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ORIGINAL: joether
I'm annoyed my President spends so much time trying to be bi-partisan towards a group that hates anything and everything about America!

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The sad thing is....I dont even expect a real answer out of any of you. You'll either A) Ignore what I've written or B) Attack it with total venom. Either way, you prove the guy correct.

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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

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ORIGINAL: Sanity


Whatever happened o your teary eyed goodbye to all of us

http://www.collarchat.com/fb.asp?m=3831139

We already have the party planned and everything

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers

Yes, great essay. The rightwingers won't read it. That's because they can't shoot the messenger...he's a GOP career operative. Can't go after the website, so they are fucked.

It isn't like there aren't millions who know this and have known this but the problem is the mass media are cowards and scared for their sacred 4th estate empire and the profits that keep coming in. They will never spread 'this word.'

It all fits Lincoln's dire warning about the corporation, banking...what he called, the money centers. Adapting: 'They will have your children grow up bankrupt in the country their fathers founded.'

Fitting that a hypocrite would show up in a thread about an article written by a hypocrite. (And btw, TheHeretic...POTY. I no longer have the patience to deal with articles written by the Democrat equivalent of the Sufi's point by point, they are deaf to them anyway, as KenDoll's response shows. Kudos.)

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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
He starts with the fight over the debt ceiling, and finds it scandalous that the Congress has done this 87 times since WWII, without a ripple, but this time it was an issue.  Just how deep in the bowels of the system must he have been to see 63 seats change hands, yet have no understanding that the crazy spending and debt was a key element driving that wave? 

You missed his biggest point about this, which is crucial to your failure to understand what is so deeply wrong with your party.

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Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.

Of course it is what is RIGHT about today's GOP, not wrong. And he either obfuscates or doesnt understand the "billionaire hedge fund manager" taxation debate. Which it is becomes pretty obvious when he uses that descriptor.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

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ORIGINAL: joether
I'm annoyed my President spends so much time trying to be bi-partisan towards a group that hates anything and everything about America!

Speaking of the tactics of demonization... Jesus.  You should have thrown in a racism charge for the trifecta.

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The sad thing is....I dont even expect a real answer out of any of you. You'll either A) Ignore what I've written or B) Attack it with total venom. Either way, you prove the guy correct.

You forget, C), Jo;  simple mockery of your partisan blindness, followed by dismissing you, as casually as he dismisses less government intrusion into the lives of the citizenry as a central piece of Republican thought.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Assuming the bit you quoted reflects the "big point" you say I missed, Ken, I certainly did address the taxation issue, when I looked at his contention about Republicans being the party of the rich.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Assuming the bit you quoted reflects the "big point" you say I missed, Ken, I certainly did address the taxation issue, when I looked at his contention about Republicans being the party of the rich.

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
He spent an entire career as a repub operative for likely damn near his 30 years.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
Anybody care to address my challenges to his positions, or the questions I raised about the intellectual honesty of his piece, or do you all want to play this like I'm only trying to kill the messenger?

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
You claimed that the last election was about the debt and deficit but when Obama functionally gave your side everything they asked for and simply wanted to get rid of a couple of loopholes that only benefit a very few people in return the deal was off the table. Why?

Which was more important 3 trillion in spending cuts or protecting a few Wall Streeters?

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
I did and you handwaved the response.

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
You are truly grasping at straws. I see no reference at all to race...except yours.

Partisan blindness ? Yet another 'blind' attempt to denigrate and wholly without foundation.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
You claimed that the last election was about the debt and deficit but when Obama functionally gave your side everything they asked for and simply wanted to get rid of a couple of loopholes that only benefit a very few people in return the deal was off the table. Why?

Which was more important 3 trillion in spending cuts or protecting a few Wall Streeters?

You are presenting spin and press release manure about proposals and counter-proposals that never saw the light of day, as being a factual basis for your question, Ken.  As one of our high-level professional staffers put it, we don't calculate from speeches.  I called the spending a key element, Ken.  I certainly didn't say that was all it was about, as you seem to be assuming.

I'll refer you, yet again, to my earlier comments about how the parties relate to the rich.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
Cantor walked out of the meeting rather than even negotiating on the proposal.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8595729/Republicans-walk-out-of-US-budget-talks-over-taxes.html

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
He spent an entire career as a repub operative for likely damn near his 30 years.

28 years, Ken, and his bio on the piece says, he served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees. 

Calling him a Republican operative is a bit misleading.  Campaign and personal staff are the operatives.  He's probably either a disillusioned wonk, or just some assistant who managed to stay in the building when his old boss got beat.

Anybody care to address my challenges to his positions, or the questions I raised about the intellectual honesty of his piece, or do you all want to play this like I'm only trying to kill the messenger?

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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers

he's a GOP career operative.

ROFL So he was a career hypocrite, not at all unusual for libtards.

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
It is almost all just your opinion, denigration of who what was a dedicated conservative career operative in his prime like other professional at that stage, oh...but only until now that he comes with a truth you don't like.

The country was in fact held hostage over the debt limit, Obamacare and Reaganomics are not even close as both Reagan's budget director and Bush I called it voodoo economics. Reaganomics was being kind. Only 250,000 votes changed the congress which bodes well for the dems and Obama come 2012.

The rest is just more opinion and offers no foundation for your sudden disregard for this 'tired old' I guess senile bureaucrat, that until just his very recent retirement...was just a great conservative patriot.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Those familiar with my posts, and the views I express here will already know of my thoughts regarding the "lifer" public employee class, how the mentality becomes institutionalized, the status quo becomes the one true way, and the methodology becomes more important than the mission ("You can't do anything, until you've had an approval on the 27b\6").  We wind up with deadwood, anchoring a chair, punching the clock for paycheck and pension, having long ago lost any perspective on just who it is they work for. 

For all his philosophical outrage, the author does eventually tell the truth about why he really took his retirement, and presumably why he has written this in the style he has chosen (see my earlier post in the thread).  While he may have worked in the GOP division of the paperwork production offices of Capitol Hill, I don't see much conservatism in the framing of his views, either

While I certainly agree with Mr. Lofgren on the incompetence of the Democrats, there are a few things I think are worth questioning, and disagreeing with.

He starts with the fight over the debt ceiling, and finds it scandalous that the Congress has done this 87 times since WWII, without a ripple, but this time it was an issue.  Just how deep in the bowels of the system must he have been to see 63 seats change hands, yet have no understanding that the crazy spending and debt was a key element driving that wave? 

He laments how "Obamacare," has become a pejorative term to attack an unpopular policy, and uses that as an example of the awful tactics the Republicans use to demonize the opposition.  Given that he is budget guy, whose career would have started during Reagan's first term, why is his criticism not tempered by how the Democrats used "Reaganomics" in precisely the same way, and continue doing so to this day?

He claims there are only three real planks of Republicans, and that the rest is just window dressing.

First, that the Republicans care only about the interests of the rich.  No.  If we want to view things that way, we would have to say that the Repubs care only about the interests of the working rich, the ones still out there producing, building and manufacting, while the Dems only look at the cares and hobbies of the old money and idle rich, the limousine liberals, who step over the homeless man, and quiet the guilt by thinking, "there ought to be a government program."  Yes, the horror of Republicans wanting the tax rates low for everyone, while the Democrats prefer the loophole, the subsidy, the bailout, the waiver, and the bad half-billion dollar loan, only to those they deem worthy.

He claims the second true plank is national defense, and laments the cronyism, corruption and waste.  I can go along with that.  Again though, in his description of Republicans as crazy hawks, he neglects to note the Mars worship of an administration which contends that assassination and war by remote control is an exclusive prerogative of the President. 

I think my biggest disagreement with him is when he places the religion thing as a "true article" of Repub belief.  That is the centerpiece of the meaningless window dressing, and the record tells the tale.  However strong a lure it might be for the theocratically minded voters, the courts aren't going to let God's flag fly.  Republicans have been in the White House, in part by reaching out to those voters, for 20 of the last 30 years and the abortion fight centers around the most repulsive late-term procedures, and what we do with the leftover bits.  In that time, we have progressed from Texas locking people up for sodomy, to being snotty about gay divorce.  I don't especially care for the fundie wing of the party (and I make them nervous ) but it is easy to comfort myself by whispering at them, under my breath, "suckers."

An interesting read, Ken, but nothing mandatory here.  He did a nice job of catching all the Dem talking points of the day, as he tries to move from the bureaucratic class, to the chattering class.