Fraggle Rocker said:
Excuse me, but it was JFK who got us hopelessly entangled in Vietnam, and he was a Democrat.
One way to say it would simply be, "Different time, different world".
We might also point to the Democratic Party pre-'68.
Or mention something about the Cold War.
Not that any of it was bright, but just who is trying to tank nuclear negotiations with Iran, and who said the president can't have a proper AUMF because it didn't start a big enough war?
I just resent the implication that there is no difference. I'm one of many people whose quality of life is better under Democrats than Republicans. Our neighbor suggests there's no difference? I call bullshit. The fact that the Democrats aren't our saviors in suits and ties doesn't mean there's no difference.
I would propose that once upon a time a friend of yours closed up his fist and, for some reason, hit you on the arm. Indeed, it's a common gesture in our American culture. To the other, I propose if someone
hit you with a Buick, you might object if I called these two acts the same thing.
Just sayin'.
I mean, sure, they both "hit" you, but I think we can agree that's a bit too general, and that closer scrutiny will reveal serious differences between the two acts.
In the Evergreen State, we had a nasty issue where two Democrats in the state Senate rolled, and gave a chamber to the Republicans. Now, then, at the same time, we have a situation going on called
McCleary, in which the Legislature is in contempt of court for refusing to properly fund the public schools. Now, we can certainly blame both parties for screwing it up in the first place, but we also have to blame
voters, not only for electing the politicians but for approving and rejecting various funding measures to help do their part to contribute to the billion and a half per year we're shorting our schools just in terms of basic funding.
Before Sens. Tom and Sheldon rolled, the argument between Democrats and Republicans was about
how to make up the shortfall, with all the usual bickering by which Democrats wanted to make up the funding in various ways and Republicans wanted to take food out of hungry people's mouths, and medicine away from the sick, and so on. You know, the usual bullshit they do.
After the Senators rolled, the argument became about whether or not it was worth even trying to make up the shortfall. Why? Because Republicans could, now that they had one chamber.
And that's how our entire legislature ended up in contempt of court.
We still don't understand what was up with rolling in the first place; they waited until
after the election to tell voters, which to me, much like Zell Miller's incredibly dishonest speech at the '04 Republican convention, is emblematic of what it takes for a Democrat to be satisfactory to Republicans.
This idea that it makes no difference? It is a sick surrender.
No, but it indeed WAS a Democrat who created the Taliban on the advice of his supremely incompetent National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Middle East hasn't been the same since then.
Yep. And just whose National Security Strategy calls for starting a new Cold War with Muslims? You know, who's trying to
create a bad situation in which such bad decisions are made?
And, you know, I would suggest deposing a democratically-elected prime minister and installing a puppet regime in an oil-laden Middle Eastern nation that would go on to build the fourth largest army on the planet might well have done one of those bits after which the Middle East hasn't been the same.
In the end, I guess I just don't buy your Cold War comparisons.
Then again―
Democrat who sent armed thugs to Ruby Ridge and Waco, because he didn't want to risk allowing people to live differently from the rest of us.
―it's better than your defense of a child-raping megalomaniac cult leader with a reputation for rolling firefights in the streets of Waco and that wingnut in Idaho.
The thing that gets me about the tinfoil supporters is that in the one case the pretense of innocence just doesn't hold up. With the other, sure, the guy was dangerous, but, yeah, sure, it was also a fuckup. So he got his ass kicked like an unarmed black man. Given the history of voter demand for law and order, and the long time this sort of bullshit has been going on, sure, we can blame both parties if we want in the case of the fuckups that occurred under their watch, but
reality itself indicates that there are glaringly obvious differences between the parties and their implications
today and
looking to the immediate future.
So I don't get why people are so set on this delusion that there is no difference. And when you have to stand up for a megalomaniac child rapist in Texas in order to complain about a Democrat, yeah, you know, it's one of those times when I find myself wondering, "Really?
That is what it takes to believe this shit?"
I've voted off ticket before, and I will again someday.
And maybe the Greens will come up with a candidate, sure.
But this bullshit about the parties being so similar is nothing more than an indictment of voters. In areas of strong overlap, the parties are responding to market demand.
Some of these policies need serious help.
But there are also areas of
vast difference, and those have tremendous impacts both immediate and enduring in questions about our quality of life.
And Brzezinski may have been an idiot as an NSA, and JFK may have eaten the brown Cold War acid, but that is history, and, you know, looking at what is
actually happening now and
about to happen―oh, you know, like a presidential election―just how much do people really want to rely on history to tell us that what we do in the ballot box in our time makes no difference in terms of Democrats and Republicans?
But Texas Republicans want to force women to carry doomed pregnancies regardless of what their doctors say about their health. And those same Republicans want to give cover to state agents who
put insufficiently Christian children in re-education camps, or
abet sexual abusers by forcing children to carry pregnancies.
Tell me there's no difference. I
dare you.
Republicans just turned on their own health care plan, and are now nervous enough to wonder what they're going to do if they successfully kill mandatory private insurance. Tell me there is no difference.
I've got a party in my state that, sure, has any number of chances to screw up their best attempt to fix school funding, and one that would rather not bother trying. Tell me there's no difference.
If I woke up in January, 2017, in a Republcan-controlled state, an outcome that could only occur if you could convince that many voters to vote for the Republicans specifically because it doesn't make any difference ... you know, how many people do you actually think we would harm if we could pull that off in any given Democratic-favoring state?
And the only reason, say, it would make no difference in a state like California is that voters regularly demolish their government's capacity to do anything with that ludicrously permissive initiative process.
And tonight I'm hanging out at my father's, on a rural peninsula in Pierce County, Washington; my stepmother works in Mason County schools. Anybody who tells you it doesn't make a difference should go take a look at the human need in Mason County. Indeed, the only reason it doesn't get as much attention as the plight of urban schools is population density. Fewer people, both to cause trouble or to care about it. It sometimes catches me off guard; living in the Corridor, "rural" is more exurbian than anything else. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it's backwater Appalachia, or anything, but I can promise you, the differences between the parties make all the difference in the world out here.
Oh, right. It isn't Republicans
per se, but, rather, a mix of conservatives and libertarians―in other words, our Republicans, but, you know, whatever―who celebrated their victorious tax rebellion in the '97 general election all night, and then woke up mad at the government for cancelling EMS funding. Hell, all the voters in King County voted against was ... er ... um ... ah ... funding EMS. Can we please have another ballot pleasepleasepleaseplease? It took us until February to get that one fixed, but, yes, they begged nicely, and got the chance to restore EMS funding.
Which is the other thing I need to remind about both the
McCleary mess
and our voters in general. See, we've always had a messed up tax system, but every time we try to fix it, voters pitch a fit. In '96, we had a vote to reduce the cost of license plate fees to a price that couldn't support even the tabs themselves. So we destroyed the MVET, which was the state's primary funding stream, and have never replaced it. Part of the way legislators and voters alike buried the schools was by playing a shell game because nobody will give up services, and nobody will fix the tax code. In the end, departments are increasing their fees; everyone's whining about their tabs again, because I guess it went up a few dollars from last year. And that's how we're getting by. We can blame the government or the parties all we want, but in this state, just like California, or Kansas, we did this to ourselves.
Remember the art of compromise in politics. You know, the way it should be as compared to the way it is. If marketplace consumers repeatedly demand slashed taxes or increased police power, what do the politicians pitch?
And that's a difficult juxtaposition. In such dimensions that the parties are similar, it is because we ask them to be. In such dimensions that they are different, I guess we're expected to pretend they're not.