I'm still struggling to understand the derangement of the average American.
I understand there's big money and power involved in politics, but the everyday voter doesn't get a piece of that. What are they getting out of this besides a red-colored banner to cheer for?
You can't tell if someone is a Republican or a Democrat by their appearance or how they live. We do the same things everyday, we pay our taxes, go to work, complain about our jobs, etc. Other than how we vote and who we donate campaign money to, we're identical.
Being American means that, at the end of the campaign season, we set aside our political differences and go back to being ordinary citizens. Even if we think the President is a buffoon. We even offer our support when it's time to go to war. Hence Bush's massive approval ratings after 9/11; not because of anything he did. Because we stand united, when someone comes into our house and kills our own people. Our brothers and sisters, our family. Republican and Democrat alike. The Islamic extremist nutholes don't care how we vote.
The anti-Bush sentiment got heated precisely because the reasons for going to war (in Iraq) were largely fabricated. We lost a whole lot of lives, more than we lost on 9/11, and we lost them unnecessarily. We were lied to, deliberately, by our own elected government.
That wasn't partisan. That was based on not even incompetence, but actually un-American behavior by our own President and his administration. He killed our own troops for reasons that were questionable, sold to us as lies. And the Democrats stood right there and supported him throughout all of it, because they're not purely partisan. They're just stupid.
That's how you get legitimate anti-President sentiment. Think Nixon: He became massively more unpopular because of stuff he did, not because of his name or his background or his political party.
From whence comes the Obama hatred?
Since it began before he even took his oath of office, we can naturally assume it has nothing to do with his actual record as President. Since Republicans began systematic obstruction, filibustering, delaying approval of appointments of non-political positions in government, and continued lying about what the President wanted to accomplish in office after the campaign season was over, I conclude that the reasons are ad hominem. They have nothing to do with Obama's policies or political party. It's somehow personal.
How has the country changed, in any substantive way, since Obama took over?
Economic recovery has been slow, as every economist predicted. There was no quick fix. McCain wouldn't have pulled magic out of his butt. And the economy became the way it is due to removal of basic oversights in government, which would of course be "free market" conservative drivel proven drastically wrong, as it always is. Not government over-regulation, as the Republicans keep harping on, completely disconnected from all sense of reality, cause or effect.
Is Gitmo closed? No.
Troops on the ground in Afghanistan? Yes.
Tax rate essentially the same? Yup. Tax breaks keep getting extended. Doesn't match the conservative rhetoric that Obama will raise everyone's taxes sky-high. Wake me when we get back up to Clintonian levels.
Legal rights? The protections for businesses and a much more liberal definition of personhood has actually made businesses stronger, both politically and legally, than ever before. Hardly a communist wasteland where no one wants to operate a business.
What has Obama done? What has he changed, that so enraged the sane people on the right?
Answer: Absolutely nothing. It's the same country with almost all the same policies put in place. The healthcare legislation was passed without Republican help, but with well more Republican input than they deserved. Repeal and replace is a fantasy, it won't happen, because the Republicans have agreed to replace it with nothing.
Obama is a Muslim socialist commie-Nazi because he's not white and Republican. Near as I can tell, that's the entire reason he's "worse than Jimmy Carter".
In reality, he's a compromising centrist who has done enough to tick off liberals, and continue Bush's policies in many cases, that the Republicans should be championing him as their hero of compromise.
It's hysterical. He's literally about as conservative as Reagan, but the Republicans have gone so far off the deep end, that they cannot tell where anything lies on the political compass, they just assume it is to the left of them. The extreme left, mind you. Nothing they say has any connection to anything that could be construed as reality, and more and more, people are proudly flouting how insanely far to the right they are, as if it's some kind of accomplishment, or as if it were a reasonable position to take, or as if wingnut insanity was the solution to bring the country together or move it forward.
This is an era where irrational hatred and blind partisan extremism is seen as something courageous, and all it does is tear the country into pieces.
These are the shameful idiots, the moral cowards, the parasites who live off of the very same government they condemn, the real traitors. They attack everything that represents America- a land united in brotherhood not because everyone lives in the same state with the same politics, with the same ethnic background, but because this is a place where none of those things should matter, and we're united in spite of it, our differences.
Being Republican isn't a crime, but being Republican first over being American should be recognized as despicable, because it is. That's what this group of Republicans represents. Blind, shameful, aggressively ignorant partisanship. And unlike the shrill, panic-stricken voices of the Tea Party wackos, I can point to an actual change. They weren't always like this. Politics was not always such a railroad. There used to be some nuance in the Republican platform, whether I agreed or disagreed with it.
Right now it represents nothing but shameful cowardice. And to those of you who will be voting not for Romney, but against Obama, I think I can safely write you all off as political cheerleaders without a thought in your heads at this point. What does Romney actually represent that's different from the last 4, 12, 20 years? What consistent viewpoint has he ever held? Remember, he used to disagree with most of what he's currently saying.
Nothing. But he's saying Obama is wrong for America, so I guess that's a political platform according to some people. I would congratulate these people on how far they've gotten with base, pointless, mindless hatred, but I note the division among the Christian conservatives who think Romney isn't a Christian. It just goes to show you how dumb people get when they're playing the dumb politics game. Eventually it becomes so divisive, that it eats itself. There's a shameful part of me that hopes that is exactly the kind of thing that causes Romney to lose- mindless bigotry. What more fitting end to a movement based on divisiveness and ignorance, than to be devoured by it's own stupidity.
