Comments

1
Obama should switch sides then.
2
Newsflash! Republicans LIE! Glad Andrew finally got the memo.
3
The majority of voters are not fooled by the right wing bullshit. It's jobs jobs jobs. Granted, independent voters may be impatient, but they certainly don't believe in death panels.

But people will continue to justify republican gains in whatever way that makes them feel better. So yeah.
4
YEAH ! What the Lady with the laughing cat said.
5
Thanks for sharing. This was a depressing read.

Most Americans are simply too stupid to recognize the facts that he presented.
6
I would consider that that theoretical republican had leanings toward the socialism side of things. NTTAWWT. I'm still confuised what race has to do with whether someone considers Obama a socialist or not. Last I checked, weren't the big socialist-type countries all lily white? I mean, Sweden isn't known for its African population.
7
So in other words, even though almost all politicians behave exactly the same and most legislation is neither ultra-conservative nor ultra-liberal, republicans will oppose anything the democrats do and vice versa?

Got it.
8
Sweden isn't known for its socialism either. It's known for its social democracy.
9
It got into the minds of people who want to believe it because he's African American and the fucking Republicans wouldn't elect a black man because racism works so well for them. Notice we smarty pants in the NW didn't fall for it and neither did California.
10
About california, I thought this was an interesting summary: Top 5 Lessons at Netroots California.

You know, I thought the whole Republican "rewrite things to their own fantasy la la land" would at least be dialed back to a dull roar aafter 2008. You know, Onion would become funny again (instead of looking alarmingly like actual, real publications) and so on. But nooooo... if anything it's quadrupled. They make 1984 look *tame*. I reread that last year and was surprised at how un-extreme parts of it seemed, as compared to when I read it in high school, when it scared the bejesus out of me.
11
Ooooh, pleez. The AmeriKKKan public happily ate every shit sandwich fed to them by Dumbya, Cheney, congressional Republicans, and the rest of their criminally insane gang, and then they begged for more. People believe this psychotic bullshit because they want to believe it. That's how outfits like dumFux Nooz stay in business. We're an aggressively ignorant, hate-crazed, right-wing KKKountry governed by our worst citizens.
12
It's worth noting that no less than Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage were part of the Big Lie machine not all that long ago--hello Iraq/Afghanistan War proponents--so, glass houses, stones, and all that.
13
@1: So, you guys are pathological liars who badmouth everyone else, right? And that means we should all join you?
Come at me bro.
14
Nancy Pelosi put it best today when she said, and I'm paraphrasing, that the jobless people who voted against Democrats better not be expecting the Republicans to actually help them... especially when it comes to renewing their unemployment benefits. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
15
@6,

"Socialist" has long been a code word for "n*gger," at least as far back as the civil rights movement.
16
Aw hell people change their minds all the time. An excellent example is Balloon Juice. If we all clung stubbornly to our religious/political/cultural dogma with no hope of changing, then we'd all be running around like a bunch of 12 year olds.

Wait...
17
Here's a variation on The Big Lie. If you ever catch the insufferable George Will on the "This Week" Sunday show, he likes to say something like, "We have two parties for a reason. Because there are genuine ideological differences."

Will deliberately paints things as far more black-and-white than they are. If the Republicans have demonstrated anything this year, it's that we have policy differences because there are two parties. Because of the evolutionary reality of American republican democracy, the party that's out of power doesn't have a vested interest in seeing the nation succeed or even seeing its own agenda get enacted under the other party so much as it has a vested interest in seeing the other party fail.

Remember, it was a Republican, Mitt Romney, who introduced the whole concept of an individual health-insurance mandate. Now, the individual mandate is the apotheosis of everything that is evil and liberal and un-American. And I've read that the health-care reform we wound up with is not all that different from what Bob Dole and company proposed as an alternative to Hillarycare. And yet...

You could say the same about the Republicans' stance on the stimulus (something like 33% or 40% of which was tax cuts), their stance on the GM/Chrysler bailout, about their all of a sudden becoming deficit hawks.
18
well....
it IS true that Obama has been awfully good for conservatives.
much better that McPain would have been.
and Danny, don't think we don't appreciate it!
19
I don't see a particular problem with denying American (capital-E) Exceptionalism.

Obviously America is exceptional in some ways - being the first colony in the New World to gain independence, our Constitution and Bill of Rights were quite trailblazing (but of course, still based on earlier precedents), and we're one of the most powerful countries in the world.

But there's really no reason to believe that the US will be the foremost superpower forever, or that we will never fall into tyranny, etc. etc.
20
Original Andrew @12:
It's worth noting that no less than Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage were part of the Big Lie machine not all that long ago--hello Iraq/Afghanistan War proponents--so, glass houses, stones, and all that.

To me, this makes their cases all the more compelling, considering that their original wrong-headed views, and their recently seeing the light, appear both to spring from genuine motives. The people who sicken me are the opportunists, people like Republican operative Ken Mehlman who advance one position to get ahead and then, once it's politically convenient, switch to the opposite position.
21
#19 I don't think I'd even heard the phrase "American exceptionalism" until fairly recently, and now it's everywhere. Recently on NPR's Talk of the Nation, a caller said her problem with Obama was that he didn't believe in American exceptionalism. What the...? Maybe this is why I'm a dumb liberal, but I don't understand why it's important for us to be considered so exceptional that we can do anything we want. Hey, if we start a war that kills several thousand innocent civilians, it's OK -- we're exceptional! I'd be perfectly fine with being a more humble country... like Canada, say.
22
Cressona, very apt analysis of present-day American democracy, in which we see the kinds of problems that a good computer simulation of the model the Founding Fathers proposed should have revealed...

Indeed a darwinian system. Each party has no interest in the success of the other party if the other party is in power -- and so to hell with the country. Rush "I hope he'll fail" Limbaugh is the textbook example.

Do you see any solutions? Taken to its logical conclusion, this system does not bode well for America's future.

23
I read the article, and was a little stunned by the "American exceptionalism" thing. That sounds suspiciously like a modern version of manifest destiny, and, sorry guys, but as a non-American, it also sounds just a wee bit nuts.
24
As an American, I just want to chime in to say that Sullivan's tiptoeing around American conservatives' chauvinism is as shocking as his revelation of conservative mendacity.
25
If only this were new info... I feel like everyone who's been saying this stuff for the last ten years now has been howling at the moon. Unfortunately, the Democrat Party is complicit in this, as they keep buying into Republican framing and letting them control the discourse instead of simply marginalizing it and pushing people like O'Reilly, Beck, and Limbaugh out to the fringes where they belong.

@10: Yeah, 1984 has been the Republican playbook since the early nineties, and they started getting really good around '98. Fucking FOX. :-/
26
@18: O RLY?
You guys were tweaking out about health care, etc.
Not to mention, you losers STILL only control half of Congress. Obama's not been as good for conservatives as you may like to think; the best you've gotten is that chunks of America have gone ahead and blamed Bush's mess on the black guy.
27
I agree with what agony @ 23 said.

10, 25: Ironically(?), the ideology of "The Party" in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was called IngSoc (for English Socialism).
Interestingly, Orwell is quoted (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Ei…) as writing:

My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere. (emphasis mine)
28
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