When did the GOP lose touch with Reality?

[Silcc69]

Why was Palin on that quiz? She isn't running for the nominee.

[Ben]

Why was Palin on that quiz? She isn't running for the nominee.

A quiz to match you to your perfect sweetheart GOP presidential candidate:

http://reason.com/quiz/GOP2011/match

Good question.
I don't like either Party. But I was surprised when my "candidate" came up: Gary Johnson....
I mean, how many debates has he been excluded from anyway?
And:
Huntsman seems pretty sensible, pretty rational. Plus he believes in science. I'm surprised they haven't thrown him out of the Party -- ha ha!
And, too, I'm surprised they haven't thrown Paul off the stage for his sensible and rational foreign policy positions. And, too, fiscally conservative positions when it comes to military expenditures. I mean, we're off the charts when it comes to military spending. I mean, as Paul points out, why do we have troops in Germany and Japan?

[Ben]

Paul Craig Roberts has a different take on it. He thinks, aside from Ron Paul, they're all idiots and dangerous....



And Ron Paul:

[Ben]

Ol' Newton can't decide whether or not he believes in (the science of) global warming. But, then again, politicians position themselves where they think it best suits their own interests:

Then:



And NOW:

[Ben]

In G.O.P. Field, Broad View of Presidential Power Prevails:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us...r.html?_r=3&hp

[onmyknees]

Good question.
I don't like either Party. But I was surprised when my "candidate" came up: Gary Johnson....
I mean, how many debates has he been excluded from anyway?
And:
Huntsman seems pretty sensible, pretty rational. Plus he believes in science. I'm surprised they haven't thrown him out of the Party -- ha ha!
And, too, I'm surprised they haven't thrown Paul off the stage for his sensible and rational foreign policy positions. And, too, fiscally conservative positions when it comes to military expenditures. I mean, we're off the charts when it comes to military spending. I mean, as Paul points out, why do we have troops in Germany and Japan?

Ben....Thanks or your support of Huntsman, and the increasingly irrational, Ron Paul but we'll chose our nominee, and it won't be either of these two. I liked Ron Paul....I think he has some very salient points about the Fed and The Dollar, and the Debt, but as time goes on he's exposed himself as a bit of an unelectable loon, and he's widely seen as anti Isreal. I can't get in his head, so I can't be sure that's accurate....but some of his statements are certainly eye opening. His thoughts on 911 are puzzling to put it mildly. While I'm more than willing to vote for an unconventional candidate, he's not the one. Any candidate that compares the Gaza with The Concentration Camps will not be the Republican nominee..


While I agree Ron Paul is an important and refreshing Republican/Libratarian voice on domestic policy....interviews like this leave one to wonder what goes on inside his head

[robertlouis]

I'm reproducing this article from last Tuesday's Guardian by the American commentator Glenn Greenwald without further comment other than that it posits an interesting and credible thesis for the undignified rush to the far right of most of the Republican candidates - his conclusion is that they don't have much choice.

Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles

By Glenn Greenwald





American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".

Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).

How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?

But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.

It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

[Ben]

I'm reproducing this article from last Tuesday's Guardian by the American commentator Glenn Greenwald without further comment other than that it posits an interesting and credible thesis for the undignified rush to the far right of most of the Republican candidates - his conclusion is that they don't have much choice.

Hey Robert,
Here's another interesting article by Greenwald. Which I read over the weekend.
He writes about, in part, how can liberals actually support Obama. I mean, look at his foreign policy record.
It's, in many ways, more extreme than Bush. I mean, the Bush administration kidnapped suspects. Whereas Obama simply assassinates them.
Greenwald also writes about the rapid rise in drone attacks. Again, how can liberals support this? (He also writes about Paul. There are a lot of positives about Paul. As Greenwald points out. But that DOES NOT mean to say he supports him or his candidacy. There's also a lot to revile about Paul.)

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/prog...ies/singleton/

[Ben]

Ben....Thanks or your support of Huntsman, and the increasingly irrational, Ron Paul but we'll chose our nominee, and it won't be either of these two. I liked Ron Paul....I think he has some very salient points about the Fed and The Dollar, and the Debt, but as time goes on he's exposed himself as a bit of an unelectable loon, and he's widely seen as anti Isreal. I can't get in his head, so I can't be sure that's accurate....but some of his statements are certainly eye opening. His thoughts on 911 are puzzling to put it mildly. While I'm more than willing to vote for an unconventional candidate, he's not the one. Any candidate that compares the Gaza with The Concentration Camps will not be the Republican nominee..

I don't support Huntsman. And: I've always said I like Paul on certain positions. But now he's being thrust into the media spotlight. And they're exposing him. Whether or not what they say is true or not, well, I don't know. Is he a racist? Is he homophobic? If he is then of course that would utterly change my opinion of him.
But what Paul is doing is interesting. He's actually showing that the Dems and Republicans are exactly the same when it comes to foreign policy. And his foreign policy positions should be the Dems foreign policy positions. I mean, so the American people actually have a choice. Now, of course, they don't.
I mean, in a lot of ways Obama is more extreme on foreign policy than Bush. Obama is more extreme on civil liberties. Obama is more extreme when it comes to cracking down on whistleblowers.
So the differences between the so-called political parties are pretty slight. Yep! The differences are pretty slight. The Republican Party are actually ceasing to be a political party. They simply serve the super rich. Ain't even the rich anymore. It's the super rich. And the Dems are rapidly moving in the same direction. (I mean, the Democratic Party used to serve middle class and working class Americans. They're rapidly abandoning that.)
And God knows what's happened to the party of Theodore Roosevelt (who was a conservative) and Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower is surely spinning in his grave when he looks at this so-called Republican Party.

[onmyknees]

I'm reproducing this article from last Tuesday's Guardian by the American commentator Glenn Greenwald without further comment other than that it posits an interesting and credible thesis for the undignified rush to the far right of most of the Republican candidates - his conclusion is that they don't have much choice.

Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles

By Glenn Greenwald





American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".

Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).

How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?

But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.

It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

Wow....Glen Greenwald....never heard of him. How about you Ben ?

Appearently he's become the liberal go to guy. Who Knew?