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Posts: 3803
Jul 16 12 8:58 AM
TKNoland wrote:Geez, when was the last time we actually had a really good president? In my lifetime, we've had some decent presidents, but certainly not recently. And I'm not sure I'd call any of them great. WB is right when we she says we need to meet in the middle - 97% of the crap that is thrown back and forth is of no significance whatsoever. There is no quality candidate *SIGH*
Posts: 13185
Jul 16 12 10:36 AM
Jana wrote:TKNoland wrote:Geez, when was the last time we actually had a really good president? In my lifetime, we've had some decent presidents, but certainly not recently. And I'm not sure I'd call any of them great. WB is right when we she says we need to meet in the middle - 97% of the crap that is thrown back and forth is of no significance whatsoever. There is no quality candidate *SIGH* QFT. Every election, I think "Is this really the best we can do?"
Posts: 7151
Jul 16 12 3:20 PM
Brian Rad wrote:Jana wrote:TKNoland wrote:Geez, when was the last time we actually had a really good president? In my lifetime, we've had some decent presidents, but certainly not recently. And I'm not sure I'd call any of them great. WB is right when we she says we need to meet in the middle - 97% of the crap that is thrown back and forth is of no significance whatsoever. There is no quality candidate *SIGH* QFT. Every election, I think "Is this really the best we can do?"Have to admit I asked myself exactly this several times during the primaries.
Posts: 12196
Jul 16 12 3:57 PM
Jul 16 12 4:16 PM
roro wrote:I still say that Jon Huntsman was the best out of the previous major candidates. If he had made the nomination I would probably have voted for him.
Jul 16 12 4:17 PM
Jul 16 12 4:20 PM
wolfbitch wrote:Brian Rad wrote:Jana wrote:TKNoland wrote:Geez, when was the last time we actually had a really good president? In my lifetime, we've had some decent presidents, but certainly not recently. And I'm not sure I'd call any of them great. WB is right when we she says we need to meet in the middle - 97% of the crap that is thrown back and forth is of no significance whatsoever. There is no quality candidate *SIGH* QFT. Every election, I think "Is this really the best we can do?"Have to admit I asked myself exactly this several times during the primaries.I was amazed at how crappy the Republican candidates were. C'mon, you guys, couldn't you find ANYBODY better than the weirdos who were running? I'm hoping Mittens picks Condoleezza for his VP choice. Because then the Republicans are gonna have to deal with those...troubling... and persistent.... lesbian rumors.Then again, if she's a lesbian--and she comes out during the campaign--I promise here and now that I will vote for Mittens.
Jul 16 12 4:21 PM
Brian Rad wrote:roro wrote:I still say that Jon Huntsman was the best out of the previous major candidates. If he had made the nomination I would probably have voted for him.Total no-nuts RINO. Might as well go for the Obama collectivist nanny state.
Jul 16 12 4:23 PM
Jul 16 12 4:29 PM
Jul 16 12 4:33 PM
Jul 16 12 4:37 PM
Jul 16 12 5:41 PM
Jul 16 12 5:47 PM
wolfbitch wrote:Huntsman should have fired whoever was making his commercials, because the ads blew. He did strike me as a sensible no-nonsense moderate, and as a man with a considerable degree of intelligence. BRad, you're just mad because he was the only Republican candidate to come right out and say in public that he believed in evolution. I would have voted for him in a minute.
Jul 16 12 6:01 PM
Jul 17 12 4:53 AM
July 17, 2012 12:00 A.M.
By Dennis Prager
Young Obama supporters in 2008
According to conventional wisdom, the older the person, the less young people are inclined to listen to him or her.
This is probably true for some of you. But I do not believe that it is true for most of you.
Most young people have tremendous respect for older people’s views. I saw this firsthand in my own life. I began lecturing publicly at the age of 21, and I give you my word that young people (and certainly older people) are far more respectful of my views today than when I was their age. All things being equal, it is very rare for a 25- or 35-year-old to command the respect that a 50- or 60-year-old commands.
So, I am not afraid that you will dismiss what I have to say here as the irrelevant thoughts of an older person.
But just in case you need an argument to take an older person’s thoughts seriously, ask any adults you respect whether they have more wisdom and insight into life now than they did ten years ago, let alone when they were your age. The answer will always be yes. (And any adult who has not gained wisdom over the course of a lifetime is not worth listening to.)
Which directly leads to my point: Did you ever wonder why people are far more likely to become conservative in their views and values as they get older?
When this rather devastating question is posed to liberals, leftists, progressives, Democrats — you choose the label or group — they answer that people get more selfish as they get older.
Progressives have to give this answer. There is no other response that enables them to avoid confronting the quite embarrassing fact that just about every adult, at every age of life, thinks he/she is wiser than when younger — and that as they accumulate wisdom they become more conservative.
So the liberal explanation — that people get more selfish as they get older — is not only insulting, it is nonsense.
People get worse as they get older?
If you were walking in a dark alley at midnight, which would you fear more — a group of teenagers or twentysomethings or a group of senior citizens?
Do older people or younger people give more of their time to charitable institutions?
Are our prisons filled with young people or old people?
The fact is that not only do people get more wise and more conservative as they get older, they get more kind and more generous, too.
But what about “idealism”? We are told that young people are more “idealistic” than old people.
Let me respond by asking: What does “idealistic” mean?
Presumably it means having ideals — a kinder, more peaceful world, etc. Well, who told you that as people get older they lose these ideals? This is so untrue as to constitute a lie. If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering. And we, not you, have children and grandchildren whom we ache to see alive and healthy.
So, let’s put to rest the self-serving myth that young people have greater ideals than old people.
What the term “more idealistic” really means when applied to young people is that young people are more naïve, not more idealistic, than older people.
Examples are legion.
Here’s one: Young people believe that when the government gives more money and benefits to more people it helps them. This is naïve. As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy. Every study shows that people who earn money are far happier than people who win many millions of dollars in a lottery. Happiness is earned, not given.
Here’s another: Young people are far more likely to believe that world peace is achieved when nations lay down their arms and talk through their differences. But this has never been the case. Of course, good nations stay peaceful when they talk to other good nations. Bad nations — that is, nations ruled by evil men — are never dissuaded from making war by talk. They are dissuaded only by good nations having more arms than they do. That is why the Marine Corps has done so much more for world peace than the Peace Corps.
If you want to vote Democrat, don’t do so because that is the party that cares more for the poor and the hungry. We older conservatives (and young ones, too) care just as much for the poor. But after living a life of seeing the naïve only make things worse for the poor, we are no longer seduced by caring rhetoric. We are seduced by policies based on the awesome American value of individual initiative combined with liberty to create and retain wealth. It’s now called “conservatism.”
And, finally, you should know this: The “idealists” that many of you find appealing are the ones leaving you with a national debt that will render it very difficult for you to attain the material quality of life that these people have had.
The next time President Obama goes to a college to get your vote by promising you more and more benefits, ask him where the money will come from. And when he says “higher taxes on the wealthy,” know that this is exactly what they tried in Europe, a continent ruined by such “idealism.”
— Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated columnist and radio talk-show host, is author of Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.
Jul 17 12 5:06 AM
Jul 17 12 9:49 AM
Jul 17 12 10:03 PM
American candidates for president have a predictable trajectory. They begin by telling the party troops that they are really coming from the honest-to-gosh right or left, and then they move steadily toward the great fuzzy middle, so that by election time they end up sounding like Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.
But Obama has been going off the standard script -- most recently by attacking capitalism in radical terms. Namely, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."
Democratic senators are reportedly "horrified" by Obama's behavior.
Last week, an Obama surrogate was accusing Mitt Romney of being a felon.
This is a new low in presidential hardball politics -- at least since LBJ accused Barry Goldwater of wanting to explode nuclear weapons on little girls picking daisies.
Ben Shapiro of Breitbart reports the following Obama transcript:
Is any of this (use of tax havens) actually illegal? It appears not, but it's impossible to know for sure because Romney refuses to release enough information to let people make their own judgments.
Is any of this (use of tax havens) actually illegal?
It appears not, but it's impossible to know for sure because Romney refuses to release enough information to let people make their own judgments.
Writes Shapiro:
... Last time I checked, ... there is a presumption of innocence[.] But Obama needs no evidence. He just needs innuendo.
"And when did you stop beating your wife?" to quote the old legal joke. But this is not a joke.
If Breitbart is right, the Obama campaign is actually raising money in China -- quite possibly from non-U.S. citizens, since its controls are lax. Not a legal move, even if it's ignored by the Federal Election Commission.
The Obama campaign may be committing felonies while accusing others of being felons. Hardball politics isn't new, but crazy hardball tends to be self-defeating. It reflects rage and desperation rather than cold calculations. Obama now seems to be playing crazy ball.
In 2008, Obama ran as a messianic figure, come to bring peace and love to earth. But in 2012 he is tearing off the mask bequeathed by Saul Alinsky and his other radical left mentors.
I think there might be two reasons. First, Obama really is an ideological radical -- there's no honest doubt about it anymore, given his expressed anti-capitalist and anti-constitutionalist views, his solid phalanx of radical associates throughout life, and his repeated assault on everyday Americans. And while Obama is the most convincing liar since Bill Clinton, he has essentially given up on hiding his radicalism.
That is hugely important.
A second reason why Obama seems to be wandering off script is his genuine rage and anger toward those who dissent from his radical orthodoxy. Early in his administration, Obama gave one of those televised White House seminars on the economy. Congressman Paul Ryan was there, and instead of listening obediently, the way Republicans are supposed to, he presented a clear and articulate argument against federal overspending. Obama was caught unprepared, and right there on live TV, he suddenly looked enraged. That used-car salesman smile was gone. For a moment, we could see the man behind the Carteresque grin. He didn't look kind and compassionate.
You can bet that Vladimir Putin and Hu Jin Tao played and replayed that clip over and over again to see the real Obama. All the novice KGB thugs are being trained on this one.
(Look at this photo of Obama's soulmate, Elizabeth Warren, and you can see the identical rage.)
The Daily Kos loves this collectivist Obama stuff. But the Kosovars are already in his back pocket. Why is Obama echoing the mad-dog left three and a half months before November?
One reason could be money. The Great O is far behind his money-raising record from 2007 and 2008. But in 2008, Obama kept his real feelings for the private delight of behind-the-scene fund-raisers.
Right now Obama's denial of business achievements is on the White House website (above). Americans who don't hate business (70-80 percent) are not comfortable with those words. If the people in the Romney campaign are smart, they'll run that one over and over toward November. Add a few occupistas running wild in business districts around the country, and they will add Obama's smiling endorsement of those idealistic kids, just to hammer the point home. Obama is his own worst enemy.
In emotional terms, Obama and Warren are "leaking" their real feelings while trying to cover them up. Popular narcissists can be devastatingly nice and charming, until they run into opposition. Then their real feelings leak out.
In his heart of hearts, President O is always enraged at the American people -- those bitter clingers -- but this time it's personal. Gone is the smiling messiah, and in his place we see a persecutory personality, a real witch-hunter who may lose the election but won't pass up a chance to scourge this country with the whip of righteousness, to tell us what he really thinks. Under the smiling mask, Obama is Rev. Jerry Wright.
By Labor Day, when all the football fans and SUV moms take their eyes of the TV, they will see it, too.
If Obama doesn't hammer his rage and anger home to the voters, Romney should do it for him. This is self-destructive strategy. You don't end a campaign by ranting at the voters.
Obama is not a conventional politician. For sure, he loves the trappings, Air Force One, the chance to finally lord it over other people. But Obama is dyed-in-the-wool ideologue. In the last four years he's changed everything except his deeply embedded beliefs. America is still the real enemy.
Obama has become Jimmy Carter, who's gotten more and more stuck in trying to justify his catastrophic policies from 30 years ago.
Jimmy Carter is still trying to be president. Emotionally, he can't come to terms with his defeat in 1978. That's why he can't leave the public stage, or stop defending his defeatist policies toward the most hardened enemies of this country.
If Obama is defeated in this election, chances are that he will become another Jimmy Carter -- a "bitter clinger" if ever there was one.
The left has always thought long-term. Radical leftism is a utopian ideology, not a normal American political party. The left wants to turn America upside-down -- the original meaning of "revolution," from Copernicus' book on the rotation (revolving) of the earth
So far, America is still rightside-up, but Obama won't stop if he is defeated. On the contrary. To keep his stuck beliefs intact, Obama will have to redouble his missionary efforts.
If that happens, Obama the "bitter clinger" will haunt the Democratic Party 'til the end of his days.
Which would be a kind of poetic justice.
(Obama image by Otto Veblin)
Jul 17 12 10:26 PM
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