North Carolina’s most beautiful blogger had this story posted:
Poll: Almost half of America would prefer Bush to Obama
File this under “you know it’s getting bad when” (via Ben Smith):
Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.
Yes, President Bush, I sure do miss you! You weren’t perfect — no one is — and your government spent way, way, way too much money, but in that you were, well, bush league compared to the money-grows-on-trees crowd running Washington today.
If you were still president, the government wouldn’t own 61% of General Motors and be taking business decisions that ought to be left to the private sector. GM might have failed, but that would be their problem. If you were still president we wouldn’t be defining victory against al Qaeda by a timetable. If you were still president, we wouldn’t be about to nationalize the health care industry. If you were still president, we wouldn’t have to worry about you signing some idiotic and hugely expensive global warming treaty in Copenhagen.
Yeah, in a lot of ways, I miss you a lot!
Give it a few more months, and the people who’d rather have George Bush back in office will outnumber those who’d rather have Barack Obama.
Did anybody ask about Carter?
Harrison: One of Sis’ frequent commenters, the Great White Rat, wrote:
I don’t know about that last: it would be pretty difficult to reach the nadir of the Carter years.
There is no comparison: Obama is a far, far better President than Cheney was. I view Bush more as a tragic figure, smart but unknowing/uneducated, overpowered by Cheney and the neocons, but not Cheney himself, also smart, but an evil man accurately personified by Darth Vader. We will find that historians give very low marks to the “Bush-43″ years. I hope we recover from their mess. At this point, I am not at all sure, with all due respect to Obama’s efforts.
It remains to be amazing to me what a political ideology, something like a religion, no, a lot like a religion, will do to a person’s judgment, independent of native intelligence. Not that I exonerate myself completely from such tendencies, but I like to think my practical side keeps me from such insane behavior as Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin, Coulter and ropelight, and some extremists on the left as well! Yorkshire and Eric, you came close to making my list!
Clinton again would certainly not be a horrible choice, despite the fact that he likes to receive oral sex. He did wonders for the economy and the deficit in his time.
Political ideology is not a religion unless you replace God with government. Guys like me (conservative) believe in God, country, family then friends. We have a higher power than Obama, Barney, Pelosi, Beck or Limbaugh. We don’t believe in “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. We believe in TO each according to his ability then we help the needy. It’s our Christian duty not our government’s. We believe in the freedom of the human spirit (a gift from God) to be the best you can be. What we don’t believe is that imperfect and corruptable humans can nor will make societies life better.
Guys like Marx, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao replaced God with government. How’d that work out? Did the government do good in the Killing Fields of Cambodia? How about the Gulags of Russia? Or perhaps the 30 million in mass graves from the Cultural Revolution? Which society offers the best chance to the individual, family, worker, small bussiness person, or local community? I say ours with all its faults is the supreme success in society in history.
Those among us who do not believe in God tend to project godlike attributes onto government. I think that’s a bad move. Even if one is an avowed athiest, one should never think for one moment that government is anything but the force of power and a magnet for corruption. Power and corruption, sound familiar? And the more powerful government gets the more corrupt it seems to get.
And also, unlike leftists, I don’t insinuate that my political opponents are evil or greedy or racist or homophobe or whatever the slur du jour is. I just think they are wrong. And I also respect their right as free men under God to persue their beliefs. As long as they do not impose them or rather, inflict them on me through the force of government. That seems to be the hardest thing of all for leftists. They MUST force everyone to support their schemes. They feel powerless ot go it alone. Sad, really. When you take the lefts belief in government force to its natural end we get the killing fields, the gulags and the mass graves. That’s the ultimate use of government force. Or as government drones say “Compliance”. Resistance is futile.
Those among us who do not believe in God tend to project godlike attributes onto government.
Most atheists I know are libertarians.
Thank you Perry, that’s very kind of you.
I’m both honored and flattered to be listed with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter.
They’re among the greatest Americans of this generation, and although I’m pleased to be listed in their company, my modest accomplishments fall far short of recommending me for membership in such a rarefied pantheon.
Yet, I’m aware you intended to bestow no such honors on either me or them. Calling our behavior “insane” both (mis) identifies your goal, and serves to exonerate you from the opprobrium of your fellow phlegmatics.
However, I’ll accept your compliment, unintended certainly, but quite pleasing to me nonetheless. Thanks again.
PS: I’ll have more to say in response to the rabidly delusional portions of your comment a bit later in the day. After receiving such a boon, it would be unseemly to pounce on the low hanging fruit too quickly.
Screw you ropelight! Took me ten minutes to find out what “opprobrium of your fellow phlegmatics” meant. Plus, now I feel the need to work it into a conversation later with my friends. You’re killing me.
JohnC.: “We don’t believe in “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs””
Then you must not have any kind of insurance. (Not commenting on health insurance reform here, just insurance in general.) Insurance is based on the idea of spreading risk throughout a population to help those who couldn’t help themselves without it. Money from each, according to his ability to pay, gets pooled and given to each according to his need, which would otherwise be too expensive.
But you believe differently. You must have no insurance at all. When your house burns down, you pay to have it rebuilt. If your neighbor is a part of your no-insurance club, but he’s too poor to rebuild when his house burns down, you give him some of your money, right? How many times have you done that?
Insurance is a voluntary association of individuals all pooling their money to cover catastrophic loss. It is not a government or economic tenant. I pointed out the manifesto lingo which is a forced government tenant. Get real.
Nangleator shows his lack of understanding of insurance:
Insurance is not based on how much you can pay. That is not a factor in the premium. It also does not pay out based on how much need you have.
The fundamental lack of economic training and understanding of those on the left is exasperating. They seem to think that money, products and prosperity all fall from the government money tree. Individual workers, producers, inventors are all at the command of government, so they think. Now, insurance is also at the governments beck and call.
And once again, the hysterical and emotional personalization of an antecdotal example solves nothing.
JohnC errs:“They ["the left"] seem to think that money, products and prosperity all fall from the government money tree.”
Of course I don’t agree! But John, aren’t you forgetting corporate welfare? How could you? Does it have to do with your religion, your ideology of the Right? Your people (financial institutions) have received probably the greatest welfare check of all time, the bailout, initiated by the Bush administration. But no, you don’t think about that, now do you? You need a chiropractic adjustment of the brain, pushed toward being fair and balanced, not the FoxNoise variety though!
I don’t know if President Bush wouldn’t have gone for the GM bailout. He did actively support the bank bailout (I’m on the fence about how good or bad that really was). But you are right that he definitely would not have approved Porkapalooza, and we wouldn’t be having the inane and frightening Obamacare looming. He wouldn’t have gone on an apology tour nor bowed to dictators and other world leaders, embarrassing our country. We wouldn’t be having to beat back cap and trade or the EPA running amok.
GWB had any number of accomplishments which will land him fairly high on the list of presidents: he presided successfully over 2 wars, kept the country safe, signed tax relief into law, helped create No Child Left Behind, provided prescription drug coverage for seniors, embraced the largest democracy in the world and welcomed it into the First World (India), isolated Iran and basically called evil evil whenever he could. Both Republicans and Democrats don’t welcome all his successes, but as time is showing, his accomplishments were far better than what we are seeing under the Obamessiah.
Obama will look better to people once Republicans retake one or both Houses of Congress, and he may actually be reelected once Republicans can pull him back to the center. But his tendency to foolishly promise things while on the world stage may undo him.
Oh my, Sharon, I could comment plenty on your grossly inaccurate statement about GWB’s “accomplishments”, but it will have to wait. Let me just say that if you honestly, honestly believe what you have written, you have strayed far from the truth. Anyone that follows the news knows that very well. This is more evidence that those on the far Right treat their ideology as if it were a religion, cherry picking what they like, shading reality to what they want it to be, and ignoring what they know went wrong. Is this in the genes, is it a disease, or is it willful deception? You choose!
Wait, are you saying none of those things happened? It’s not deceptive nor ideology to state these accomplishments.
Perry, my people are not financial institutions. You may not realize this but financial institutions are businesses not people. They are built by, invested into by and employ millions of your fellow citizens. Those lousey, greedy financial institutions helped you buy a house, finance a car or maybe put you through school. Yet you seem to think they and their investors are scoundrels. Do you think the grocer is a scroundrel when he profits off your weekly shopping? And as I have previously stated my politics are not my religion. Furthermore, where have I ever stated I was for ANY welfare be it corporate, farming subsities or personal welfare? I am not for ANY bailouts, nor corporate take overs, nor tax money to unions or community organizations. You are either in a parallel universe or in complete denile to believe a free-marketer like myself would be for any of these things.
I don’t believe in forcing anyone to do anything they feel is not in their own interest. Ayn Rand called it “The virtue of Selfishness”, I call it enlightened self interest, civic duty and personal choice and responsability. If you think that means my brain needs an adjustment then we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Perry:
Yorkshire and Eric, you came close to making my list!
What qualifies you to declare people insane? That’s right, no argument, call names.
Dana, this qualifies as your best post ever! Congrats !! It is True Common Sense Political Thought, except in this case it should read “Uncommon Sense”
JohnC says:We believe in TO each according to his ability then we help the needy.
Obamessiah. I like that!I call his followers Obamatons …
Perry, where do you get off calling George W Bush “uneducated?” Are you insane?
GWB graduated from Yale and has an MBA from Harvard. Clearly, even to a mind-numbed Kool-Aid gulper, such scholastic accomplishments alone are sufficient to put him well within the category of the reasonably well educated. Rational people do not deny obvious facts, such is the dark and lonely province of the mentally challenged.
Successful in private enterprise, governor of Texas, president of the USA, are GWB’s many honors and distinctions inadequate to overcome your inability to see beyond your ignorent prejudices? You may well disagree with the man’s policies, but to deny him his due only disqualifies you from any claim to common sense and reason.
Perry, you’re not a stupid man. Quit acting like one.
He has confused actuarial based insurance with mutual aid societies.
Compared, not confused.
Perry wrote:
Insane behavior? With the exception of ropelight, of whose personal fortunes I am unaware, you have listed some very successful people. Rush Limbaugh helped revive AM radio, and went from a struggling local radio personality to an internationally-known, nationally syndicated and very wealthy radio host. Glenn Beck overcame alcoholism and has made himself successful and wealthy. Ann Coulter was graduated cum laude from Cornell, and was a law review editor at Michigan. She is a best-selling author, and very wealthy by her own efforts as well.
That they don’t phrase themselves the way you would prefer hardly makes them insane, unless you are defining disagreement with your views as insanity.
Perry:
It remains to be amazing to me what a political ideology, something like a religion, no, a lot like a religion, will do to a person’s judgment, independent of native intelligence. Not that I exonerate myself completely from such tendencies, but I like to think my practical side keeps me from such insane behavior as Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin, Coulter and ropelight, and some extremists on the left as well! Yorkshire and Eric, you came close to making my list
My feeling is you have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, and speech and say the mantra of the day for Libs. If you can not see the Democrats sysytematically trying to tear this country apart, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Healthcare is going stealth Government control by moving Medicare to 55, then go to 45 and work their way down until all are covered.
I emailed my brother at OPM today and he was surprised to hear Sen Reid is proposing to have the Office of Personnel Management, which is for the Federal Employees, take over managing Medicare for all, and Pelosi wants that age lowered to 55. He told me his bosses heard the same this morning and wondered in amazement how it could be done. There goes healthcare, but a Dem supports it, so it must be good.
They seem to think that money, products and prosperity all fall from the government money tree.
It’s become a multi-generational way of life, this belief of the left that money, etc., comes from the government money tree. And when they are faced with the brutal truth that the tree is nothing more than dead wood, the howls can be heard far and wide. And there is no longer any shame attached to it. It’s justified and righteous and owed them, in their own eyes.
And now we have a president who believes it’s our moral obligation or some sort of gobbeley gook, to make sure no one has to howl – so the answer is to print more money…. or there’s always TARP leftovers…
While Bush may have butchered the English language like no other and been a bumbler, what he brought to the table was common sense and pragmatism that cut through layers of nuance and bull and I believe earned him a healthy respect from our enemies. I miss that.
Osama bin Laden had his best years under Clinton’s leadership I’m sure he’d love that!
With GWB, GITMO would stay open and there would be NO SHOW TRIAL in NYC for KSM. There is an acute difference between Common Sense, Intelligence, and plain old smart. Unfortunately BO lacks two and a half of these.
Absolutely, Yorkshire. And he would not have been ashamed of it those decisions,nor cowed into submission by the prevailing political whims and winds.
FTFY, Perry.
And, here, let me show you how much in lock-step we on the right are. Sharon said
I don’t know, either, whether GWB would’ve gone for a GM bailout. And both bailouts were very much wrong on several levels.
Sharon went on to list other accomplishments. Among those accomplishments were “No Child Left Behind” and prescription drug coverage for seniors (Medicare part D, I believe). While I agree those were GWB accomplishments, I sincerely believe they were also outside the Constitutional limits and are harmful to the country. The rest of the GWB accomplishments Sharon listed are good accomplishments.
I must agree with Hitchcock on this one (like I don’t always). Sharon was not even close. Bush sucked because he tried to lean left with NCLB, and prescription drugs. B f’in S. That is so lame and so leftist he was a nangleator, excuse me wussie. Killing the enemy, okay. The rest is BS.
Sharon’s and my ideas about President Bush’s accomplishments differ somewhat. NCLB was a bad idea, simply more federalization of what should be a state and local responsibility. Medicare Part D was an overly expensive additional benefit; we can’t afford it. The tax cuts were excellent, with the only problem being that they were not permanent; we’ll have an automatic tax increase unless the Congress passed new cuts, meaning that President Obama and the Democrats will get the tax increase that they want without having to do anything. President Bush was on the right track when he withdrew our signature from the Kyoto Accords, but he’d have done better to have sent it to the Senate for a ratification vote, knowing that it would be rejected.
The biggest problem with President Bush was that he thought he could be a “compassionate conservative.” That’s a contradiction in terms, at least if it is meant as putting compassion into policy, because at that point it become compassionate statism. Every time that the government tries to help people, it does so by increasing the involvement of the government in people’s lives and people’s wallets.
Perry said, in another thread, that he believes that yes, he is his brother’s keeper; I pointed ou that such made him his brother’s supervisor as well. State compassion is always at odds with liberty; there’s just no way around that.
34 comments and nobody asking about the nature and ideological bent of the organization conducting this poll, or the size of the sample and the base from which it was culled (numbers conveniently missing from the “complete results”) – yup, just another day’s work with the people who care a whole lot about “media bias”
(also:
you realize that the point of the Cain & Abel parable that includes the “brother’s keeper” line is that, yes, we are our brothers’ keepers…you do realize that, right?
How can you people long for the days of GWB with all the problems he and his party have caused Americans and others as well? I honestly don’t understand it! But let me respond to Sharon’s omissions and half-truths, written here.
9/11: Ignored the PDB in August of 2001 warning of an imminent attack by bin Laden.
Bush kept us safe: True, if one disregards 9/11.
Afghanistan War: Victory followed by defeat from neglect of the victory, resulting in an eight year war/occupation left to Obama to resolve, funded by off-budget appropriations. Obama has moved it to being on-budget. The end is not yet achieved.
Iraq War: A war of choice, financed off-budget, large loss of lives, finally turned around to his credit. The end is not yet achieved. Obama has moved the funding to on-budget.
Axis of Evil: Unfortunate choice of words which polarized instead of engaging, the tatters left to Obama to resolve.
Tax cuts favoring the wealthy: Caused further decimation of the American middle class and poor, left to Obama to ameliorate.
Deregulation of the financial sector: Caused a near global depression, left to Obama to resolve.
No Child Left Behind: An unfunded mandate having limited success, left to Obama to fix.
Prescription coverage for seniors: Expensive, a bonanza for big pharma, awkward and confusing to implement, and with a donut hole, left for Obama to improve.
Sharon went on to say: “Both Republicans and Democrats don’t welcome all his successes, but as time is showing, his accomplishments were far better than what we are seeing under the Obamessiah.”
As pointed out above, you are misjudging Bush’s eight years. Moreover, you are judging Obama after only one year, a year in which he has attempted to do a great deal, the results of which are still too early to assess. Bringing job loss from 700,000 (1st Q) down to 61,000 (4th Q), bringing the stock market (DJ) from 6,500 to 10,300, economy growing faster than at any time in two years, tax cut for 95% of Americans, is it possible for Conservatives to give Obama a little bit of credit for these accomplishments? Sharon said not a word about these.
All that said, we have the immense deficits to address. The Bush/Obama gamble is that the growth of the economy will, along with spending cuts, produce revenues sufficient to begin to pay down the deficit. We have yet to see this approach play out enough to pass judgment. Please tell me what GWB did to begin to pay down his deficit before TARP.
Dana exonerates:“Insane behavior? With the exception of ropelight, of whose personal fortunes I am unaware, you have listed some very successful people. Rush Limbaugh helped revive AM radio, and went from a struggling local radio personality to an internationally-known, nationally syndicated and very wealthy radio host. Glenn Beck overcame alcoholism and has made himself successful and wealthy. Ann Coulter was graduated cum laude from Cornell, and was a law review editor at Michigan. She is a best-selling author, and very wealthy by her own efforts as well.”
Dana, is it only the ‘ends’ that you care about? I care about the ‘means’ as well as the ‘ends’. Not a one of these characters gives a good damn about their behavior and the impact therefrom on American society. Their behavior, all of them, is indeed at least self-centered, at worst insane. Perhaps immoral is a better choice of words. Do you think the Pope would approve of their ‘means’. I doubt it!
This goes to JohnC’s point, which was: “Ayn Rand called it “The virtue of Selfishness”, I call it enlightened self interest, civic duty and personal choice and responsability.”
In other words, the ends justify the means. I have never accepted this Ayn Rand ‘value’ statement, a stretch to even call it a value. In my view, both the ‘ends’ and the ‘means’ are subject to judgment. One must take into account the impact of their behavior on their neighbor, as John points out, otherwise Ayn Rand’s ideal will lead to utter chaos.
Dana, on the other hand, in defense of Rush et al, appears to take the Ayn Rand value all the way!
Going through Perry’s list:
Thing is, no one knew where, how or when the attack would come. Would you have supported banning all Middle Eastern men from American flights on September 10th? No, you wouldn’t support that now, either. Many of the airline security measures put in place after September 11th are barely tolerated now, and never would have been before the attacks.
Yup, true enough. Let’s see if President Obama does that well.
Moving to on-budget is a good thing; whether victory will be achieved has yet to be determined.
Again, on-budget is a good thing. But Iraq was being stabilized during the Bush years.
Telling the truth was an unfortunate choice of words?
The wealthy certainly saved more in absolute terms, because they pay more in taxes in the first place. But I’m not wealthy, yet my family saved $12,905 in federal income taxes due to the Bush tax cuts in just two years (2006 and 2007). That was a tax cut for the working class as well.
Most of the deregulation occurred before President Bush took office, and it was the right thing to do. Imposing greater regulation will stifle profits.
It certainly was an unfunded mandate, and a big mistake by President Bush. President Obama’s best “fix” would be to end the whole thing.
Again, something which should not have been done; the best improvement President Obama could make would be to end the whole thing.
I never give the government credit — or blame — for the economy, because the government doesn’t control the economy. Stock prices improved because investors thought they could make money. If job losses have slowed, it’s because the economy is adjusting to the new conditions; that has nothing to do with the President. Heck, he said that unemployment would top out at 8%, remember?
And what tax cuts have there been, Perry? If Congress passed them and the President signed them, I sure missed it! Oh, that’s what he promised, but will it be what he delivers? And ta cuts should come for 100% of Americans, not 95%; anything else is just class warfare.
Perry — who must be online even as I type — wrote:
Economically, it really is the end which matters; if the ends don’t justify the means, what does?
The concern about the means is rather misplaced if they don’t deliver the ends. There have been many times we have been so concerned about the ends — say, in fighting poverty — and let our compassion guide our choice of the means that we never achieved the desired ends. Instead, we created a system of permanent dependence and an underclass which has willingly accepted the Faustian bargain of agreeing to remain in poverty as long as we agree not to make them work to survive.
In a discussion which got off-thread, Eric and others noted that the basis for too much liberal thinking was based on Marxism. That might have been overly broad, but it was on target in one regard: there is a tendency by our friends on the left to be overly sympathetic, to see the wealthy as somehow having taken immoral advantage of an obviously unfair system, and wanting to put in more and more government controls to spread the wealth more fairly. The only problem with that means is that the end achieved in societies which have gone further into it than we have is not to spread the wealth more fairly, but to spread poverty more widely. I appreciate capitalism, regardless of the “unfair” results, because capitalism and the free market do something that other systems do not: it actually increases wealth.
What Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter do is to speak the truth without any self-restraint: they tell it like it is without caring whether they offend people. In our overly politically correct society, we need people like that.
I wasn’t on line, Dana, but I am now, and couldn’t disagree with you more about the ends justifying the means, which I now understand your position to be. And then, to justify the mindless shenanigans of the likes of the Limbaugh’s, well, Dana, you surprise me. If all they did was “tell it like it is”, I’d be fine with that. In addition to that, they distort, they spin, they lie, they assassinate character, in the most malicious manner. There is a moral issue here too, Dana.
At you, I am surprised, because you are a most civil individual, a person open to discussion and debate, an honorable man I would add. I cannot help but conclude, then, that with your stated position on Limbaugh et al, is: Let them do the dirty work, let them do the hating, which is exactly what they do. I’ll just sit back here and be civil, and intellectual.
This dichotomy in your character, Dana, is hard to take on this end! I hope you reconsider. Perhaps a few days of Rush now will cause you to do so.
Wow!
Dana, I could nit-pick a number of your responses to my list of GWD Presidency issues, but I’ll leave our comments for the readers to decide for themselves. However, there is one with which I would like to take issue: “The wealthy certainly saved more in absolute terms, because they pay more in taxes in the first place. But I’m not wealthy, yet my family saved $12,905 in federal income taxes due to the Bush tax cuts in just two years (2006 and 2007). That was a tax cut for the working class as well.”
I realize that everybody benefited from the Bush tax cuts, but, they were skewed to the wealthy, which is common knowledge. He chose the failed trickle down tax cut theory, pioneered by Reagan until he (Reagan) realized, too late, that it was a failure, due to ballooning deficits. His mistake lasted until Clinton, then GWB revitalized it.
In contrast, Obama’s tax cut was aimed at the middle. It came in the form of reduced withholding from your paycheck, which you would see clearly if you checked back on your pay stubs.
The fact that you saved so much during 2006-07, suggest to me that you gained by the reduction in the capital gains tax and the tax on dividends, a greater impact on the wealthy than on the middle, many of whom I’m sure gained proportionally more on tax savings than you did.
I don’t think the average middle income Conservative has any of how skewed to the rich the income distribution has become in this nation, due to tax policy and other policies, because instead of listening to Diane Rehm or the PBS Newshour, they listen to Rush and Fox. For a large corporate CEO to earn a salary 300 to 400 times the average middle income earner, is outrageous, and, uniquely American. This really is a value issue, which the government could ameliorate by making the tax laws more just.
In a study by Emmanuel Saez, published in August of this year, he presented the following which you can see right here:
These facts hardly represent ‘pay for performance’, which I always thought was an American value, rather, it is not, going back to Reagan!
You can also see that yes, the wealthy pay more taxes, because they earn much more money, not because their tax rates are higher. Their payroll tax rate is considerably lower, their tax on dividend and capital gains income is much lower than that on regular income, which with large stock holdings lowers their overall tax rate. Get it?
I have come to the conclusion that Perry believe everyone who is anti-liberal is a hater. So, yes, I am a hater. I hate the fact that our Constitution is being destroyed, the vision of the framers is being destroyed, the intent of the Founding Fathers is being destroyed, freedom and liberty is being destroyed. I hate the fact all that is being destroyed by liberals in our own country. I hate the fact that liberals, like Perry, call the truth a lie and lies truth. I hate the fact that our schools, from K-PhD, have been overrun by liberals who have no use for actual truth, no use for actual facts, no use for unadulterated data, but have full access to indoctrinate our children into the lie that is liberalism. I hate the fact that liberals push socialism and statism when both have proven to be failures everywhere they were tried.
Yes, I hate all that because I love the USA and I know all that junk is killing the USA. So, yes, Perry, we conservatives are haters in your book, as I showed you.
John assumes:“I have come to the conclusion that Perry believe everyone who is anti-liberal is a hater.”
Wrong, John! I named names. Even your name was not on the list, although now you have volunteered it yourself. So now you have decided to play the patriot card, recognizing only your positions to be the right ones for America. Just who, John, do you think you are? Get real, and honest.
I have some advice for you. Watch the PBS News Hour for a couple of weeks, while avoiding FoxNews and Rush, then let us know where you stand. Yes, basically, I think you are brainwashed and don’t know it.
Other than the fact you cannot spell, Perry, you also cannot read and remember. My TV viewing, such as it is, is limited to my stores of DVDs because I have no cable. And, oh, that fed-mandated changeover from analog to digital? That thing that was gonna make over-the-air TV so much better? Guess what. It killed the signal strength. With analog, I was able to get 5 broadcast stations. With digital, I’m able to get ZERO broadcast stations. Thank you very much, meddlesome gov’t. Unless I pay for an antenna tower outside my house, I cannot get broadcast stations, and neither can the rest of the 40k residents of this county. And I’m in central Ohio. Not like I’m in Nowheresville, Montana.
Ok then John, listen to Diane Rehm on NPR. You need to expose yourself something intellectual, other than to Rush’s preachings. Now I’ve made an assumption; you can correct me if I am wrong.
If I wake up soon enough, I hear 2 hours of Beck and 1.5 hours of Rush (in the background as I’m on the blogosphere) then I listen to 20 minutes of Rush as I drive to work. When I get off work, I listen to 15 minutes of Mark Levin on my way home and then hear 1 hour of Levin (in the background as I’m on the blogosphere) at home. Then I turn off the radio because I’m not interested in that Art Bell-created radio show.
Beyond that, I get my info through the blogosphere and, recently, twitter.
(Hearing is not the same as listening to.)
And, Perry, I know you didn’t name me in your short list of names. I also know you have called me a hater on numerous occasions. So take that faux shock that I would deign to assume I’m in your “hater” list and shove it where your head is — so deep inside your rectum you will never, for the rest of your life, see the light (unless a miracle happens).
Perry wrote:
Actually, President Clinton never touched income tax rates: the taxes which were increased during his tenure were mostly what you would call regressive: the increase in gasoline and diesel taxes, in some other excise taxes, and the increase in how much of Social Security benefits was subject to taxation.
Perry, reduced withholding is not a tax cut! You owe exactly the same amount in income taxes, based on your income and Form 1040 deductions. The only difference is that, when you file your taxes, you’ll have paid in less in advance, so you’ll either get a smaller refund, or owe more.
Nope! I had neither capital gains nor dividend income in those years. Rather, what I did was to take my income for tax years 2006 and 2007, and run them through a year 2000 Form 1040, see what I would have paid on those incomes had the pre-tax cut rates been in effect, and that is how I calculated my savings. All of my income in those years was taxed under ordinary income rates. A decent chunk of it came in the increased per-child tax credits (from $500 to $1,000 per qualifying child, but was only $1,000 per year. Personal exemptions were a bit higher in 2006 and 2007 than in 2000, but the main saving was in the percentage taxed due to the changed brackets.
I really ought to do the work to run my other Bush-years income through the old rates.
Perry wrote:
If the ends don’t justify the means, what does? If there is no end planned, no means are justified.
Perry wrote:
That’s just it, Perry: I don’t think that the public or the government have any business deciding whether someone’s income is “just.” In a free society, people are free to earn whatever they can, and that’s just the way I like it.
Which again, Dana, is your way of saying the end justifies the means. There is no way that I could ever agree with this value, this ethic, this philosophy, because it enables all kinds of terrible behavior in striving for that glorious end that some might call success.
To hear a man of your calibre say what you have just said is very disturbing and upsetting to me.
There has to be a balance, a countervailing force, which the government is in many cases the only entity which can intervene in order to control excessive behavior. Don’t you think we have had enough excessive behavior lately?
In my view, your philosophy here is a recipe for chaos, a direction in which we seem to be heading, as the Right, you folks, are digging in your heels, to resist any attempt at change toward a more balanced position, a more centrist position. The extreme polarization of our politics, the buildup of which has taken several decades, beginning with Reagan, is unsustainable, in my view, because we cannot tolerate the rich getting richer and the middle and poor getting poorer.
With our economic instability reaching the point that it has, with an increasingly skewed distribution of our wealth and the powerful wealthy calling the shots in Congress, with a military-industrial complex ever growing, the future of our nation is in a such a precarious state that we are approaching a seriousness we have not seen since the Great Depression and the WWII challenge, only this time, I question whether we have the spiritual wherewithall and the basic intelligence, like we had before, to work our way out.
I just wonder if you have seriously considered the unintended consequences of the philosophy which you have just stated, because in my view, the unintended consequences are already upon us, again, a buildup of a few decades. I’ve seen better days, I’m sorry to say, and I am not optimistic, especially when I hear this from a person like you!
Funny Liberals think the end justifies the means… funny thing is they never get their “end” only the means.
Perry wrote:
No, Perry, it does not mean that the ends justify every means, but that without an end, no means are justified. Detonating a nuclear bomb in a roach infested house would kill all of the roaches, but that wouldn’t justify the means. But the acceptable means, using an exterminator who employed poisons, would not be justified if there were no roaches in the house in the first place, because it would be the spreading of poisons needlessly.
And my friends on the left have certainly agreed with that logic: they have used the argument that because no WMD were found in Iraq — though governments around the world believed them to be there, even if some disagreed with President Bush’s means of removing them — our invasion of Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party government was wholly unjustified, even though President Bush did give other reasons for the action, including the brutality and oppression employed by the Hussein government.
OK, Dana, I appreciate reading of your qualification with your roach example. I could carry your example a little further, and that is, it would not be my prerogative to use poisons to exterminate the roaches in your house, if your house were infested, even if you were my neighbor where your infestation threatened my house. I would have to rely on my own homeland defense measures, unless, or course, the government stepped in on my behalf!
I would use that reasoning, which I already have numerous times, to condemn Bush’s decision to exterminate Saddam from his homeland. That was strictly the business of the Iraqis, regardless of how admittedly daunting a task it would have been for them. In my view, Bush was primarily after oil, and the establishment of a military headquarters there, and WMD, using the WMD and the Saddam thing as a justification that would appeal to the American majority mentality. Well he failed in all but the Saddam thing, as we continue in our efforts to extricate ourselves from that aggressive invasion and occupation, and attempt to forget the terrible mistakes we made.
More on the oil, isn’t it interesting that just about everyone but us are now signing oil development contracts involving Iraqi oil, like the Chinese, the Russians, the Norwegians, Malaysia, France and the British? Perhaps we have our hands in there somewhere, but I have yet to run across our name in any of the news releases so far. Ironically, we are still involved in furnishing some of the security in Iraq. How wise have we been in this entire Iraq mess, I ask you?
Bush wanted the oil, so he went in and got rid of the terrorist-enabling, child-rape-supporting, genocidal tyrant and never touched the oil.
What’s it like, Perry, to so religiously hold to your leftist ideology that you can allude to the facts without those self-same facts affecting your judgment? Because I see you turning yourself into a pretzel to avoid admitting the truth.
Perry wrote:
We do have a lot of laws which are along the lines of requiring your neighbor to get rid of his roaches, because they might migrate to your home: many municipalities have laws which require you to keep the grass cut, remove snow and ice from the public sidewalks in front of your house, to remove excess trash from your yard, etc. In some places, if you don’t, the government will come in and haul off the trash or cut your grass, and then bill you for the “service.”
In Iraq, President Bush took the government’s action: he went in and hauled off the trash. The neighborhood and the world are better off for having done so.
Perry asked:
If you are saying that, once the decision was taken to invade and depose the Ba’ath Party regime, we might not have done everything perfectly, I’d agree with that: there is no field of human endeavor in which we have even been perfect. There was a failure to secure all captured Iraqi weapons, and we didn’t get enough done to protect Iraqi art treasures. The Abu Ghraib situation was a mess, which required better direction from the commanders. But lack of perfection does not mean that we weren’t right to depose the Ba’ath Party regime: that part was well done.
I was watching part of a History Channel series on the Presidents, and it noted that Harry Truman was generally vilified when he left office, with a very low popularity rating. As people got further away from his terms in office, and looked at things less passionately and more realistically, his stock has risen considerably. My guess is that6, twenty or thirty years from now, people will look back on the Bush Administration and realize that he was a lot better president than people give him credit for now.
Of course, he’s already the best president of the 21st century!
O’m guessing you’ve never listened to Rush, and are just spouting off left wing talking points.
Give me citations, without going to the liars KOS, Media Mutters, Sadly No and without using wiki, of Rush’s lies, character assassinations and “most malicious manner.” Because you made that stuff up, Perry.
I listen to some of Rush on a daily basis, which helps me to understand where you wingnuts are coming from. If it is not obvious to you how badly this man behaves, it never will be, because you have made him into some sort of a disciple of the nasty side of Conservativism, into a religion really, meaning that proof of anything is of no consequence to you folks, rather, the scripture according to Rush, which is your holy grail. Instead, you should be questioning everything this man says.
Then give some examples of where you heard Rush lie, or do any of the other things you accused him of. Bet you can’t think of one!
Someone once commented that Rush drives libs crazy not because he attacks them. They’re used to being attacked and know how to deal with it. No, what drives them nuts is he LAUGHS at them! That they simply can’t handle, amd explains why they hate his guts.