Cokehead on 21/10/2010 at 00:51
I'm a pretty hardcore liberal. My stepfather ("The earth is 6,000 years old, and nothing can convince me otherwise") claims this is because I haven't had kids yet. Well, I say MEH to that.
Regardless, having seen Congress do fuck all for two years has been somewhat frustrating. The coming elections promise only two more years of this.
But that said, I really have hardly noticed. The attention this summer and fall has been entirely on the Tea Party. You know the ones, I'm sure - they wear their ignorance as a badge. The government can't do anything, and it needs to keep it's hands off my medicare!
Not all of the members of the movement are like that, of course. That's just the caricature - that's what the 'leadership,' if it can be called that, is about. The candidates are like this - not the people that vote for them.
These are the people that claim they love the constitution, and then find the words of the first miffing amendment to be a complete mystery. Liberals all around have coined the phrase "Noun, verb, unconstitutional" - and to some extent, that's true.
And it's goddamn hilarious.
So why vote for them? These people talk of government as if it was evil incarnate, and they're trying to become in charge of it! It's insane. But that's the delicious part.
Try to find some recent footage of Christine O'Donnell. Go ahead, I'll wait. What you'll notice is that it's all the same - she's been pretty much hiding from cameras as much as she can. Because every time she gets in front of them, it's like she has stupid torrettes - she just can't help but note how Obama's a nazi and how if the people don't vote Republican, then they will have to search for "second amendment solutions."
Ever since the debate debacle, O'Donnell has been steadily losing support. She was briefly ahead of Reid, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. But now she's behind by double digits. This wasn't the work of Democratic operatives or campaign commercials or letter writing campaigns. All that was required was getting her on camera.
Regardless of who wins in November, nothing's going to happen for the next two years. Even if Democrats win at every single election (spoiler: They won't), they won't be able to get anything done. Ditto for republicans - any measure they could enact that would have any measurable effect would be smacked down by Obama. Even as spineless as he is (or appears to be.) The moderates jumped the republican ship and are now under the Democratic tent - that means that there's going to be a lot of bickering, even within their own party.
So that leads down to this: What's the best thing that could happen to the "liberal elite?" A Tea Party victory. It gets these candidates on camera, which we've discovered is their worst enemy. So when the next election rolls around in 2012, all the democrats have to do in their commercials is roll tape from CSPAN - instant landslide victory.
Tl;dr: Vote for the Tea Party, because you want some lulz. Don't you?
Mortal Monkey on 21/10/2010 at 00:57
It took you this long to figure out your democracy is largely a joke?
Thief13x on 21/10/2010 at 00:58
I quite honestly see little to no difference between the two parties (or three parties if you're drunk on coolaid). Bring on the laughs - politicians pretending to differentiate themselves from their twin brethern by arguing over issues never intended for federal discussion while simultaneously looting the treasury.
I'm going to enjoy sitting this one out.
Xorak on 21/10/2010 at 01:31
This might just be a rumor, and I'm not American so I don't know quite as much as everyone else, but I heard that the teabaggers want to make the tea bag the official method of greeting rather than the hand shake. Can anyone confirm?
Thief13x on 21/10/2010 at 02:23
No, but I guess you wouldn't be able to initiate
demagogue on 21/10/2010 at 02:42
I was brought up in the "do the right thing in every situation" school of thought. So the horse-race side of politics is a bogey to me. I can see it going on; I just see it for what it is. All I really care about is the policy side, what's the right policy for each issue at the time.
On that note, though, what's funny to me about the Tea Party is not only are they fiercely anti-intellectual, they are also for the same reason fiercely anti-policy... I mean the actual process of drafting a law with proper grammar that rationally addresses a very specific, modest socio-economic need; "governance" literally speaking. They are anti-wonks. ... which I always found perverse. They're so livid and raging to toss everyone out of government and get themselves in so fast and so desperately just so they can ... ignore policy-making. And I guess yell all day(?). I mean, wtf... How can people have so much contempt for the actual process of rationally governing things and want to do it for a living? It's like somebody who starts shaking with anger when people start talking about aerodynamic properties that they just crack and start shouting GODDAMMIT YOU PEOPLE!!! THAT'S IT! YOU CANNOT BE TRUSTED MAKING AIR-CRAFT! WE'RE TAKING OVER! WE'RE NOT GOING TO TOLERATE THIS AERODYNAMICS BULLSHIT ANYMORE!!!!!
What do you do with people like that? Give them a factory & airplane parts and say ok, Einstein, make it fly?
Rug Burn Junky on 21/10/2010 at 03:28
Quote Posted by demagogue
What do you do with people like that?
Usually we spend three to four pages of posts while I call them a tard, most people laugh and a few uptight germans soil their tampons.
fett on 21/10/2010 at 03:59
For fuck's sake, how many times do I have to tell you, I'm not German. And I wear pads, thank you very much.
37637598 on 21/10/2010 at 04:27
I say we throw all presidential candidates in a house full of cameras for a month, make them compete to avoid elemination, and let americans vote via text, AND put their scores on the ballots for the old timers who don't know how to send "NONE" to 43434.
Renzatic on 21/10/2010 at 04:43
I got to have my firsthand experience with the hardcore right teabag supporting folk just recently. What's amazing is that it came from someone I normally have a bit of respect for, someone I consider an at least fairly intelligent person in most normal situations. At least until you bring up Obama, universal healthcare, and the current state of the government. Then it's all about shouting SOOOCCCIIIIAAALLLLISM SOOOCCCIIIIAAALLLLISM SOOOCCCIIIIAAALLLLISM like they're Chicken Little holding up a cardboard star, thinking it's a part of the sky.
What's scary is that these normally intelligent people are just shouting what they hear on talk radio. There's no real thought behind it. They just parrot what they hear. Case in point, I made the horrible mistake of bringing up Obamacare while eating lunch with he and his wife one day. The things they said made my head spin. What follows is the worst I heard, and my paraphrased responses.
"I totally support insurance companies denying coverage on preexisting conditions. If I switch car insurance, and my car has a bad muffler, I don't expect my new insurance company to fix it".
Horrible analogy. You have a good idea of when your mufflers going bad, and if you switch insurance companies without fixing it, then yeah, it's your problem. But when you feel fine one day, switch insurance companies, then wake up the next and realize your eyes are yellow because your liver died in the night? Well, by your logic, you're fucked. Have fun spending $500,000 in medical bills because those poor insurance companies you're paying X per month to aren't responsible for your bad judgement call.
And anyway, you can replace a muffler quite easily. It won't exactly kill your car, and won't ruin your life by ignoring it.
"But I hate that I'm being forced to pay my hard earned cash for some lazy bastards healthcare. DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH! SOCIALISM"!
What do you think you're doing now? Foremost amongst many other reasons I can't even begin to fathom, you're already doling out excess cash because some poor welfare queen bee boogieman type can't afford insurance or decent healthcare. Why do you think you pay $50 for a bottle of aspirin in the emergency room? It's to cover losses sustained by the hospital over people who have defaulted on their bills. The current vicious cycle you're supporting means that healthcare will continue to skyrocket, which will cause more people to default on paying their bills, which will in turn cause healthcare to skyrocket even moreso. Nevermind that paying a little bit each month for universal healthcare could potentially save you hundreds of thousands later on. As long as you're not paying for someone else, I guess it's all good, right?
"HEALTHCARE IS NOT A RIGHT!"
That's easy to say, now that you're in relatively good health. But when you or one of your kids are in the hospital, and you're both having to mortgage your houses and sell your cars to cover hospital costs, I'll walk in and see if you think the same thing then.
"Well, whatever. Thank GOAWD for these teabaggers though, telling these socialists in Washington right where they can shove it".
Uh uh. A whole crowd of people angry over practically nothing, exercising their God given right to free speech by cutting off their own noses to spite someone elses face. Great bunch of people. And hey, thanks to them, we're now in the midst of a political environment that would consider Richard Fucking Nixon a radical leftist. God bless their empty fucking heads, and big damn mouths.
"Wow. I never realized you were such a socialist yourself".
I'm really not. The problem is you don't know what socialism is.
