Can we just agree now that the GOP field is full of crazies?? (WARNING: POLITICAL)

GRR Spartan wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:

Republicans want to divide on class and race?   You have to be fucking kidding me.

No he isn't. If you don't believe folks take a look at the link. The GOP has created a political dynamic where many of their state house and state senate districts along Congressional districts demographics are so safe for the GOP any threat to an incumbent is from another Republican in a primary.

After the '64 elections the GOP was in a hole. Nixon realized he needed to change the Electoral College political map paradigm. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened the door. He went about it by changing "The Solid South" the Democrats had since the Civil War by beginning to flip Bourbon Democrats who were Democrats because they couldn't stomach being part of The Party of Lincoln for 100 years. It worked, Nixon won in '68 and '72. It's called Nixon's Southern Strategy.

After winning the nomination in '80, Reagan's first speech as the GOP candidate was at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi where he kicked off his "States Rights" agenda. A continuation of Nixon's Southern Strategy. In the Reagan years the GOP also began to line itself up with the Evangelical Movement and Roman Catholics who opposed abortion. It's basically a different tact of the Southern Strategy on a national scale and now abortion is part of the litmus test for any GOP candidate. Sarah Palin used aborion when she was running and winning her first political election although that office had nothing to do and she kept using it as she won the Alaskan governor's race.

When a party has chosen race (Southern Strategy) and abortion for over 6 election cycles you get a lot of candidates because they have rarely lost an election by being too extreme.

http://www.census.gov/mycd/#

GRR Spartan wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:

Republicans want to divide on class and race?   You have to be fucking kidding me.

No he isn't.  If you don't believe folks take a look at the link.  The GOP has created a political dynamic where many of their state house and state senate districts along Congressional districts demographics are so safe for the GOP any threat to an incumbent is from another Republican in a primary.

After the '64 elections the GOP was in a hole.  Nixon realized he needed to change the Electoral College political map paradigm.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened the door.  He went about it by changing "The Solid South" the Democrats had since the Civil War by beginning to flip Bourbon Democrats who were Democrats because they couldn't stomach being part of The Party of Lincoln for 100 years.  It worked, Nixon won in '68 and '72.  It's called Nixon's Southern Strategy.

After winning the nomination in '80, Reagan's first speech as the GOP candidate was at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi where he kicked off his "States Rights" agenda.  A continuation of Nixon's Southern Strategy.  In the Reagan years the GOP also began to line itself up with the Evangelical Movement and Roman Catholics who opposed abortion.  It's basically a different tact of the Southern Strategy on a national scale  and now abortion is part of the litmus test for any GOP candidate.  Sarah Palin used aborion when she was running and winning her first political election although that  office had nothing to do and she  kept using it as she won the Alaskan governor's race.

When a party has chosen race (Southern Strategy) and abortion for over 6 election cycles you get a lot of candidates because they have rarely lost an election by being too extreme.

http://www.census.gov/mycd/#

The Myth of ‘the Southern Strategy’

Everyone knows that race has long played a decisive role in Southern electoral politics. From the end of Reconstruction until the beginning of the civil rights era, the story goes, the national Democratic Party made room for segregationist members — and as a result dominated the South. But in the 50s and 60s, Democrats embraced the civil rights movement, costing them the white Southern vote. Meanwhile, the Republican Party successfully wooed disaffected white racists with a “Southern strategy” that championed “states’ rights.”
It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)

Liberals will never tire of calling conservatives racist, because it’s always a show-stopper, a way of cutting off further debate on any issue where a liberal is likely to lose.  So don’t expect it to go away any time soon.  (Though why Republicans aren’t better at “punching back twice as hard,” e.g., by pointing out the permanent racist legacy of the Democratic Party, noting the vote tally for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, etc., is beyond me.  Another example of Republican rhetorical incompetence.)
Gerard Alexander began a thorough debunking of this theme in the Claremont Review of Books several years ago (“The Myth of the Racist Republicans“), and Sean Trende continues the job with a fine column today on RealClearPolitics, “Southern Whites’ Shift to GOP Predates the ’60s.”  It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a few highlights:
In truth, the white South began breaking away from the Democrats in the 1920s, as population centers began to develop in what was being called the “New South” . . .
But the big breakthrough, to the extent that there was one, came in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower won 48 percent of the vote there, compared to Adlai Stevenson’s 52 percent. He carried most of the “peripheral South” — Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida — and made inroads in the “Deep South,” almost carrying South Carolina and losing North Carolina and Louisiana by single digits.

History Lesson: Racist Democrats and the Big Lie

In order to escape their truly wretched past (click on the link for my short book on the subject), modern Democrats have adopted as an article of faith the bedtime story that, thanks to Tricky Dick Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the racists who had been the backbone of their party for the better part of a century suddenly switched to the GOP en masse some time around 1968, with the happy result that now all the racists are on the right. Presto — instant virtuousness and a clean slate!
It’s a lie, of course. But don’t take it from me, take it from my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson, who addressed this issue brilliantly last year:

Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. 

As Kevin goes on to point out:

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.

And yet this myth persists — in fact, it’s just about the only response today’s Democrats have to their own sordid history: pinning it on the other guy. It makes them profoundly uncomfortable that among the 21 who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be found Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., the founder of the Hillbilly Dynasty; Robert “KKK” Byrd, the Conscience of the Senate; and Sleepin’ Sam Ervin of Watergate fame.

AnomanderRake wrote:Cool story Goose. Who gives a shit what the parties did 50 years ago? Republicans used to stand for a lot of things that they no longer do and the same goes for Democrats.

AnomanderRake wrote:Lol Robert you jest but some of the things people say really are crazy. A republican talking about what the party used to represent is like Walverines talking about the glory days.

Republicans like to tout Reagan as their lord and savior, but the fact is that Reagan would be considered a moderate today and modern republicans would brand him a socialist/communist for some of his policies.

AnomanderRake wrote:Cool story Goose. Who gives a shit what the parties did 50 years ago? Republicans used to stand for a lot of things that they no longer do and the same goes for Democrats.

AnomanderRake wrote:Republicans like to tout Reagan as their lord and savior, but the fact is that Reagan would be considered a moderate today and modern republicans would brand him a socialist/communist for some of his policies.

Robert J Sakimano wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:
Hell yes, infinitely better - that grinding sound of 3,000 abortions a day isn't hate - that's the sound of Love Democrat Style.

BobS and the Dems want to talk on and on about 30 deaths involving guns a day whilst ignoring the ongoing baby massacre enabled by their party.

meh - a lot of them are black babies that'll just end up killing white people eventually.. or living off the government while voting for socialist muslims from Kenya. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Probably a good thing.

LooseGoose wrote:

AnomanderRake wrote:Cool story Goose. Who gives a shit what the parties did 50 years ago? Republicans used to stand for a lot of things that they no longer do and the same goes for Democrats.

Agreed, JFK would be run out of the Democrat party of today on a rail.

AnomanderRake wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:
Agreed, JFK would be run out of the Democrat party of today on a rail.

Yes he would. I have nothing but disdain for the modern republican and democratic parties. My views are much more progressive than either party would ever allow.

I realize that corporate influence over elections and news is hindering our ability as a nation to make well informed decisions regarding our political leadership. Even if we did provide a fair and transparent political environment, I know the average American still wouldn't care enough to be well informed, and that is the saddest realization of all.

LooseGoose wrote:

AnomanderRake wrote:Republicans like to tout Reagan as their lord and savior, but the fact is that Reagan would be considered a moderate today and modern republicans would brand him a socialist/communist for some of his policies.

Another pile of bullshit people are peddling these days.   That wild eyed conservative Nate Silver has debunked the "Reagan is a Moderate" myth.

Brock Middlebrook wrote:

Robert J Sakimano wrote:
meh - a lot of them are black babies that'll just end up killing white people eventually.. or living off the government while voting for socialist muslims from Kenya. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Probably a good thing.

Though I disagree with your politics, that was

Robert J Sakimano wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:
Hell yes, infinitely better - that grinding sound of 3,000 abortions a day isn't hate - that's the sound of Love Democrat Style.

BobS and the Dems want to talk on and on about 30 deaths involving guns a day whilst ignoring the ongoing baby massacre enabled by their party.

meh - a lot of them are black babies that'll just end up killing white people eventually.. or living off the government

AnomanderRake wrote:I am pro abortion, it limits population growth and prevents poverty. Babies born into households that don't want them and can't support them are a burden to society. We're not all precious little snowflakes made by god, we're animals.

Here's an idea: You should have to apply for a license to have children. Pass a physical and mental health exam, and an income threshold. No license? Cool we're taking your baby and putting them in a secret military training program to become elite soldiers of the future.

Maybe I read The Giver too many times as a kid...

Duke Silver wrote:

Robert J Sakimano wrote:
meh - a lot of them are black babies that'll just end up killing white people eventually.. or living off the government

The sad thing is that many in the pro "choice" movement feel this way.

Robert J Sakimano wrote:to illustrate Trump's actual popularity, even Bernie Sanders beats him in a head-to-head match up per CNN poll -

Sanders Would Beat Donald Trump

The_Dude wrote:

Robert J Sakimano wrote:to illustrate Trump's actual popularity, even Bernie Sanders beats him in a head-to-head match up per CNN poll -

Sanders Would Beat Donald Trump

I dont think anyone that really knows whats going on thinks Trump will win the GOP nomination. Leading this early means nothing.