Therefore, your lack of debate....just as I said......
You need a few lessons from TCLibby, his comments are as stupid as yours, but at least he has some original and funny retorts.....
Excuse me...but you wrote, "Ah...what the hell....
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor assured his constituents on Wednesday that Congress "will find the monies" to assist earthquake victims in Mineral, Virginia - but the Republican lawmaker noted that "those monies will be offset with appropriate savings or cost-cutting elsewhere."
Nothing hypocritical is that statement by Eric Cantor....it ain't even debatable..."
Why isn't it debatable? We ship monies and aid to disaster relief, the world over, and no one ever speaks of "off-setting" the costs. This is aid to our own people, and it needs to "off-set"????
Which is why I repeatedly post the link to the understanding of Conservatives and Republicans: Conservatism: The Politics of Ignorance And Self-Interest
http://www.bidstrup.com/politics.htm
which describes how conservative philosophy is "flawed", beyond hope, and how incestuous and self-serving conservative politics are. No wonder frequently heard is that "conservatives have no heart", which is precisely what is being said, in all quarters about Eric Cantor, and his ilk. Debate that!
The Most Fundamental Fallacy of Conservative Philosophy
The conservative theorist and the right-wing Libertarian theories from whom his ideas are derived, love to rail against the power of the state. The obtrusiveness of government, especially in economic matters, are the basis of the conservative's complaints about government.
Yet the reality of life is that it is the economic power of corporations, which conservative theory ignores, that represents the greatest circumscription of personal freedom to the vast majority of people. As conservative principles are applied to government, the increasing restraint with which corporate activities are regulated means that corporations become increasingly free to tread on the personal freedoms of individuals who are powerless to stop them.Suppose, for example, a major corporation wishes to buy up property across the street to build a shopping mall. Those who already live across the street from the proposed shopping mall are in a very poor position to prevent the mall from being built and have to watch helplessly while their property values are negatively affected. Why? Because they don't have the political muscle that fighting the large corporation would take. In other words, those with the gold make the rules, and the rights of the individual property owners in reality don't matter. So even though the small property owner has the theoretical right to object, his objection will make little difference. As the zoning regulations become increasingly watered down, individual property owners are finding they have fewer and fewer options for stopping the loss of value of their principal investment, because of the greed of a major corporation.
But the most serious circumscription of personal rights by corporations is in the workplace. The constitution and the bill of rights are essentially left at the workplace door. There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no right of privacy, no right to petition for a redress of grievances, and little if any recourse for an unjust decision by management. And now, at least in Michigan and increasingly in other states, workers injured on the job are no longer entitled to compensation either for injuries or for lost income in any practical way.
And hadn't you heard? A huge "recall movement" is underway in Wisconsin, particularly in response to Walker's attempts at "union busting". He may not have a job, come Novemeber 2012. Debate that shit.
The conservative argument is that the worker has the right to bargain for improved conditions; but if the worker has no bargaining power, that right exists in theory only. A father with hungry mouths to feed and a single job offer has far fewer options than does a huge corporation with a massive human resources department. And when the ability to organize a union is stifled by unfavorable labor law, it isn't possible for the worker to aggregate that power.
Who Are The Conservatives?
It's hardly surprising that conservatives are most generally the people who benefit from implementation of conservative policies in society. A look at just who they are is quite revealing.
I like to say that conservatism is the politics of the middle and upper class, adult, white, Anglo-Saxon, male, heterosexual, Protestant Republicans. Of course, the ranks of conservatives include many people who don't fit all of those labels, but a look at the delegates who attended the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego was quite revealing. Fully 94 percent of the delegates were white, more than three-quarters male, and only four out of the thousands attending were openly homosexual. Most were from upper-class backgrounds or from the management of corporations. The presence of large numbers of religious fundamentalists was made clear by the frequent appearances in the media by Ralph Reed, the director of the Christian Coalition, who spent over $1 million coordinating his troops there. The people who were present at that convention said more about the agenda than the rhetoric from the platform did.The other large group of conservatives are middle class (mostly) men of limited education who feel alienated and victimized by liberal policies which they feel have not been to their benefit.
These men often come from poor and working class backgrounds and fail to realize that their upward mobility was often made possible by the very liberal policies, such as the fostering of the labor movement, they now angrily denounce.Why is it that conservatives come from these two very different groups? Well, just consider for a moment: getting "government off the backs of the people" benefits the upper-class who run corporations which can increase their personal wealth and the companies can externalize their costs by shifting them to the taxpayer through the avoidance of taxes and "burdensome" regulations, such as pollution laws, securities regulations, etc. The middle-class males benefit by discouraging Affirmative Action and similar liberal policies they view, wrongly as it turns out, as a threat to their economic status. Adults of limited parenting skills benefit by the conservative obstruction of government efforts to protect children from child abuse and neglect. Whites like conservative policies because it means they don't have to support and protect racial minorities or suffer from economic competition from them. Males tend to like conservative policies because they would allow the continuation of the presumed right of males to discriminate against women simply because they think they have a natural right to. Heterosexuals who don't like the idea of gay men and lesbians having the same right to marry are drawn to conservative politics because they presume the conservative emphasis on "traditional values" give them the right to deny marriage and other civil rights to homosexuals. Conservatives tend to be Republican because that party has adopted conservative ideology since its earliest days, while the Democratic party, since the founding of the American republic, has always been far more liberal.
Conservatism has a commonality of philosophy amongst its members simply because there is a commonality of experience that has brought these people to their political views. You're far more likely to find yourself agreeing with someone whose life has paralleled your own, because he is much more likely to have arrived at the same conclusions you have. This is why the gatherings of conservatives produce crowds that all tend to look alike.
This leads to an obvious question: If conservative economics is so harmful to the economic interests of the lower and middle classes, why are so many of them conservative?
The answer to that can be only described as a combination of deception and shallow thinking. The deception is on the part of the rich and powerful who see a keen self interest in convincing the lower and middle classes that a simplistic, "free enterprise" model of economics is in their interests. The shallow thinking is on the part of the lower and middle classes who simply accept it without question, because it comes from those who've "made it" and who "obviously" know more than they do, and have limited educational experience with which to understand the rhetoric.
A classic example is Ronald Reagan's so-called "trickle down" theory. In it, he claimed that if the rich were allowed to keep more of what the poor and middle class were producing, more of it would then "trickle down" to those below, and they would end up richer. No one ever thought to ask whether giving someone else more of the wealth you produce really would actually make you richer. Of course it doesn't, but that didn't stop the conservatives from accepting the notion no matter how silly it was. They simply accepted it because it was handed down by their opinion leaders, who had a vested interest in their accepting it.
Get to debating, stupid bitch. On those points.
