come home and tell off his own constituents, and he’s not embarrassed either.
members of the GOP tend to be less likely to toe the party line than Democrats are, you always will get some defectors here and there.
This is like saying the Globetrotters win because they break the rules and get away with it while the Generals play regular basketball… but WHY do the Globetrotters and Generals do what they do? Why do the Generals keep showing up to obviously rigged games and never change their tactics, or try to get new refs? Because it’s only a show where athletes pretend to play basketball, it’s not real basketball. When the show’s over for the night they all get paid.
So WHY is the GOP in Congress that way? Are their brains wired differently from Dems? Some may think so, but I think they behave this way because that is their role in the Uniparty: token opposition in exchange for appropriations that favor their friends, clients, and patrons.
Not every Congressman or Senator in each party is a member of the Uniparty but it nearly always has a majority in both Houses.
They all take an oath to the Constitution. They are our Representatives. They work for us.
We, all of us, are free men and women.
These people use the threat of force and putting us in cages to take our hard earned money, they diminish the dollars we saved, they restrict our movement, forbid us from attending religious worship, exercising, seeing loved ones on their deathbeds, burying them. They have retinues of staffs and purport themselves like kings and queens. They legislate themselves out of the legislation they inflict on us.
They are destroying the nation generations of Americans gave their all to build. Why can’t they simply follow the Constitution and leave us alone? Occasionally someone who truly believes in our individual rights and the Constitution seems to get in; maybe a Rand Paul or Chip Roy. They tend to turn up more on the GOP than the Dems. But what good of it? The GOP treats these people hypocritically.
It is a Uniparty. Neither party fights to preserve our, individual rights.
I do not need to be led. I do not need to be governed. I do not wish to choose between two people who want to lead me arguing over who will take fewer of my rights, or who will put my grandchildren in less debt.
They are determined to destroy the nation. Fine. They seem to have the power to do it. Fine. I don’t have to participate.
Frederick @6:35pm,
Spot on!
Strangely, everyone seems to hate the GOPe. I think GOPe is defined as anyone who disagrees with an individual. I suppose at the far end of the epithet spectrum would be the term RINO.
I detest RINOs, although I recognize that that is also a term that is easily abused.
As far as the GOPe, I realize that if you are going to have a party, there must be a core of people who do the hard work to hold the party together and advance an agenda. I would classify such people as part of the party establishment.
I compare them to the people who do nothing to hold the party together or advance the agenda, but stand on the sideline and throw stones.
Although I get frustrated, I am well aware that politics at its core is a matter of compromises. The smaller the margin of power, the greater the need for compromise; often less than palatable compromise. Small margins can be a characteristic of a party in which a significant segment considers itself aloof from the establishment types who make the party run.
Should such people be the actual RINOs? Just thinking out loud.
Galatians 6:7
I once knew a lobbyist. He explained his job to me. In an average year the Congress will consider many different issues. The members cannot be experts on most of them. So, the lobbyists bring the expertise to the legislators. But only if the legislators want to be informed. With time and experience, the lobbyists find out which legislators can be persuaded to vote for their issue and which ones want some further incentives. (Cash, special trips, expensive gifts, etc.) Some of this is obvious, but a lot is well covered up.
This is one of the greatest weaknesses of our system. And it’s hard to stop. Constituents have the right to plead their cases to their legislators and the lobbyists represent various constituencies. It’s the way many legislators become wealthy over the years on a middle-income salary. Considering this is the way the sausage is made, it’s a wonder we aren’t in more trouble than we are.
Congress has to pass some legislation that seems to benefit the unwashed masses in order to look good and get re-elected They do this with spending on infrastructure, education, medical care, NGOs, grants to states, etc. But the bureaucracies keep growing and they keep giving COLAs to Federal retirees and Social Security beneficiaries. So, the spending grows and grows. Conservatives actually try to buck all this, but not with much success.
I was amazed at how much Trump actually accomplished. He bucked the system and much of what he accomplished was the result of putting in grueling hours on the job, and not being afraid of the media. And we can see how he’s been reward. The Deep Stae wants to destroy him.
We actually have quite a few conservative House members now – many more than when Obama was first elected. Many of them have stood up to the system as well, but wins are few and hard to come by with only a small majority in the House.
Changing the way things are done is a step in the right direction, and it appears McCarthy has agreed to many changes but moving forward with an agenda of lowering spending will take unity and teamwork. I hope that will happen after the election of the speaker is over.
A while back, I remember people talking about the Rs needing to expand their reach or enlarge the tent so we get more people of all sorts in the party. Well, guess what, we now have a wide variety of people who want to get their viewpoint out there. And it is messy, as we can see.
The Ds seem to be more organized, but is that a better situation? Running in lockstep is not a good thing – I think someone mentioned that this afternoon.
On the look up of info portion of this post – I agree that many people only look at the headline and don’t drill down to the facts.
There are a few articles today that talk about Oklahoma banning trans healthcare and they make it sound like it is a sure deal. Nope – bills are just being introduced since it is the start of the session. The bills still have to go through committees, hearings, votes, more motions, and so on. Just because a bill is introduced does not mean that it is passed and signed into law.
But, how many people will only remember the headline in January and assume that it is a fact?
It is more frustrating to read someone’s summary of a bill only to actually read the bill and find out their summary is so wrong. I’ve argued with some people on conservative sites about their reading (or lack thereof) of a law and the process.
BTW, Oklahoma and a few other states require that a bill deal only with one topic. Some people still try to run through more than one topic through the process, but eventually the bill will be reviewed by the State Supreme Court review and rejection.
Strangely, everyone seems to hate the GOPe. I think GOPe is defined as anyone who disagrees with an individual. I suppose at the far end of the epithet spectrum would be the term RINO.
RINO – a Republican whose voting record is closer to the median of the Democratic caucus than the median of the Republican caucus – is a nonsense term. The number of members of Congress who might conceivably have merited the term could after 1992 been counted on your fingers (Lincoln Chafee, Sherwood Boehlert, Connie Morella, and some borderline cases). GOPe is a fuzzier term, but a much larger problem. It denotes a member of Congress who is devoted to the interests of donors over the interests of Republican voters, who despises the base, and thinks they’re marks to be disregarded. That’s most of the Senate Republican caucus, to be sure.
Congress has to pass some legislation that seems to benefit the unwashed masses in order to look good and get re-elected They do this with spending on infrastructure, education, medical care, NGOs, grants to states, etc. But the bureaucracies keep growing and they keep giving COLAs to Federal retirees and Social Security beneficiaries. So, the spending grows and grows. Conservatives actually try to buck all this, but not with much success.
Ptaah.
1. The ideal appropriation for grants to NGOs is $0.
2. Federal financing of primary and secondary schooling should concern a series of niche clientele which typically sum to about 3% of all pupils (military dependents, dependents of federal civilian employees posted abroad, reservation Indians, people in itinerant occupations, and, to a degree, the residents of the smaller insular dependencies. Federal financing of tertiary schooling should concern those clients, federal employees, aspirant federal employees, and veterans. About 15% of students at tertiary institutions should be receiving federal financing in a typical year, and about 3/4 of them should be veterans or enrolled in ROTC or at service academies.
3. Public works is a state and local responsibility. The only exceptions might be in regard to coastal projects, multi-state watersheds, long-haul Interstates, and (in a minor way) short-haul Interstates and U.S. Routes. Last I checked, the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers was < $10 bn a year. Maintenance of long-haul Interstates might set us back $20 bn a year.
4. Grants to the states are avenues to coerce and manipulate state and local officials. With some minor qualifications, they should be calculated according to formulae, remitted to state and territorial government, and be unrestricted. They never are.
5. The overwhelming bulk of spending on medical care is to be found in two massive entitlement programs. These persist year in and year out.
“I do think that some people in Congress are quite smart, hard-working, and dedicated, but it’s not the rule and I don’t think it’s ever going to be the rule.” [Neo
As Milton Friedman noted:
One of the early steps to this end may be the Freedom Caucus making it clear that the speakership is not simply McCarthy’s birthright, but will be earned through negotiation and perhaps some small change.
Frederick:
I very much disagree with your comment at 6:35 PM. Of course what you describe may be true of some people, but I think your analysis shows a lack of understanding about the existence of some very basic personality and philosophical differences between left and right, between Democrats and Republicans. For leftists, it’s party uber alles and they are far more willing to subvert their individuality to the needs of the party. In fact, that’s one of their most basic principles. Dealing with Republicans really is, in that sense, like herding cats – which is difficult. Dealing with Democrats involves people who don’t mind going along with the group for the Greater Good as they see it. That’s why the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Sinema had to leave the party even though they believe in most of its aims – because they lacked the requisite blind-follower temperament.
And most Republicans are not conservatives. So why should they act like conservatives, just because conservatives want them to? Whereas I think most Democrats these days are leftists, and the few non-leftists are willing to follow the leftists’ lead.
By the way, I don’t use the Globetrotters analogy. I don’t think it’s a good one. With the Globetrotters, everyone on both teams is playing a game and the audience is aware of it. In Congress, you may think every single person is playing a game, but I do not. And I’m not a naive person, either. No doubt some are behaving as you describe, but I think it’s simplistic and reductionist to see it the way you describe it, although it’s a convenient way to dismiss the very real challenges of government and the dilemmas and complexities of compromise, and to tar most of the members of the GOP with the same utterly cynical brush.
who balance the budget within three years of the close of the 2d World War.
Lord that is a depressing thought.
Thank you for the clarification of GOPe and Rino Art Deco. I suppose that you, and people who think like you, would be in favor of just scrapping the Republican Party to rid us of the GOPe. I imagine that you, and people who think like you, would be willing to work tirelessly to build an alternative. Of course, in the interim the Democrats would run wild with their agenda.
If there is a problem, and I believe that there is, it is because Conservatives, me included, sat on the sidelines, leaving it to the GOPe, while the political parade moved past. It is now surfacing, notably and belatedly at the school board level for instance, that the Regressives (I refuse to call them Progressive) were at work diligently doing their mischief while Conservatives were focused elsewhere.
It it is to change, then Conservatives better become part of the establishment, organize, vet candidates, and do all of the basic political stuff that it takes to get them elected, then hold them accountable. At all levels. People who are not willing to do that, are stuck with the results produced by those who are.
Carping is futile.
Confession. My comment that “carping is futile” was chosen deliberately as a possible a double entendre, as I am an avid, but frustrated, carp fisherman.
@neo:I think your analysis shows a lack of understanding about the existence of some very basic personality and philosophical differences… For leftists, it’s party uber alles and they are far more willing to subvert their individuality to the needs of the party
But why? You treat this as a given that appears from nowhere, and you don’t explain why only one of the two parties draws this sort of person. And the Dems describe Rs as close-ranked herd-thinkers who put party above all. You don’t explain how you know that for only one of these parties this is true and for the other it’s a lie, and why the parties would sort themselves for two kinds of people… and for every personal experience you have of Dems being closed-minded and Republicans being independent thinkers, there’s an anti-neo who can share her personal experiences of the opposite. (But you have plenty of your own.) It’s rare for people to behave the same way in every context and it is beyond belief that Congress is the one context that reliably pulls in and sorts such people.
You hate the Globetrotters analogy, but in that case there is an extremely good explanation for why only one of the teams does things in a certain way and it doesn’t postulate a mysterious division of athletes into two types who all mysteriously gravitate to one team and not the other.
In Congress, you may think every single person is playing a game,
I don’t, and you’re being pretty simplistic and reductionist about what I’ve said. You see my last sentence at 6:35:
Not every Congressman or Senator in each party is a member of the Uniparty but it nearly always has a majority in both Houses.
There’s not two kinds of brains who sort by parties. There’s a group of people, found in both parties, who are there to profit from the show of partisan wrangling, and they both get paid at the end of the night. This group has the majority in both houses. They are members of the American elite and they believe what the American elite does. Currently the American elite is leftist, so the Left tends to get what it wants more often.
Over the years they have adapted to a set of norms that makes is easier to hide from the public what is going on, with the aid of a sycophantic and co-opted press and a malignant, metastasizing administrative state.
There are politicians in both parties who don’t care to go along with it all, and they get co-opted or marginalized. The slim majorities make these people occasionally of outsized importance. This year it’s the 20 against McCarthy, last year it was Manchin and Sinema. Sinema was marginalized, once it was clear she was no longer needed, and Manchin was co-opted and THEN marginalized. We’ll see what happens to these 20.
I don’t think this is simplistic and it fits the last 20 years very well. It’s not a conspiracy theory: it’s a rigged game in a small circle of 535 people run by a critically large percentage of these 535, and if enough of those people were changed out or scared straight the rigging would stop. I’ve seen a lot of institutions where it happens that a big chunk of people in the organization run things their own way, and coordinate through back channels or maybe sometimes just winks and nudges, despite what the rules say or what the customers or the management want. Haven’t you? Isn’t this quite common, and described in literature by Tolstoi and C S Lewis?
To me it surpasses belief that Congress is mysteriously immune to this, but instead has this mysterious property of polarizing temperaments such that the herding robots all prefer to be Leftists. As though you never find go-along-to-get-along among conservatives. There’s plenty of issues where conservatives run together in herds, straining at gnats and swallowing camels (and one of those issues is one that’s been contentious the last few days).
@oldflyer:It it is to change, then Conservatives better become part of the establishment, organize, vet candidates, and do all of the basic political stuff that it takes to get them elected, then hold them accountable. At all levels.
They are already very good at this at the local level and state levels and getting better all the time. Doesn’t make national news much because national media is part of the game and has no interest in honestly highlighting conservative initiatives and successes.
But the national GOP is a very different animal. If some of the Uniparty types are primaried out or scared straight, it will change, and it may not take that many. There’s plenty of reliably red states who send Uniparty types to Washington, but the Establishment in those states has no desire to change out a reliable bringer of bacon. It has to come from the base in those states. A few being changed out will encourage the others to do the right thing.
There’s a nasty dynamic with African Americans, that their votes get taken for granted and their interests neglected because after all what are they going to do, vote Republican? Yet conservatives keep themselves on their own plantation. Obviously they are not going to vote Democrat. But they do have to demand accountability from Republicans as individuals, that they stand up for the right thing even if it means some appropriations are missed out on.
Piled Higher and Deeper in full display. From physics to politics to psychology.
We are not worthy. stan has some competition.
I wouldn’t judge the worth of anyone by what degree they have, or don’t, but people who leave two-line personal attacks don’t contribute much of anything. Bots can do that just about as well.
No one has to read anything they don’t care to. Scroll buttons are there to be used.
Piled Higher and Deeper
You claim to have such insight and wisdom. Cynicism only goes so far and you’ve reached that point.
The antics of your Globetrotters.
POSTED ON JANUARY 6, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER
IN HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, REPUBLICANS
CLOWN SHOW COMING TO AN END?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/01/clown-show-coming-to-an-end.php
“And let’s hope that the caucus’s tiny minority of egomaniacs hasn’t done permanent damage, and will not collaborate with Democrats in the future.”
Frederick:
I assumed it was fairly obvious why I said what I said, and I’m surprised that you seem to think I’m positing traits and differences that “appear from nowhere,” and that it requires even more explaining.
The differences stem from the inherent differences in the parties and the political movements themselves, that is: desire for big central government telling people what to do, emphasis on the needs of the group (particularly identity groups) rather than the rights of the individual, and more in that vein for the left. And the opposite for small government conservatives.
Also quite obviously, there are exceptions in each party. But in a very general sense these are the trends, and it’s not at all mysterious. That doesn’t mean that people on the right don’t sometimes run in packs spouting propaganda – they certainly do and I see it rather often. We are not talking about that here, though: we are talking about voting behavior by members of Congress who are being arm-twisted or somehow convinced to vote in a completely solid bloc with no defections, whether they want to do so or not. The party differences in that tendency is the phenomenon I was attempting to explain.
I never said I hate the Globetrotters analogy; you’re putting words into my mouth. I wrote “By the way, I don’t use the Globetrotters analogy. I don’t think it’s a good one.” To translate that into “hate” seems over the top, and needlessly so. But I’ll just repeat that I believe it’s a poor analogy, and you continue the poor analogy when you write: “in that case [Globetrotters] there is an extremely good explanation for why only one of the teams does things in a certain way and it doesn’t postulate a mysterious division of athletes into two types who all mysteriously gravitate to one team and not the other.” Certainly true that there is an extremely good and extremely obvious and open explanation: it’s a game, and the game is known and acknowledged. Only perhaps a very young child, and maybe even not most of them, would think it was for real. There is no analogy to the far more complex motives and interactions of the people involved in politics. And there is nothing all that mysterious about the fact that people gravitate to one political side or other in part because of their beliefs, personalities, and life experiences, and how those things are expressed or embodied in the different sides of the political realm, left and right.
When I write, “In Congress, you may think every single person is playing a game” – there’s that word “may” – which is not the same as “do.” I was thinking of the contradictions in your 6:35 comment, which I was addressing. In that comment it’s only in your last paragraph that you say, “Not every Congressman or Senator in each party is a member of the Uniparty but it nearly always has a majority in both Houses.” What do you say in the rest of your comment? You refer to the members of the GOP as a whole, using the game-playing Globetrotters analogy:
Then you add the last sentence indicating that it’s not every single one. So, which is it? All or some? To me, there’s a contradiction there.
I too dislike the Globetrotters analogy. It only functions as a confusing shorthand for Uniparty. So just say Uniparty and leave Meadowlark Lemon out of it. 🙂
(As a kid I loved Meadowlark Lemon.)
I think Uniparty is inaccurate as well, but neo seems to have that debate in hand.
@neo:You refer to the members of the GOP as a whole,
Didn’t say “all without exception”. Most people don’t say, and don’t intend to mean, “all without exception” when they name a group without qualification. For example, someone could say “Americans learn to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school” and expect not to get called on the carpet about the existence of a few kids who didn’t if they happen to mention them later: “But at the Patrice Lmumba People’s Education Center in Marin County, kids start the day with…” Most people extend the grace in exchange for not having to read a list of tiresome qualifiers.
If you, whenever you don’t qualify, invariably and always mean “all without exception”, my hat’s off: I will do my best to live up to the very high standard you are setting. Even if you don’t yourself, well point taken I’ll be more careful about qualifiers.
desire for big central government telling people what to do, emphasis on the needs of the group (particularly identity groups) rather than the rights of the individual, and more in that vein for the left. And the opposite for small government conservatives.
If we wanted to, we could both after a little thought name issues where conservatives and Leftists split the other way on these issues: where conservatives desire the central government telling everyone what to do, and where conservatives want to favor needs of the group over rights of the individual. If we broaden beyond the current year, it would be really easy, and we wouldn’t have to reach very far back, not past the 2000s.
I never said I hate the Globetrotters analogy; you’re putting words into my mouth.
Cheerfully withdrawn with apologies, but I was using “hate” pretty colloquially and didn’t intend to mischaracterize your view.
Certainly true that there is an extremely good and extremely obvious and open explanation: it’s a game, and the game is known and acknowledged. Only perhaps a very young child, and maybe even not most of them, would think it was for real. There is no analogy to the far more complex motives and interactions of the people involved in politics.
I’d love to believe this, but I have seen it far too often. Any organization can have this happen.
For example, an accredited university where a large fraction of the courses were dumbed down beyond the level required for accreditation. There was a critical mass of people in on it and it had run that way for years. These people weren’t scammers, they were well intentioned and saw nothing wrong in what they did and had great difficulty understanding what the problem could possibly be.
I’ve seen it in state agencies, where the people who’ve worked there for years work against directives from the Governor because he was from the wrong party. They don’t openly defy the Governor, obviously. They don’t hold a press conference and say they’re going to do the opposite, obviously. They don’t put meetings on their Outlook calendar that say “Agenda: thwart the Governor”, obviously.
I’ve seen a government regulator say one thing in a meeting, and then call up people I work with and tell them to do the opposite.
It’s depressingly common for humans to say one thing and do another, so sometimes you have to draw conclusions about intentions from what people actually do.
So I have no trouble believing that most Senators and Congressmen, of both parties, with the complicity of the media and the administrative state, are running a scam on the country and their constituents, mostly by wink-wink nudge-nudge and maybe mostly by their staffs. I don’t know how many House R’s are in on it, not the whole 200 surely, and maybe some of the 20 aren’t really out of it either. Senate R’s, there’s 10 I’d be confident of saying definitely in and maybe another 5 I’d say definitely out.
You’ve pointed out that voting in this country is set up in such a way as to make the evidence of fraud incredibly hard to prove. Well, what the Uniparty in Congress is doing is very like that.
Frederick:
In your comment at 6:35, you speak of the GOP as a unit right up until that last paragraph. My use of the word “may” indicated that there was ambiguity in your comment, not that you absolutely thought one way or the other. And then in my later comment I simply pointed out the ambiguity.
I don’t know about you, but I try to qualify my statements when I want to express a qualification. Do I always do it? I very much doubt it. But I try to do it as often as possible, and I think in the interests of clarity it’s best to do it, or the message is ambiguous. I felt your message was somewhat ambiguous, that’s all.
You certainly can believe whatever you want. I happen to disagree with some of it and agree with some of it.
huxley:
I also loved the Globetrotters when I was a child. Now and then I guess they were on TV, and it was a treat.
@neo:You certainly can believe whatever you want. I happen to disagree with some of it and agree with some of it.
Thank you for your civil engagement.
I don’t know about you, but I try to qualify my statements when I want to express a qualification.
There’s the Scylla of Tiresome Over-qualification, and the Charybdis of Weasel-Words. Some days it’s hard to navigate between them, so you try to avoid the Strait of Qualification but then run up against the Desolate Coast of Being Misunderstood, or you get boarded by the Pirates of Willful Misinterpretation (Internet’s full of them). I try to get better and feedback helps.
Besides the Globetrotters, I also enjoyed The Phantom Tollbooth. My favorite portrayal of the Globetrotters is in Futurama, where they sometimes invade Earth to humiliate Earthlings at basketball, and sometimes to aid Earthlings in solving complex cosmological problems.
The internet: Where people will not spend the 5 seconds to research the answer to really really dumbshit obvious questions, but will spend 20 minutes taking a survey to identify what kind of potato they are…
Even better: You can give them a link which answered their question before they asked it (and was a sufficiently obviously innocuous link, such as Amazon or Walmart) but will ask you to tell them the answer anyway.
I’m almost positive a Globetrotters game was televised on one of the major networks, at least annually. I seem to recall Howard Cosell being one of the announcers, so that would mean ABC. I’m thinking it would be on the Wide World of Sports on a Saturday afternoon between football and baseball season, maybe that slow, February sports window.
I spent years involved with California politics as a member, and later a consultant, with the legislation commission of the state Medical Association. That experience made me very cynical but lately I find I am not nearly cynical enough. At one of our annual retreats, Jesse Unruh the great politician whose famous comment, “Money is the mothers’ milk of politics,” is best remembered, said “If you can’t eat our food, drink our whiskey, f**k our women and then vote against us in the morning, you don’t belong here.” What a great guy. Willie Brown, who followed him , was just about as smart.
John McCain, aside from lying in his last re-election campaign, wrecked Congress with his “McCain-Finegold Bill” which left Congress members spending their days “dialing for dollars” while delegating all legislation to their staffs. McCain was a great one for virtue signaling and his allies in Arizona turned us over to the Soros-girl Hobbs because their Trump hate would not allow them to support candidates endorsed by him. Keri Lake and Blake Masters (co-author of “Zero to One” with Peter Thiel) were far superior candidates than the Democrats.
Many Republican candidates lie about their intentions, especially if they have been in Congress for a while. I wholeheartedly supported the “Freedom Caucus” in their battle with McCarthy. They negotiated with him for months but, until he faced losing the Speakership, they got nowhere. Maybe, just maybe, we will see some progress now.
As far as I am concerned, the Democrats who hold high office are the vanguard of a new Red Army, unified, marching in lockstep. Sinema and Manchin simply illustrate as occasional outliers the existence of this Army, which is dedicated to ruling forever.
The GOP better tighten up against this true enemy.