I wish you were right, but the GOP has been moving away from Reaganism since Newt lost the stare down contest with Clinton in the 90s.
I could write a similar hit piece about the Republican Party under Trump, the difference being that the idiocy going through the party right now is temporary. After the party loses power and spends time wandering in the desert looking for repentance, figuratively speaking, it will rise again and get America back on the right path. Hopefully that won't take 40 years like it did for the Hebrew tribes. Originally Posted by Tiny
- TinMan
- 09-05-2020, 05:46 AM
- HoeHummer
- 09-05-2020, 08:29 AM
There is no GOP. Only Trump.
- ICU 812
- 09-05-2020, 11:31 AM
Why does it have to come down to name calling?
All I was trying to say in the OP is that the Democrat Party has not just moved away from, but has discarded its liberal roots. The Party used to be working for the civil rights of minorities and for the betterment of the blue collar working class. No longer.
"Free Spe3ach" has been brutally suppressed to the point where no stand-up comedian will book an event at a University. Lenny Bruce must be turning over in his grave. George Carlin argued a free speech case before the Supreme Court in person: He too must be restless in death.
The freedom to peacefully assemble is under attack by liberal Democrat governors and mayors who allow mass funerals for media created martyrs while actively suppressing and persecuting mainstream Sunday worship. . . .even outdoors. Where is the ACLU on the First Amendment today? Black Lives Matter and Antifa have rights but no one else does?
All I am saying is that a potential voter should seriously look at what the Democrat party has said it stands for and what it has demonstrated itself to be.
Then look deep inside themselves and see if they too stand for Marxist-Socialism, as does former Vice President Biden, Bernie Saunders. Do they stand for the Anti-Semitic views of Patrisse Cullors (founder of Black Lives Matter), As a potential voter do they believe in thwe violent overthrow of the national government and destruction of American society as advocated and attempted by Attifa?
This is not the Democratic Party that fought for the forty hour work week and against the slave labor of children. This is no longer the party that brought us positive, pro active policies such as Head Start, school lunches and the Title Nine equality in sports or international out reach like The Peace Corps.
All I am saying is . . . .
Think it over before you vote.
All I was trying to say in the OP is that the Democrat Party has not just moved away from, but has discarded its liberal roots. The Party used to be working for the civil rights of minorities and for the betterment of the blue collar working class. No longer.
"Free Spe3ach" has been brutally suppressed to the point where no stand-up comedian will book an event at a University. Lenny Bruce must be turning over in his grave. George Carlin argued a free speech case before the Supreme Court in person: He too must be restless in death.
The freedom to peacefully assemble is under attack by liberal Democrat governors and mayors who allow mass funerals for media created martyrs while actively suppressing and persecuting mainstream Sunday worship. . . .even outdoors. Where is the ACLU on the First Amendment today? Black Lives Matter and Antifa have rights but no one else does?
All I am saying is that a potential voter should seriously look at what the Democrat party has said it stands for and what it has demonstrated itself to be.
Then look deep inside themselves and see if they too stand for Marxist-Socialism, as does former Vice President Biden, Bernie Saunders. Do they stand for the Anti-Semitic views of Patrisse Cullors (founder of Black Lives Matter), As a potential voter do they believe in thwe violent overthrow of the national government and destruction of American society as advocated and attempted by Attifa?
This is not the Democratic Party that fought for the forty hour work week and against the slave labor of children. This is no longer the party that brought us positive, pro active policies such as Head Start, school lunches and the Title Nine equality in sports or international out reach like The Peace Corps.
All I am saying is . . . .
Think it over before you vote.
- dilbert firestorm
- 09-05-2020, 04:52 PM
The winding switchbacks of politics
By David M. Shribman Aug 29, 2020
ST. GEORGE, W.Va. -- Up several thousand feet in the Pheasant Mountain area of West Virginia, the course of American politics suddenly becomes clear.
Lace up your hiking boots, follow Smoky Hollow Road for two miles, take a left, pull into a grassed-over parking lot and head up the Clover Trail, then climb into the thickness of the Monongahela National Forest. This is like no mountain trail you have ever traversed; it follows an old logging railroad through five switchbacks that nearly a century ago the D.D. Brown Lumber Co. used to haul lumber. The train would inch one way and then switch back -- thus the term -- to cross the mountain by going backward on the next switchback.
It is those switchbacks amid the hemlock and yellow poplar that sent lumber from the Clover Run Valley to the unincorporated village of Moore on its way to market in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And it is those switchbacks that illustrate the course of American politics, for in the past 150 years the presidency and the Congress have consistently switched from the control of one party to another, and then switched back.
Indeed, there is no more vivid example than West Virginia itself, which in November will fall in Donald J. Trump's column but which a generation ago was devoutly Democratic. It was here, in 1960, that Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts defeated Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota in one of the classic presidential primaries. Later that year, Kennedy took 52% of the vote against Richard M. Nixon, and the state's eight electoral votes went into the Democratic column.
Some 28 years later, another Massachusetts Democrat, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, captured the same 52 percentage points, though by that time the Mountaineer State possessed only five electoral votes. By 2012, yet another Massachusetts governor was running for the White House, and this time the Republican, Mitt Romney, prevailed with 62%. That is a massive change -- a massive switchback, to apply the metaphor -- in only 24 years. Battered by the party's positions on gun control and coal, the Democrats went from a slender majority to a decisive minority of about a third of the vote. And in 2016, Trump took West Virginia with 68 percentage points.
Switchbacks appear everywhere across the American political landscape.
Political professionals consider the Philadelphia suburbs a vital key to the 2020 race, and this switchback works to the Democrats' advantage in a state they believe they must win if former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is to capture the White House.
In the 1988 election, Vice President George H.W. Bush took the four suburban counties around Pennsylvania's biggest city by the landslide margin of 61 percentage points. Four years ago, Trump captured only 41% of the vote there. In Delaware County, a suburb abutting the city of Philadelphia that has been reliably Republican since the Civil War, the switchback is particularly vivid; less than a year ago, Democrats swept all five seats in the county council. They also won county-council majorities in nearby Bucks and Chester counties.
Think again about West Virginia's Clover Trail. There the path ahead seems unclear. The trail often is obscured. And on the slopes of the mountain, the old timbers have been felled.
The same is true in our politics. Today no one knows for sure whether Trump will win a second term, and whether the Trump ethos will endure in the Republican Party after he departs. Also, no one knows for sure whether Biden would govern as a centrist, which is his inclination, or would lean left, as many of his reluctant supporters are pushing him to do -- a prospect Trump sought to use to his advantage in the Republican National Convention when he said, "The radical left will demand he appoint super-radical-left wild crazy justices going into the Supreme Court."
All around, the old timbers of American politics are down: Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the powerful 16-term incumbent who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was defeated this summer in a Democratic primary. Reps. Joseph Crowley, also of New York, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, and Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, a traditional Bay State Democrat, were felled in 2018. And establishment Republicans have fallen from grace in the Trump years. Neither Romney, the party's 2012 nominee, nor former President George W. Bush, who won GOP nominations in 2000 and 2004, spoke at the Republican conclave. All the living Democratic presidential nominees except Dukakis and former Vice President Albert Gore Jr. spoke at the party's virtual convention earlier this month.
It turns out that switchbacks are the way of American politics. The Republicans won the first three presidential elections of the last century, and then the Democrats won the next two. The Republicans took three consecutive elections beginning with 1920, the Democrats five straight after that. The pattern has basically continued until our own time. We go one way for a while, then we go the other way.
The only question is the length of each period of control. Between Richard M. Nixon (1969) and George H.W. Bush (president until 1993), the Democrats controlled the White House for only four years. That's an aberration, but then again, that Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, was something of an aberration -- but one who highlighted another transition in our politics.
On Election Night 1976, when the former Georgia governor prevailed, it seemed possible that the Democrats -- winners of every state of the Old Confederacy but Virginia -- might reclaim their birthright of the Solid South, which Nixon had pierced in 1968. It was not to be. Four years later, former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California swept the South except for Carter's Georgia home. The elder Bush took them all in 1988.
Another tradition of American politics is the post-election postmortem. In 2012, the Republicans were in despair over their poor performance among women and minorities and vowed to do better. Trump's triumph postponed that reckoning. Even if the Democrats win this year, they will undertake some soul-searching. "There will be tension," said Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, "but it will be good tension." Markey faces a tough primary Tuesday against Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, a generational rival who thinks he sees a switchback. And so it continues.
North Shore native and Pulitzer Prize winner David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
By David M. Shribman Aug 29, 2020
ST. GEORGE, W.Va. -- Up several thousand feet in the Pheasant Mountain area of West Virginia, the course of American politics suddenly becomes clear.
Lace up your hiking boots, follow Smoky Hollow Road for two miles, take a left, pull into a grassed-over parking lot and head up the Clover Trail, then climb into the thickness of the Monongahela National Forest. This is like no mountain trail you have ever traversed; it follows an old logging railroad through five switchbacks that nearly a century ago the D.D. Brown Lumber Co. used to haul lumber. The train would inch one way and then switch back -- thus the term -- to cross the mountain by going backward on the next switchback.
It is those switchbacks amid the hemlock and yellow poplar that sent lumber from the Clover Run Valley to the unincorporated village of Moore on its way to market in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And it is those switchbacks that illustrate the course of American politics, for in the past 150 years the presidency and the Congress have consistently switched from the control of one party to another, and then switched back.
Indeed, there is no more vivid example than West Virginia itself, which in November will fall in Donald J. Trump's column but which a generation ago was devoutly Democratic. It was here, in 1960, that Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts defeated Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota in one of the classic presidential primaries. Later that year, Kennedy took 52% of the vote against Richard M. Nixon, and the state's eight electoral votes went into the Democratic column.
Some 28 years later, another Massachusetts Democrat, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, captured the same 52 percentage points, though by that time the Mountaineer State possessed only five electoral votes. By 2012, yet another Massachusetts governor was running for the White House, and this time the Republican, Mitt Romney, prevailed with 62%. That is a massive change -- a massive switchback, to apply the metaphor -- in only 24 years. Battered by the party's positions on gun control and coal, the Democrats went from a slender majority to a decisive minority of about a third of the vote. And in 2016, Trump took West Virginia with 68 percentage points.
Switchbacks appear everywhere across the American political landscape.
Political professionals consider the Philadelphia suburbs a vital key to the 2020 race, and this switchback works to the Democrats' advantage in a state they believe they must win if former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is to capture the White House.
In the 1988 election, Vice President George H.W. Bush took the four suburban counties around Pennsylvania's biggest city by the landslide margin of 61 percentage points. Four years ago, Trump captured only 41% of the vote there. In Delaware County, a suburb abutting the city of Philadelphia that has been reliably Republican since the Civil War, the switchback is particularly vivid; less than a year ago, Democrats swept all five seats in the county council. They also won county-council majorities in nearby Bucks and Chester counties.
Think again about West Virginia's Clover Trail. There the path ahead seems unclear. The trail often is obscured. And on the slopes of the mountain, the old timbers have been felled.
The same is true in our politics. Today no one knows for sure whether Trump will win a second term, and whether the Trump ethos will endure in the Republican Party after he departs. Also, no one knows for sure whether Biden would govern as a centrist, which is his inclination, or would lean left, as many of his reluctant supporters are pushing him to do -- a prospect Trump sought to use to his advantage in the Republican National Convention when he said, "The radical left will demand he appoint super-radical-left wild crazy justices going into the Supreme Court."
All around, the old timbers of American politics are down: Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the powerful 16-term incumbent who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was defeated this summer in a Democratic primary. Reps. Joseph Crowley, also of New York, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, and Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, a traditional Bay State Democrat, were felled in 2018. And establishment Republicans have fallen from grace in the Trump years. Neither Romney, the party's 2012 nominee, nor former President George W. Bush, who won GOP nominations in 2000 and 2004, spoke at the Republican conclave. All the living Democratic presidential nominees except Dukakis and former Vice President Albert Gore Jr. spoke at the party's virtual convention earlier this month.
It turns out that switchbacks are the way of American politics. The Republicans won the first three presidential elections of the last century, and then the Democrats won the next two. The Republicans took three consecutive elections beginning with 1920, the Democrats five straight after that. The pattern has basically continued until our own time. We go one way for a while, then we go the other way.
The only question is the length of each period of control. Between Richard M. Nixon (1969) and George H.W. Bush (president until 1993), the Democrats controlled the White House for only four years. That's an aberration, but then again, that Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, was something of an aberration -- but one who highlighted another transition in our politics.
On Election Night 1976, when the former Georgia governor prevailed, it seemed possible that the Democrats -- winners of every state of the Old Confederacy but Virginia -- might reclaim their birthright of the Solid South, which Nixon had pierced in 1968. It was not to be. Four years later, former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California swept the South except for Carter's Georgia home. The elder Bush took them all in 1988.
Another tradition of American politics is the post-election postmortem. In 2012, the Republicans were in despair over their poor performance among women and minorities and vowed to do better. Trump's triumph postponed that reckoning. Even if the Democrats win this year, they will undertake some soul-searching. "There will be tension," said Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, "but it will be good tension." Markey faces a tough primary Tuesday against Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, a generational rival who thinks he sees a switchback. And so it continues.
North Shore native and Pulitzer Prize winner David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- matchingmole
- 09-05-2020, 09:03 PM
I wish you were right, but the GOP has been moving away from Reaganism since Newt lost the stare down contest with Clinton in the 90s. Originally Posted by TinMan
His wife should have tried the stare down contest
hosting photos
- HedonistForever
- 09-05-2020, 09:26 PM
As I have been preaching to OEB, give the Democrats total control for 2 years and they will fuck up worse than Obama did and he managed to lose over 1,000 legislative seats. They simple can not stop the monster they have created no matter how much they try to assure you they can.
When the American people see what "these" Democrats are about to do, they will switch back, of this I am supremely confident because much of this support for Biden is nothing more than hatred for Trump and 58% of Democrats are willing to say that out loud. They don't have great enthusiasm for Biden, they have enthusiasm for being rid of Trump. Problem is, when you are rid of Trump, then what do you do, put thousands out of work in oil and gas? Keep up this Marxist indoctrination in schools, primary and secondary? Continue harassing Americans that won't pledge allegiance to BLM and Antifa?
And what happens when Joe Biden and Commala can't stop the shooting of Black men because Black men will continue to act the fool like Jacob Blake ( not all of course ) and will be shot. Then more acts of violence and more reluctance to do anything about it because there is noting they can do about it but either crack down which they can't do, won't do because that won't be social justice will it now or accept that they can't govern and back we go to Republicans.
And that's if we even have any police left by 2022. We've all seen now what "these people" think of a Democrat Mayor in Portland that was on their side. Imagine what they'll do to a Mayor that finally says enough and fights back which anybody with a brain knows will have to happen if all this doesn't come to an end with a Biden election and I'm predicting that it will not.
With militias Black and White now squaring off against each other, it has begun. The next civil war won't be anywhere near as bad as the last but it will be bad enough and do we seriously believe the Black militias will prevail?
When the American people see what "these" Democrats are about to do, they will switch back, of this I am supremely confident because much of this support for Biden is nothing more than hatred for Trump and 58% of Democrats are willing to say that out loud. They don't have great enthusiasm for Biden, they have enthusiasm for being rid of Trump. Problem is, when you are rid of Trump, then what do you do, put thousands out of work in oil and gas? Keep up this Marxist indoctrination in schools, primary and secondary? Continue harassing Americans that won't pledge allegiance to BLM and Antifa?
And what happens when Joe Biden and Commala can't stop the shooting of Black men because Black men will continue to act the fool like Jacob Blake ( not all of course ) and will be shot. Then more acts of violence and more reluctance to do anything about it because there is noting they can do about it but either crack down which they can't do, won't do because that won't be social justice will it now or accept that they can't govern and back we go to Republicans.
And that's if we even have any police left by 2022. We've all seen now what "these people" think of a Democrat Mayor in Portland that was on their side. Imagine what they'll do to a Mayor that finally says enough and fights back which anybody with a brain knows will have to happen if all this doesn't come to an end with a Biden election and I'm predicting that it will not.
With militias Black and White now squaring off against each other, it has begun. The next civil war won't be anywhere near as bad as the last but it will be bad enough and do we seriously believe the Black militias will prevail?
- ICU 812
- 09-06-2020, 06:20 AM
This time around, losing control for two years is not a viable option.
If :these" Democrats, as you put it, do gain control over the House, Senate and Presidency, we may never have another shot at saving the country.
Losing is not a winning strategy.
If :these" Democrats, as you put it, do gain control over the House, Senate and Presidency, we may never have another shot at saving the country.
Losing is not a winning strategy.
- Jacuzzme
- 09-06-2020, 06:45 AM
Surrendering the country to literal terrorists, which is precisely what these rampaging Biden mobs are, to prove a point is foolish. The damage they could do to the country in a short period of time is incalculable. Not negotiating with terrorists is a longstanding policy of the US for good reason.
- ICU 812
- 09-06-2020, 07:34 AM
This time around, losing control for two years is not a viable option.The country endured eight years of Obama because the Republicans ran John McCain and Mit Romney . . .and lost.
If :these" Democrats, as you put it, do gain control over the House, Senate and Presidency, we may never have another shot at saving the country.
Losing is not a winning strategy. Originally Posted by ICU 812
- nevergaveitathought
- 09-06-2020, 07:49 AM
As I have been preaching to OEB, give the Democrats total control for 2 years and they will fuck up worse than Obama didobama, biden, and obama's wingman holder started the war on cops
Originally Posted by HedonistForever
they gave voice and not just a philosophical foundation to that which has grown into blm and antifa
they are responsible for all of this destruction and killing and anti Americanism
and should the aging dodderer get elected, it will be open season on the constitution
and not necessarily by him, but by his handlers
- TinMan
- 09-06-2020, 08:17 AM
- ICU 812
- 09-06-2020, 12:14 PM
Back on-topic:
We don't need to convince each other on this. Re-read the OP. I was really trying to speak to an audience who should be re-thinking their sutomatic Democrat party-line straight ticket vote.
Please forward the text of that OP to your social media portals either intact or as a paraphrase. The core idea is: Do you personally support the violent Marxist-Socialist extremism of the current Democrat party? We can debate, negotiate, legislate and litigate any of the left-right/lioberal-conservative positions or agendas if the Republican's win. If the Domocrats win, non of that dialogue or compromise will not be possible ever again.
We don't need to convince each other on this. Re-read the OP. I was really trying to speak to an audience who should be re-thinking their sutomatic Democrat party-line straight ticket vote.
Please forward the text of that OP to your social media portals either intact or as a paraphrase. The core idea is: Do you personally support the violent Marxist-Socialist extremism of the current Democrat party? We can debate, negotiate, legislate and litigate any of the left-right/lioberal-conservative positions or agendas if the Republican's win. If the Domocrats win, non of that dialogue or compromise will not be possible ever again.
- TinMan
- 09-06-2020, 12:53 PM
Back on-topic:That’s a great way to piss off your friends. Not one of them will care. It’s all drowned out by “TRUMPTRUMPTRUMP!!!”
We don't need to convince each other on this. Re-read the OP. I was really trying to speak to an audience who should be re-thinking their sutomatic Democrat party-line straight ticket vote.
Please forward the text of that OP to your social media portals either intact or as a paraphrase. The core idea is: Do you personally support the violent Marxist-Socialist extremism of the current Democrat party? We can debate, negotiate, legislate and litigate any of the left-right/lioberal-conservative positions or agendas if the Republican's win. If the Domocrats win, non of that dialogue or compromise will not be possible ever again. Originally Posted by ICU 812
And I’m saying that as someone who happens to agree with you.
- ICU 812
- 09-06-2020, 01:08 PM
Thanks TM.
I understand. I have a high school budy who lives on the Eastg Coast. He has an advanced degree and retired from IBM. His wife is a retired atourney. These are intellectually engaged people . . .both deeply lioberal. My college roomate lives in (no shit) Portland. He taught High School math for thirty uyears, then retired and got a PhD in Math Education . . .also intellectually engaged. Also a deeply liberal person (Reagan BAD/Clinton GOOD).
I am dumfounded at the inability of these demonstrably smart peopler to see the profoundly disturbing changes in the Democrat Party and the liberal community in this election cycle.
Thanks for your good words of support.
I understand. I have a high school budy who lives on the Eastg Coast. He has an advanced degree and retired from IBM. His wife is a retired atourney. These are intellectually engaged people . . .both deeply lioberal. My college roomate lives in (no shit) Portland. He taught High School math for thirty uyears, then retired and got a PhD in Math Education . . .also intellectually engaged. Also a deeply liberal person (Reagan BAD/Clinton GOOD).
I am dumfounded at the inability of these demonstrably smart peopler to see the profoundly disturbing changes in the Democrat Party and the liberal community in this election cycle.
Thanks for your good words of support.
- dilbert firestorm
- 09-06-2020, 05:28 PM
I am dumfounded at the inability of these demonstrably smart peopler to see the profoundly disturbing changes in the Democrat Party and the liberal community in this election cycle. Originally Posted by ICU 812
they have what's called tunnel vision. theres degrees of it. they're very smart, but their smartness doesn't always extend to good common sense and this is where their brain fails..
they see the forest, but not the trees.