Matthew wrote:

Michael, the operative words in your statement are "as far as I can tell". Because those players sure are not making the nightly news anymore for their war protests.

*******************

So either Matthew has me on ignore or just didn't feel like responding to my links from the previous page, where it is clearly stated that Cindy Sheehan was just arrested a month ago outside the White House, while protesting Obama's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no "as far as I can tell". She is still actively protesting the war, and quite frankly a simple Google search would have told you as much.

Code Pink may be following around rove and the Teabaggers. So what? They're still actively protesting. Just because they aren't on the news doesn't mean shit.

If you want to call people out, at least have the decency to do a little homework before you try to make them look like hypocrites. You know, like the teabaggers who were nowhere to be found while Bush spent money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but suddenly developed a problem with it when Obama signed the stimulus bill.

All we get from the right wing idiots is "Oh, but your guys did it too". Who gives a shit? That was then, and many of us were very vocal in previous political threads here about the way our people were acting. Some of it was disgusting. And I'll say as much. But it's not even close to the hatred and vitriol against the Obama administration. Not....even....close!

I served my country proudly for six years. And for what? So fucking retards like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity can sit on tv and call me a fucking Nazi because they don't like my political views. Never mind that in 1994 while I was still in the Army, Beck was lying a puddle of his own vomit after drinking himself into a stupor and snorting all the blow he could get his hands on. I'm the Nazi. The U.S. hating liberal commie pinko. Screw them.

Am I pissed? You bet. I sat there and listened to these assholes smear me and everything I stood for and made me out to be less than a true American, while I watched Bush and his cronies start two wars they had no idea how to win. While they sent many of my friends over there to die. Fuck all of them. If that's what being a Republican means, then you can have it. I'll fight to my last breath before I let you people take me down.

No more will I sit by and listen to these turds talk about taking back "their" America. It's my America too. And I've had it. All we hear from the Teabaggers is how they want smaller government. Then here's a wild idea. Quit trying to interfere with a woman's right to choose. Quit trying to ban gay marriage. Don't tell me how you don't want the government to interfere in your life, and then ask them to interfere in someone else's.

I may not agree with much of what Mike writes, and it may be blunt and harsh, but it is also impassioned. In an era of apathy, defeatism and word-watching handwringing political correctness his posts have a real authenticity to them. This is a guy who cares. It may be in an awkward, fumbling kind of way, but he CARES.

As Ted Solotaroff, the legendary editor and founder of the New American Review, wrote:

"Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger."

May we all write long and well enough to reach that end.

Neither side is being honest in this whole business, Randy. That's the problem. Politicians either side of the aisle spend wildly because we the people are willing to be bought and we the people keep our hands out for the government cheque, rebate, tax credit, program, whatever.

How do we expect the system to change -- how could anyone expect Obama to bring his promised change to Washington -- when we ourselves are unwilling to change our behaviours which perpetuate the system?

I also see regulation as a way of building national resiliency and improved national security. We have chemical plants located near major metropolitan areas using deadly chemicals for which there are safer substitutes. These facilities are potential deadly accidents and attractive targets for terrorists. Regulate the industry to go to the safer substances. 

Mike O'B: You are worthless meat to the rich and they don't have your best interests at heart.

Matt: A lot of rich people in elective office, or people that got there by rich people. Why should we believe they have our best interests at heart?

Mike O'B: I mean rich business people. Democrats don't put their faith in others, they just get it done.

Matt: The rich are the controlling interests who facilitate the election of other rich men and women to pursue legislation that is in their interest. The rich are those who sit on the corporate boards, who cross-pollinate between a range of companies. Whose business entities are large enough and sophisticated enough to have attorneys and accountants work the tax code loopholes (kindly legislated by their elected kin) so they pay nothing to the state. I don't see them as evil. Merely enabled.

Mike O'B: You're just playing games.

fMatthew wrote:

If we collectively turn our back on the loud and the shrill they lose their power.

**

This reminds me of another quote, this one from the late, great George Carlin: "Think about how stupid the average person is.  Now remember that half the people out there are dumber than that". 

The loud and the shrill will never lose their power, because they are often the voice of the fearful, the timid, the ignorant and the selfish.  Pandering to the lowest common denominator is, sadly, a brilliant strategy in both politics and business.  Finding someone to blame is always easier than finding a solution, and sells better, quicker. 

I'm glad to hear that you're trying to teach your kids to look beyond the branding, and I wish that more people would at least take a stab at critical thinking.  But although that hypothetical "average person" is exposed to more information than ever before, I sincerely doubt he is even remotely as wise as he believes himself to be.  What's the term?  "A mile wide and a foot deep."  And I include myself in that description. 

I find that most people dislike the loud and the shrill and discount their stance on issues. Most people want and need to hear differing opinions to come to a conclusion.

The likelyhood of anyone, participating in this discussion, changing their political views is very slim. There are around 5x as many views as replies in this thread, maybe some people are just reading and all the comments are helping them form opinions.

I am new to posting on this board and I know that some of my replies may have irritated some but that is definately not my intension. These discussions to me are great fun and I want people to challenge my views, educate me on the issues and keep me entertained. Please never quit trying to make me understand why you believe in an issue.

So, my apologies.

And to explain why I'm so hot about the issue, to answer Michael's question - I have reached the end of my patience with playing grab-ass with republicans. Debating issues and reaching across the aisle, only to be rejected.

The Republicans are playing a game, and while it's lowering our dignity to play that game, if we don't play it we lose.

The Republicans will never admit they were wrong, or make concessions or try to work with the other side, and when we do any of those things, we come out behind, in reality. We come out ahead morally, but the sausage-making process of politics isn't about doing the right thing. It's about making sausage. And we hope that sausage is the right thing when you eat it.

So, here's where I get really hot - clearly I'm on my last nerve here with this - the tea-party movement, like the Iraq war, has ever-changing reasons for existing. Each time a lie is shot down, a new excuse pops up.

The one that is sticking is that the Tea Partiers don't like how their tax money is being spent. Sounds good, right? None of us want waste, so that's ok. Except that's not it.   They are mad for the same reason Republicans have been mad about taxes all along - they're mad that their money is going to pay for hand-outs to poor people. To entitlement programs. To lazy bums who refuse to work.

And when you put it like that, hell yeah that sounds awful.

Except that ain't the case. That's decades of propaganda that has sunk in - the "game" again. While Democrats were sitting on their asses trying to do the right thing, Republicans were winning the battle by lying over and over again until the lies became the truth.

If we take away the social safety net, we'll be back where we were before it was put up - people starving to death in the streets.

Let me repeat that: People starving to death in the streets.

Now - let me be more clear - I grew up in a city - I know that even with the safety net, people still starve to death in the streets, or die of exposure, but I also know, as a student of history, that far less people do these days.

I will not sit down for letting a bunch of ignorant terrified rubes tear down that safety net because they believe that some woman is shitting out babies for a fat welfare check.

It's an ugly misunderstanding of the way the system works. It's an ugly misunderstanding of the way insurance works. And it's an ugly and frequently bigoted lie.

Let me be clear - this is what I meant about Republicans working on faith - they believe that without social programs the "lazy" poor will just get to work - except we have historical proof that that's not the case - sure, you can find a few anticdotal bits of evidence that show it happening here and there, but by and large, the poor bust their asses working multiple jobs and still live below the poverty line, having to choose between eating and having a roof over their heads. And if they get a $200 welfare check - which will get them only the cheapest unhealthiest food, but food nonetheless, somehow that's some lazy person working the system and getting something for nothing? Or jobs - they work on faith that if you just take away regulations and give tax breaks and help, the rich (business) will help others. Except every time we try that, the businesses focus on what's important to them - the bottom line. And that means hiring less workers and paying them less money and benefits.

I am livid.

I will not stand for this.

This is why I am so God-Damned angry, Michael Sommerville. America doesn't have time to sit around playing grab-ass. We need to make sure we don't return to the "good old days" where old people died cold and alone, where the sick were left to die of illness that they couldn't afford to fight, that the poor were left to starve, all so that someone could make MORE money.