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Post by slartibartfast on Nov 7, 2012 20:58:32 GMT 10
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Post by spindrift on Nov 8, 2012 7:26:08 GMT 10
Onya Tam.....whoopie......arrr like who is she when she is at home...?
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2012 7:32:35 GMT 10
Tammy who??  |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2012 7:37:03 GMT 10
So?? You have to be lesbian to be good???
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2012 9:09:21 GMT 10
So?? You have to be lesbian to be good??? In our PC world yes. |
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Post by pim on Nov 8, 2012 10:34:17 GMT 10
I had no idea who Tammy Baldwin is either. So she's a lesbian ... is that supposed to be "PC"? I'll make a wager ... who's prepared to bet that Penny Wong is the only lesbian in the Australian Parliament, and that there are no lesbians on the conservative side of politics anywhere! I looked up the Wiki entry on Tammy Baldwin and sure she fits the profile of left-liberal Democrat. The more interesting question is why did the Republicans lose the Wisconsin Senate spot? Their guy was a dude named Tommy Thompson ... here's what wiki has to say about him en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_ThompsonWith candidates like Tommy Thompson, it's no wonder that the door is open to Democrats like Tammy Baldwin. The question for the Republicans is not that different from the sort of questions that are posed for conservative parties everywhere: A liberal democracy needs a party that's in favour of small government, minimal regulation, and the primacy of the private sector and the people need to be able to make a choice between a small government party and a social democratic party. They both reflect strands in the mainstream of the body politic and the polity would be the poorer, and democracy would be ill-served, if the people were denied such a choice. I think the people live in a reality that's in the centre as far as politics goes, and parties that aspire to be mainstream do well when they stay near the centre and they do poorly when they stray oo far from the centre. And this is what the Republicans in the US have done, and it's what the Liberals in Australia are in danger of doing. The election of Tammy Baldwin came about because the Republicans put forward a Tea Party fruitcake like Tommy Thompson. Read his "Wiki" profile for yourself. It isn't "PC" to vote against a dud like that and vote in favour of someone like Tammy Baldwin. The Republicans are paying the price of becoming the White Backlash Party. True they've had a good long innings as the White Backlash Party and it was probably the logical political strategy for them after Lyndon Johnson's equal rights and desegregation laws which dismantled Jim Crow caused the South to dump the Democrats and delivered the South to the Republicans. In a way Harry Goldwater in 1964 and George Wallace were prophetic. As Republican candidates at the time they scared the bejesus out of the Americans and caused them to vote for the Democrats in a landslide, but a Republican would argue that they were proved right in the end. And I guess if you look at the number of years a Republican has sat in the White House since then, compared with the Democrats, you'd have to admit they had a point. But the times are a-changing because the US population is changing and for the Republicans it's crunch time. They can stay the party of angry white folks wrapped up in their white backlash against minorities, wrapped up in their libertarian "no government" economic fantasies and their voodoo anti-science Christian fundamentalism, and consequently become more and more wedged out onto the extremes and marginalised, or they can rejoin the mainstream as a small government private sector party that connects well with the emerging US demographic reality that America is becoming a white minority nation for the first time in its history. |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2012 13:32:47 GMT 10
Vanilla cut and paste from some troskyist article.
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Post by pim on Nov 8, 2012 15:01:39 GMT 10
Skippy, disagree with me by all means. Denounce me in the most strident terms. Engage in robust debate and be as shrill as you like. But please don't accuse me of plagiarism.
Do you even know what "trotskyist" means? No, not as some ill-informed term of abuse, but what it means in a dispassionate objective sense. If you do claim to have such knowledge please tell us what "trotskyist" publication worthy of being called "trotskyist" would print something like:
A liberal democracy needs a party that's in favour of small government, minimal regulation, and the primacy of the private sector and the people need to be able to make a choice between a small government party and a social democratic party. They both reflect strands in the mainstream of the body politic and the polity would be the poorer, and democracy would be ill-served, if the people were denied such a choice.
In what way are those sentiments even remotely "trotskyist" or even "left wing"?
The rest of my highly original post, which is entirely my own work and not cut & pasted from anywhere, is a potted assessment of why I believe the Republicans made it possible for someone like Tammy Baldwin to win the Senate spot over her Republican rival, and what this means for the Republican Party everywhere and I draw these insights from information that's out there on the public record. Are you saying that there is no scope for Republican re-evaluation? If I say the Republicans had become the White Backlash Party I base that on the fact that I've been following politics and world events since I reached adulthood in the latter half of the 1960s. I may well have read the odd Trotskyist tract along the way but so also have I read Edmund Burke. I've read Marx but I've also read Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire and Montesquieu. I have read some of Lenin's stuff - turgid and tendentious to read - but I've also read Winston Churchill whose prose style is a lot more elegant, eloquent and satisfying.
I can assure you there are zero c & p's from any of them!
If I refer to Jim Crow and LBJs desegregation laws it's because I remember that period. If I hark back to Goldwater and Wallace and how they foresaw, as conservative Republicans, the way the Republicans would follow by nearly 10 years then it's because I remember the electoral contest between LBJ and Goldwater in 1964, and the way Nixon harvested all those votes from the South that had hitherto gone to the Democrats before Johnson.
I go into that history because it sheds some light on the Republicans today. Basically they need a new business model (Trotsky would certainly disapprove of that metaphor!) because the old one has passed its use-by date. Even though it has to be said that the old White Backlash model of "God, Guns and No Taxes" has served them well from the late 1960s, through the 70s and 80s, and made them angry enough in the 90s to view Clinton as the Antichrist and to mobilise in a way that gave us the Bush era. "White Backlash" has had a good innings but it doesn't work anymore. If you base your business model on disaffected white redneck anger and that model shrinks then you'll end up irrelevant and gnawing on your own entrails.
The Rpublicans can change. They'd better change! The demographic that they've appealed to is shrinking and they risk losing power bases that they've regarded as their natural territory - like Texas - as the Hispanic proportion of the population (in Texas) grows ever larger. It doesn't help when the Republicans become the anti-immigration party and in the US "anti-immigration" = "anti-Hispanic". You can't abuse and insult these people and then expect them to vote for you.
And for their part the Democrats had better get smart too. They could blow it. Basically they have a natural constituency among blacks, Hispanics and liberal whites. If they mobilise that vote and get them to turn out on election day they'll be the natural party of government for several generations. Their problem is that blacks and Hispanics are the groups that are the least likely to turn out to vote while Republican Bible Belters are easily mobilised in their churches to get out the vote. If the Dems think that all they have to do is sit back and collect the votes of an ever larger demographic of minorities without getting out among them and connecting with them, then they risk remaining the party of white liberals from the north east and the west coast.
PLEASE NOTE:
1) No Trotskyites were consulted in the preparation of this post and I would ask where are the Trotskyites these days? Are there any left? What phone booth?
2) No messengers were shot. I did get interrupted a couple of times by personal phone calls.
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Post by spindrift on Nov 8, 2012 17:40:03 GMT 10
Pim's essay's are informative and academic, something no RW member could match...not even close.
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Post by slartibartfast on Nov 8, 2012 18:40:13 GMT 10
So?? You have to be lesbian to be good??? Best person for the job. |
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