Hah, yeah I was about to respond that people on the right would probably say Pelosi or Biden. Pelosi for hatred equivalency, and Biden for them thinking he's dumber than a box of rocks. Then again Biden and them thinking he's dumber that dirt is probably more akin to us thinking (and knowing) Palin is. Bachmann has more to her. It's not just that she's dumb, it's that she's full of crazy conspiracies. I'm not sure there's a conspiracy theory nutjob on the left lurking about the house or senate.
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PoliGAF 2013 |OT2| Worth 77% of OT1
- Thread starter The Librarian
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Hah, yeah I was about to respond that people on the right would probably say Pelosi or Biden. Pelosi for hatred equivalency, and Biden for them thinking he's dumber than a box of rocks. Then again Biden and them thinking he's dumber that dirt is probably more akin to us thinking (and knowing) Palin is. Bachmann has more to her. It's not just that she's dumb, it's that she's full of crazy conspiracies. I'm not sure there's a conspiracy theory nutjob on the left lurking about the house or senate.
PhoenixDark
Banned
Isn't this bad news? While I'm glad she's gone, this makes picking up her seat a lot harder. Defeating a crazy, scandal plagued congresswoman in a red district is a lot easier than defeating a non-crazy republican candidate with a clean slate.
It's probably going to make that seat safer, but it also represents the continuing erosion of crazytown GOP Reps. One way or another, that seat will be going further to the left next year.
empty vessel
Member
Yeah but i think it's also about the flip nature of the response. Could you imagine the reaction on the right if Hillary Clinton had said that about Benghazi?
It probably balances out a little with the fact that it's easier to beat a no-name republican candidate than a big name nationally known candidate like Bachmann. It's easier sometimes to discredit someone if no one knows who they are to begin with.
shadowsdarknes
Member
Yeah I suppose Pelosi isn't too likable.
But if I were a woman, Pelosi would likely be a female role model for me. Bachmann, not so much.
Pelosi actually has a brain.
I am Michael Bolton
Banned
Interesting.
PhoenixDark
Banned
Makes sense. He can protect his right flank while working on immigration. So far Rubio has played this quite impressively.
/headdesk
This is great news to wake up to!
Took my damn response, PP. Because of immigration and the primaries, you can expect Rubio to maneuver to the right of the Birch Society.
I know very little about New England, but for those who do, apparently Lincoln Chafee is about to emerge from his independent cocoon as a beautiful Democratic butterfly:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...second-term-as-a-democrat/?wprss=rss_homepage
Guess he'll probably still lose the primary.
wapo said:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...second-term-as-a-democrat/?wprss=rss_homepage
Guess he'll probably still lose the primary.
The Librarian
Banned
Bad news for whom? Obama? Damn.
Chafee has had a long and interesting career.
i still think that, unless a culling happens, Rubio has no shot in a general. Christie is most definitely playing the "fuck the primaries, i need to win the general election" game, but that would require him to make it through the primaries. Christie could win PA and NJ if he doesn't get bit by anything big... that'd make him tough to beat.
That's one way of putting it. Looking at his history I am not sure how he was a republican at all.
smokeandmirrors
Banned
Nj will not vote for Christie in the general election.
empty vessel
Member
I can't figure out why they vote for him for governor.
RustyNails
Member
Who could Graves might be facing next year?
Black Mamba
Member
Two most important factors in congressional elections are money and name recognition. Unless the GOP nominates someone well known, graves should have a clear advantage here.
Bachman probably solely won last time on her name alone.
jamesinclair
Banned
Jesse Jackson?
The Librarian
Banned
Are we sure we would want a Congressman with the last name of "Graves"? He could support death panels!
i'll take that wager... again, barring anything crazy like a scandal
Avon Barksdale
Member
Not relevant enough anymore.
Particle Physicist
between a quark and a baryon
speculawyer
Member
Poorly worded? It is poetry.
Probably the only good thing that came from that war-monger.
Avon Barksdale
Member
Against Hillary?
speculawyer
Member
Interesting?
Nonsensical. Some random government agency involved in a tiny part of the law has a completely unrelated scandal . . . so repeal the law.
Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal that involved missiles so we should cancel all Star Wars defense systems.
Cross-posted here and the boy scout thread.
Not surprising, but still disgusting.
Some Churches Say They'll Cut Ties to Boy Scouts Following Its Lifting Ban on Gay Scouts
There is more of the article behind the link.
Evangelicals against gay boy scouts. A number of other, somewhat more reasonable, denominations support repealing the ban. Not shocking at all.
Also the "don't hate" line is right up there with "I totally have gay friends".
Not surprising, but still disgusting.
Some Churches Say They'll Cut Ties to Boy Scouts Following Its Lifting Ban on Gay Scouts
There is more of the article behind the link.
Evangelicals against gay boy scouts. A number of other, somewhat more reasonable, denominations support repealing the ban. Not shocking at all.
Also the "don't hate" line is right up there with "I totally have gay friends".
speculawyer
Member
I think that people just don't know what to do. The religion says hate the gays. But if gays are just ordinary good people who just happen to be attracted to the same sex . . . then is the religion then bogus? So to some degree, I think the gay fight is an existential fight for some people with their religion.
Ironically, the more they fight it, they more they will obliterate their own religion. They should just accept it and start working on those rationalizations. They already have them for a zillion other things like divorce and what-not. But hey . . . at this point, I'm happy to have more crazy anti-gay marriage people because the war has been lost at this point and the more they keep pushing this issue, the more they discredit their stupid theocratic views.
Maybe not. Some people need something to believe in in order to feel "whole". However, people hide behind their religion as a way to continue to be ignorant and those people are either afraid of logic or just don't know how to think logically.
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
The religion doesn't say to hate the gays, their leaders do.
Sure, there's some stuff in the bible about about it, but they're all in OT books that are generally ignored by evangelicals otherwise.
People need to reject their religious leaders a bit more often.
Sure, there's some stuff in the bible about about it, but they're all in OT books that are generally ignored by evangelicals otherwise.
People need to reject their religious leaders a bit more often.
speculawyer
Member
But for better or worse, the gay thing is one of the red line rules many churches seem to have adopted. Never mind that Jesus say absolutely not a single word about gays and he was extremely critical of divorce.
So they are being force to either admit that the church was wrong and gays are fine or that gays are still evil and we are going through evil liberal persecution of the church.
In the long run, people will deal with gays and various churches will quietly change their position (many already have). But some people may just quit church when they realize it is just a man-made thing. And few stragglers will become Westboro Baptist Church types.
PhoenixDark
Banned
You said similar things about Romney early on. Just want to remind you
I could be wrong here, but it seems like a clear pattern with Rubio. He spent two years voting against everything imaginable in the Senate, and it worked: Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Lauryn Ingram, and all the other big right wing voices aren't telling their audiences that he's a RINO or questioning his conservatism. During the Gang of 8 rollout he was getting a lot of feint support from them too. Now things are changing as the bill comes into focus more and the right is slowly boiling, but Rubio has yet to be injured by any of it.
Black Mamba
Member
He hasn't been injured by it because nobody cares about him. Nobody will care until there is an election.
Unless a politician does something illegal or cheats on their spouse (sometimes...), no one will care until election time.
PhoenixDark
Banned
And yet the right has completely dismantled Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. Rubio is actively doing something "worse" than either of them, yet hasn't been attacked fully.
Avon Barksdale
Member
Conservatives think Rubio is the Republican Obama.
Black Mamba
Member
Bush's name dismantled him years ago. Christie nobody knows.
he has one of the highest national favorable ratings of any presidential candidate in a while (this isn't THAT good of news, as John McCain was up there once). The problem for him is that he has higher favorables from democrats and independents then he does republicans
Sirpopopop
Member
Republicans believe Christie handed Obama the election.
well yes, thats certainly an issue for him having to go through the republican primary. I think its also good for any democrat as he is the only one that, at this point still a ways out, is even competitive
I think this misses that the existential fight is the whole point. There are a significant number of American Christians for whom the appeal of Christianity is that it's the right side in some epic struggle of good and evil. Importantly, this is prior to anything to do with what each side actually stands for. So "objective Christian morals" end up getting defined relative to the sorts of causes championed by atheists and heretic liberal Christians. This has been going on since at least the 70s, when the modern religious right organized around defending racial segregation as religious liberty.
They can't say "maybe liberals were right about this" without obliterating their own religion. What's going to happen is that old conservatives will die lamenting all the moral decay they see while young conservatives will have neat explanations for how those old conservatives weren't really conservatives or Christians at all. There's no changing minds here. There can be no admission of error. This is where a lot of atheists come from - lots of de-conversion stories involve being taught how 'biblical' Christianity is either all true or all false.
PhoenixDark
Banned
What a shame. They have the republican Bill Clinton (Christie) staring them right in the face.
The Librarian
Banned
I thought it was more like two months. Doesn't matter. John Oliver will do a fine job.
Every religion and every denomination had changed their mind on significantly bigger issues than gay marriage.
The whole "we're infallible, we can't change our position anymore than we can edit the bible" is catholic sales pitch that isn't even true for them.
So if
Obama
emocrats::Rubio:Republicans Poligaf should vote for him in the hopes of electing a mild socialist
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
We're not talking dogma so much as mindset.
If you are a black and white thinker, once you start to acknowlege grey the whole thing falls apart.
smokeandmirrors
Banned
Because Corzine left a really shitty taste in people's mouths. That and no good Democratic candidates in 09.
Baffles me too since a fair few people I talk to here don't like him.
Alright. What shall we wager?
Yeah right.
I wasn't saying that conservative Christianity can't change over time - I actually described a mechanism by which I expect this to occur. I'm also not talking about the usual sorts of claims about having reliable access to objective truth and the awkwardness involved in deciding that objective truth is different now.
I'm saying that, for many US Christians, the way that "objective truth" is determined is by looking at what certain outsiders seem to be strongly for and then going the other way. The reason that being anti-gay (and anti-abortion, and, increasingly, anti- social welfare) is just that the only people who seem strongly pro-gay are identifiable as religious enemies. Modern conservative Christianity is dedicated to being opposed to what outsiders want, whatever beliefs that requires. That's what strikes me as novel about it.
When I said "They can't say "maybe liberals were right about this" without obliterating their own religion." I wasn't saying that changing their minds or coming to think they were wrong is taboo in itself. It's admitting that liberals were right that's a bridge too far.
Edit: Depictions of the Antichrist over the last maybe 50 years are useful here. What sort of starts as "the Antichrist will be a wolf in sheep's clothing", which is an acknowledgment that the Antichrist will be in disguise and will be saying things that aren't clearly evil, gives rise to a strategy of "shoot all sheep on sight" and later "things that look like sheep are probably evil". Probably anti-communism had something to do with the change. Now, a major political figure talking about helping the poor and working together with other nations will be suspected of being the Antichrist by virtue of advocating those things.
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