Sarah Palin is RIGHT about "Crony Capitalism." Well... okay, that might be going a little too far. EDIT: Whoever on Sarah Palin's not-a-campaign staff got the memo requesting something that could be seen as a swipe at both Obama and the current GOP frontrunners, came up with "Crony Capitalism" and taught her to sound it out phonetically is RIGHT about "Crony Capitalism."
If a given industry is directly contributing to making my water less-drinkable and my air less-breathable, it is difficult for me to care how many people it employs. I'm as sensitive to the plight of the jobless and potentially-jobless as I can be, but the fact is that, however burdensome it may be for the good men and women of the Sludge Dumpers Local 140 to retrain in some other field, said retraining is at least largely possible. Me "retraining" my lungs to breath soot and smog? Significanly LESS than possible.
The reason so-called "conservatives" consistently have a fighting-edge over so-called "liberals" in American politics is that the emotional "default mode" of modern conservatives is HATE, while the default mode for modern liberals is FEAR. And while these are both negative emotions, hate is at least an emboldening emotion, while fear tends to produce cowardice. (This particular nugget courtesy John Lukacs)
President Obama's fatal flaw is NOT that he is willing to compromise, but that he views "compromise" or "the middle" as GOALS in and of themselves as opposed to something you temporarily settle for on the road to wearing your enemy down.
I do not object to people and things that stand in the way of social/intellectual progress - they are, after all, only adhering to their basic nature. My objection is to the all-too-frequent unwillingness of social/intellectual progress to simply shove past them.
It is perfectly reasonable for anti-abortion crusaders to promote their agenda via the calculus that a given fetus has the potential to become the next Einstein, Ghandi or Mother Theresa... providing, of course, that they allow for the equally-valid calculus that it could just as easily be the next Hitler, Stalin or Osama bin Laden. Likewise, laws requiring women seeking abortions to view an ultrasound first should ONLY per permissable if said viewing is followed by forced-listening to an audio track of a roomful of screaming brats - you know, "both sides" and all that...
Suggesting that the world would be much better off with a significantly smaller human population and significantly-reduced human population-growth is NOT some horrible statement in support of "population control" or "Eugenics." It doesn't become that UNTIL you start talking about how to accomplish it by sinister and/or unethical force - prior to that, it is merely a statement of fact obvious to anyone who has to commute to work.
Given that, in retrospect, he was amenable to enivormental and social-justice causes, a supporter of a social safety-net, globally-minded and a domestic-policy pragmatist in addition to being a ruthless political street-fighter willing to grind his opponents' bones into powder to accomplish his ends... I would gladly vote for Richard Nixon's cyborg-retrofitted head a'la Futurama were he/it running today.
The notion that both political "sides" in America are equally "bad" is a fallacy that does nothing to help anyone. The problem with Democrats is that they spend too much money and lack mangerial fortitude. The problem with Republicans is that they want to burn down the planet to make their Invisible Friend happy - these are NOT comparable flaws.
"Evolution" versus "
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