kcdodd wrote:Oh, you mean GW?"Spoiled child of rich parents who never worked at a physically hard job, and now makes their living playing make believe characters in a pretend world as an actor, but still feels the need to lecture others about how to deal with matters involving the real world."
You are probably closer to right than you know. George W is not the most obvious example of what I referred to above, but he is not that far from it. Both him and his father George H.W. Bush were the spoiled kids of rich parents, and perhaps that is the reason for their foolish behavior while they were President. George H.W not only didn't understand who his political enemies were, he wasn't even aware he was in a war! *
The same could be said of GW, but to a lesser extent. GW did some things right, but there were some very important things that he did absolutely wrong! One of them was the abdication of conservative principals regarding fiscal sanity.
kcdodd wrote: My point is you don't use labels for convenience. What you do, in the case of opposition, is make a label, define it in a negative context, and then apply it to the person you disagree with. You also tend to define it using evidence which can, in general, also be applied to people you claim to agree with.
The very definition of the Straw man argument, with a little side order of Tu quoque.
I don't think i'm criticizing a caricature and then claiming my beaten up straw man is what liberals are actually like, I'm pointing out that the various constituency groups which makes up the "Liberal" side of the political environment really are so silly that you cannot caricature them sufficiently enough! Likewise that they are fools, and every time the nation gives them a chance to govern, they imperil us all. I would further point out that this state of affairs was only made possible by the erosion of the original requirements for voting. I.E. Taxpaying landowners.
Now that we have a system which allows people on welfare to share their obvious great wisdom with everyone through the ballot box, we elect an unending series of idiots who bribe other aforementioned idiots with the money created by the productive members of society.
Yeah, this is gonna end well.
Consider for a moment that Governor "Moonbeam" is running in California again.
* Had George HW Bush NOT broken his "Read My Lips" promise by trying to reason in good faith with the Democrat Leadership (who absolutely insisted that it was simply impossible for the country to continue without another tax increase) he would have been able to bring up the "Character" issue against Bill Clinton. Clinton had already been caught in a whole series of lies (I didn't inhale, I didn't dodge the draft, I didn't protest America while in England, etc... ) but George HW Bush could not point out that Clinton was a habitual liar, because George HW Bush had already made the most public and outrageous lie that any politician could have made, and the Democrats were shoving that lie down his throat throughout the entire election.
That lie, cost George HW Bush the election of 1992. Upon that lie, hinged the Waco disaster, the OkC federal building, Osama Bin Laden, Supreme court judges, the expansion of the CRA and forced loans (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) which turned out to be the Housing economic bubble, the twin towers, the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the prevention of interfering with Iran which is a far worse threat, and possibly the virtual collapse of the American (and world) economic system.
It is my opinion that a person grounded in reality would never have broke his word about such an important issue. It had consequences, and they were dire.