Gevaudan wrote:Some teabaggers are indeed libertarians committed to reform, and many of these protests were organized by concerned citizens.
Trust me, they're not. They're not concerned citizens -- they're professional instigators -- rebels without a clue with no reason to protest except for the sake of it. We had a budget surplus under Clinton, and under Bush, that surplus turned into a trillion dollar deficit. If they were
really so committed to the cause, they would have taken it up eight years ago. They claim to be protesting the bank bailouts, but they also oppose the proposed laws that would have eliminated the huge bonuses the banks were paying with the bailout money (Brown especially). Mixed messages perhaps?
The Tea Party Express, the people who endorsed Scott Brown by name, if you were curious to know, was established by a GOP consulting firm called
Russo, Marsh & Assoc. in Sacramento. They're not grass roots -- they're AstroTurf. Unemployment is at 10% -- that means there are a lot of angry devout Republicans out there who have nothing better to do than hop on a bus and protest wherever their holy leaders take them.
That's certainly not why I criticize Obama. Racism is an individual bias, and such individuals should be ignored.
I didn't say that
you were racist, or that the reasons were racially motivated. It's instead a product of
economic discrimination. Obama was
born poor, so he was supposed to
stay poor in their book.
I mentioned at another forum that one part of a prevailing "rich person" mentality that is plaguing this nation is the prioritization of personal ego: Bush was willing to launch the country into an eternal (by his design) war in Iraq in order to keep from conceding that there were no WMDs or ties to Al-Qaeda, the bank CEOs were willing to risk economic collapse to keep themselves from conceding that their predatory "infinite interest" loan policies were what would cause it, and the Republican voters were/are all happy to sing along with Bush, Cheney, McCain, Palin and now Brown if that's what it takes to keep them from having to admit that voting for Bush in the first place was a mistake on their part.
I mention that because the psychotic hatred they showed for Obama even before he had won the party nomination is yet another part of that "rich person" mentality: hatred for the self-made. If someone born with
no money or power suddenly acquires it, it's an indirect reminder that people who were born
into money and power (IE: the GOP) are capable of losing it.
Which ties right back into the above-mentioned aspect of that mentality: When presented with the truth, instead of accepting it, they have someone else to tell them a
different "truth" that is more to their liking and become outraged at any indications of the truth they are trying to ignore.
Obama's race does have something to do with it, but the reason the GOP wants to bring him down as hard as possible is the result of economic discrimination; poor kids aren't
allowed to grow up to think they can one day be president. The rich are supposed to stay rich and the poor are supposed to stay poor.
Everything the GOP has ever opposed within the last century (minimum wage, medicare, desegregation, abortion, gay marriage, clean energy, the stimulus, health care reform), in one way or another, all tie directly into this cause: to make the haves have more and the have-nots have less. It's got very little to do with race, but if they could write a law that would send all black Americans (all 36.5 million of them, about 12% of the population) back below the poverty line and stay there, they would. It wouldn't be a product of racial discrimination; it would be about making sure there are thirty-something million fewer people that might one day have more money or more power than their elitist inbred offspring will.
Terastas wrote:Criticism alone doesn't solve problems. If there's going to be disagreement, then for God's sake, at least let it be over possible solutions being presented, and not personal gripes.
Weren't you the one that said "I don't care. They're all liars and crooks?"
So what's your solution? You've already declared that both parties suck, have always sucked and will continue to suck no matter what (because they can't be reformed internally, as Obama had done to the Democrats) and that all third parties are a waste of time (because we've had the same two parties for 200+ years: the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans). So, what, pray tell, is your brilliant alternative that you think will produce actual reform?
You got a lot of nerve lecturing
me about how "criticism alone doesn't solve problems" when the entire post I was responding to was nothing but criticism with no solutions. You just said "they're all liars and crooks," and now you're telling me that you're waiting for
one of them to lead the way to actual reform? Well if they really
were all liars and crooks, they won't, so why would you just sit there moping about it while you wait for one of them?
And no offense Gevaudan, but this is the part of your post that pissed me off the most of all:
So, in politics, absolutely no one can get pissed off at the current situation or the system itself, because if they do they're simply pathetic creatures to ignore. Do I understand that correctly?
Is that what I said? If I thought it was wrong to be pissed off at the current situation, would I have said
anything during those eight years under Bush? Would I have made a reputation for myself as the Pack's most outspoken uber-progressive (even calling myself "a commie bastard and proud of it" from time to time) if I believed that getting pissed at the system was wrong no matter what the system was like?
Absolutely not. "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" and all that.
I'm only opposed to criticism in two forms:
Baseless criticism (dissent just for the sake of it) like that being directed against Obama by the GOP and their AstroTurf protests, and
purposeless criticism like the emo-angst dribble that your second to last post in this topic absolutely reeked of.
I don't like the system either, but don't tell me it sucks if you can't think of a single way in which it could be better (and "get a real leader" or "make the parties get along" doesn't count as one). If you are discontent with the system because you see a problem and believe you know how to correct it: More power to you. But if you believe the system is rotten from top to bottom
because all systems are rotten from top to bottom and refuse to believe that any action of any kind would be anything but futile: That's your fate and I leave you to it.