A Meltdown We Can't Even Enjoy (WP)

[luckydevil]

This could be fun

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...033001334.html

It's frustrating. The three overlapping forces that have sent this country in so many wrong directions -- the conservative movement, the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party -- are warring among themselves, doing their best impression of crabs in a barrel, and sensible people can't even enjoy the spectacle. That's because it's hard to take pleasure in the havoc they've caused and the disarray they will someday leave behind.

Factions within the conservative movement have been engaged in escalating skirmishes over what, exactly, the label "conservative" should mean. This week the fight is over illegal immigration. The nativists and xenophobes want mass deportation and a Berlin Wall looming over the Rio Grande. The cultural determinists lose their studied, academic poise the moment they hear brown-skinned people speaking Spanish or see them waving a Mexican flag. Watch your blood pressure, people, because Cinco de Mayo is just a few weeks away.

The social conservatives seem to be hopelessly conflicted about immigration. They have a kind of immune-system reaction against this unchecked inflow of aliens who look suspiciously like carriers of alien values. But, as some conservative commentators have noted, the immigrants flooding across the border are more likely to have traditional, family-and-church values than many native-born Americans. Does . . . not . . . compute.

read the rest by clicking the link

[skinfan13]

read it in the style section today, at first i was like, "ok that irelevant" then "woa now thats a little strange" then "ok this guy is turning nothing into something."


it went something like that, then again it was 6 AM

[LD0506]

One of the big conflicts some of them have is one the one hand, those milliuons of non-English speaking immigrants moving in around THEIR neighborhoods but on the other hand they make so damn much nice money from virtual slave labor that can't complain about wages or benefits....... what a quandary, see the tiny tear trickling down my cheek?

[brewdogmike]

What a great way to rationalize the Democrats' utter lack of policy solutions -- Our "strategy" to sit back and offer no rational policy alternatives has worked! Victory!

[luckydevil]

What a great way to rationalize the Democrats' utter lack of policy solutions -- Our "strategy" to sit back and offer no rational policy alternatives has worked! Victory!

You know what............it just might work.

[Destino]

What a great way to rationalize the Democrats' utter lack of policy solutions -- Our "strategy" to sit back and offer no rational policy alternatives has worked! Victory!

If the democrats remain mostly silent then the GOP has nothing to unite them.

[DCsportsfan53]

All I'm going to say is I liked the article. I think he brought up good points. Other than that, I'll let the usual banner carriers debate and argue the details.

[Mass_SkinsFan]

Interesting article.

As a Social AND Fiscal Conservative (notice I didn't say Republican), I have been quite disgusted with this administration on a great deal of issues. They've thrown us a couple of bones (tax cuts, death of the Assault Weapons Ban, etc...) but overall they've been inept and in many cases nearly Socialist in the policies they've put in place.

Now before anyone starts jumping up and down about how great it is that the Republicans are eating each other alive, remember this....

The Republican Party is much like a pack of dogs. They may growl and bite at each other over the steak bone, but they're going to turn en mass against any dog whose NOT part of the pack if that dog tries to take the bone. Unless that other dog gives certain members of the pack a reason to side with the new dog over the existing pack, that new dog is not likely to get a chance at knowing what that bone tastes like.

In laymans terms.... These internal disagreements only help the Democrats if the Democrats move far enough to the political Right, to take some of the more moderate (read "gutless") Republicans away from the Republicans. Simply sitting back and letting the Republicans chew on each other internally isn't going to make them vote for a Democrat, and they've learned the lesson from Ross Perot's little foray into the political arena.

[Baculus]

I was just reading about Francis Fukuyama, a former Neo-conservative, over at Wikipedia, and I read the following quote:

"In an essay in the New York Times Magazine in 2006 that was strongly critical of the invasion [5], he identified neoconservatism with Leninism. He wrote that the neoconservatives

believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support."

That is interesting since this isn't the first I have seen Neo-conservate compared to Lenisnism as well as Bolshevism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama

Just an aside since this fellow had mentioned the struggle within the GOP, including Neo-conservatives.

[Baculus]

Another Fukuyama article - he has an interesting discussion on foreign policy. I don't agree with 100% of what he writes, but he has some good observations:

"KRAUTHAMMER and other commentators are correct that what is seen as "Kissingerian" realism is not an adequate basis for American foreign policy. A certain degree of messianic universalism with regard to American values and institutions has always been an inescapable component of American national identity: Americans were never comfortable with the kinds of moral compromises that a strict realist position entails. The question, which was the constant subject of those board dinners, was: What kinds of bounds do you put around the idealistic part of the agenda? Krauthammer answers this key question in the following manner:

Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy?
Where to nation-build? I propose a single
criterion: where it counts. Call it democratic
realism. And this is its axiom: We will support
democracy everywhere, but we will commit
blood and treasure only in places where there is
strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the
larger war against the existential enemy, the
enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.
[italics in the original]

While this axiom appears to be clear and straightforward, it masks a number of ambiguities that make it less than helpful as a guideline for U.S. intervention. The first has to do with the phrase "strategic necessity", which of course can be defined more and less broadly. Krauthammer initially appears to be taking a realist position by opting for the narrow definition when he refers to an "existential enemy" or an enemy posing a "mortal" threat. If these words have any real meaning, then they should include only threats to our existence as a nation or as a democratic regime. There have been such threats in the past: the Soviet Union could have annihilated us physically and conceivably could have subverted democracy in North America. But it is questionable whether any such existential threats exist now. Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not one: It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. (2) Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision: They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but pose threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.

This is not to say that Iraq and Al-Qaeda did not pose serious threats to American interests: the former was a very serious regional threat, and the latter succeeded in killing thousands of Americans on American soil. Use of WMD against the United States by a terrorist group would have terrible consequences, not just for the immediate victims but also for American freedoms in ways that could be construed as undermining our regime. But it is still of a lesser order of magnitude than earlier, state-based threats."

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...76/ai_n6127311

[hands11]

What a great way to rationalize the Democrats' utter lack of policy solutions -- Our "strategy" to sit back and offer no rational policy alternatives has worked! Victory!

Last time I checked, they aren't the ones leading this nation. You cant blame anything or ask for direction from a party that doesn't hold any power. They don't have to come up with more ideas for the Republicans to claim as their own. At least not until the real races start. They are smart to sit back and watch this ship sink.

The Republicans have the House, Senate, Presidency, and the Supreme Court.
And they own most the AM radio and mass media news outlets.

Time to stand up and look in the mirror and stop blaming the Dems and Clinton for all their failed policies.

May father always said. Tick Tock. The clock swings both ways. We have swung as for to the right as we can, there isnt anywhere for them to do but down.

The nation is waking up to what they have done. Look at the poll numbers.

Deregulation of everything doesnt work. It chaos.
Their war policy and internation affairs are a nightmaire.
They spend like drunken saylors with credit card so your kids can pay it back.

Its all them. No one else to blame. Sorry Charlie.

[Sarge]

Ahhh, leftist codewords

"nativists and xenophobes"

"brown-skinned people speaking Spanish"

There is a struggle for the right side of the aisle going on right now. Bush came to power not as the perfect candidate, but the best of a pack of Republicans. People's mistake was believing he was conservative.

At best he is a moderate, and at worst no different than clinton. I shudder to think what would be going on in this country if 9/11/01 had not happened. Bush came to office kissing Vicente Fox's ass. Had 9/11 not happened we probably wouldn't even have a border now.

The uproar is that true conservatives have no one representing them now. Most conservatives are middle class folks who are not making huge bucks like the guys running Exxon etc. But the Exxon types are the very same people that are greasing the palms of "conservative" representatives and thus keeping the immigration spigot open.

Open borders is diametrically opposite of conservative values. What the House of Lords has to deterime now is do they keep things the way they are and keep getting money from their business buds, or do they go with what the people want and fix immigration.

If they go with their buds, the angry white man is going to show up at the polls again this fall and the Republicans will lose their asses

And rightly so

[luckydevil]

Deregulation of everything doesnt work. It chaos.

Except for the fact that republican deregulation isn't really deregulation. Its double talk, it's more like reregulation.

Libertarians really need to distance themselves from the Republican Party. I am tired of being associated with crony capitalism.

[chomerics]

I wonder where all the people are who were trashing me for saying this over a year ago. . .

http://extremeskins.com/forums/showp...22&postcount=9

[Major Harris]

the title should read "a meltdown we can't even enjoy...........well, except for chom."

j/k chom. trying to add some light-heartedness to what i'm sure will be a heated thread.