Comments on The Anonymous Liberal: The Myth that Holds the GOP Together

You forgot another thing that holds repugs togethe...

2006-05-15T16:35:00.000-05:00

You forgot another thing that holds repugs together, tight sphincters and santorum dripping out the rectum.

No reason to apologize terraformer - it was a good...

2006-05-15T09:59:00.000-05:00

No reason to apologize terraformer - it was a good post. I feel your pain. To be truthful though I have, within the past year, purposefully distanced myself from my con friends. I can no longer stomach them or their ignorance. Call it arrogance call it bitterness, call it what you will but I see them as evil now. I simply no longer want to associate myself with the willfully ignorant. I am polite if/when they call but I do not attempt to contact them. It is sad really but then it is a choice I can live with - one I actually feel good about as I have come to believe that cons in general are simply "people of the lie".

In the past I would have dismissed their nuttiness as inconsequential but these fools are the continuing enablers of those that are destroying our great nation. I have grown to despise them for it. They are no friends of mine and they are no friends of America. I am not one to hold a grudge but I do not think I can ever forgive them at this point.

The Republicans are so anxious to cut taxes for th...

2006-05-15T09:36:00.000-05:00

The Republicans are so anxious to cut taxes for the rich that they're willing to raise taxes on the poor (the non-taxpaying class--those lucky duckies!) to make it more politically feasible to cut taxes for themselves. Yes you read that correctly.

Yeah their economic philosophy is perhaps the most...

2006-05-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

Yeah their economic philosophy is perhaps the most disingenuous thing about American cons. Every time they implement it in any way they show that they couldn't care less about the well being of average Americans or the health of the nation in the long run. They care about one thing only - getting theirs. They fleece this country for all they can. When will the common man realize that they have been duped? Probably never.

I spent the weekend with an old friend of mine, an...

2006-05-15T09:19:00.000-05:00

I spent the weekend with an old friend of mine, and we went fishing. We have been friends for almost twenty years, and even though we took different paths in life (he remained employed in a grocery store and now works construction, I went on to get a PhD), we still are tight. For the purposes of this blurb, I will call him blue-collar, which is largely accurate.

However, and as is known by many, the BushCo brand of politics continues to sway blue-collar types, even though the policies actually hurt them greatly (e.g., tax cuts aren't going to them, minimum wage stagnation). For some reason the Bushes came up in conversation. My friend's mother said "I hate when people criticize Bush; that Barbara Bush is a wonderful woman---noone messes with my peeps," she said. Most of my friend's family assumes (and rightly so) that I'm a 'liberal.' But I never, ever soapbox or grandstand or try to engage in discussion, because when I had in the past I got the blank looks, the muttering about how 'they' are 'unAmerican.'

What I see is a swathe of America who has been (and continues to be) bamboozled by a system that most definitely does not have their best interests at heart, but knows that it needs them for votes, and yet continues to be successful in maintaining the belief amongst them that its policies most certainly have their best interests in mind. Of course these days one really has to be on one's toes to read between the lines of spin, accomplished by visiting sources (such as this site) that provide a decidedly different view of events, and through reading other media. The success of BushCo and those who think as they do is that they know that people such as my friend and his family do not, and will not (likely) ever seek to inform themselves outside of Fox News and similar outlets (and yes, that was the channel that they watched while I was there). I would wager that so many people who support BushCo are similar. They tell you what to fear, and who is to blame for it--a perpetual boogeyman that only they can best.

What does this mean for my friendship? I do not know. I would like to think that we could continue to meet up and go fishing, or do other things that we have enjoyed to do over the years. But it is becoming inreasingly toxic, going down to visit them. Through their news outlet, I have noted a palpable change in atmosphere when I visit--that I am 'one of them college liberals.' We certainly cannot talk politics--we argued the last time I tried (just before the Iraq war, in response to my friend's Saddam/Al Qaeda link comment). I just hope that we can get through this era in our nation's history, that we learn from it, and that we move to ensure that this kind of intra-national coldness between 'those who know' and 'those who choose not to know,' fostered and manipulated by a system whose power rests on these divisions, never happens again.

(sorry for the long post.)

bamage,It's not that tax cuts don't draw out money...

2006-05-15T07:19:00.000-05:00

bamage,

It's not that tax cuts don't draw out money. They can and do, depending on the type of cut. But in order to "pay for themselves" they have to generate enough new revenue to make up for the lost revenue caused by the cut itself. And there's just no good empirical or logical reason to think that happens.

Clearly the optimum tax rate from a revenue generation standpoint is somewhere between 0% (which generates no revenue) and 100% (which stifles all productivity and spending). This the whole Laffer curve idea. But there is little evidence that we are currently above that optimum rate, especially considering we have historically low tax rates and among the lowest in the world.

Y'know, I did pretty well in Business school, and ...

2006-05-15T00:46:00.000-05:00

Y'know, I did pretty well in Business school, and I THINK it was there that I acquired my perception that tax cuts somehow drew out the money that was stuffed under matresses and whatnot, resulting in a net increase in tax revenue... Never really examined that assumption, though. Thanks for the links - I'll have to read the cites.