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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I don't think Trump is a very good representative of the Republican party. At all. I mean, seriously, Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Dick Cheney have all denounced him. At least one GOP candidate called him a "narcissistic lunatic".
I'd argue that he's a RINO.
Leviticus 19:34The top three Republican candidates are all people that the RNC has denounced and thinks would be horrible for the party. The RNC is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
The term "RINO" means someone who holds Democratic views but claims to be a Republican. That doesn't describe Trump in any way.
Regarding guns, sure, we can't stop everything by banning them, but we definitely can stop a lot more than we are now.
edited 8th Dec '15 9:32:54 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Well, let's look at the others...
- Marco Rubio, the "up-and-comer" establishment darling, who abandoned his own immigration plan and seems to be riding the policy coattails of the Tea Party, including a tax plan so regressive that even Fox couldn't "unskew" it.
- Jeb Bush, the heir-apparent to the Bush dynasty, who can't get popular even after outspending the entire primary field in advertising. He is a wooden plank, no personality, no motivation, nothing.
- Rand Paul, the Libertarian-Objectivist misanthrope who visibly hates campaigning, and government, and people, really.
- Lindsey Graham, the war hawk who thinks that nothing short of nuking the Middle-East is too much to Protect American Freedom.
- Chris Christie, the corrupt bully who was nevertheless seen shaking hands with Obama and is thus toxic to the GOP.
- Carly Fiorina, who got fired from HP for incompetence, has staked her campaign on false claims about Planned Parenthood, and mainlines conspiracy theories from Alex Jones.
And some other guys.
edited 8th Dec '15 11:36:43 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Polls don't always tell the whole story, but I think saying Trump, Carson and Cruz don't represent the Republican Party reeks of No True Scotsman fallacy. When those three, amongst themselves, have roughly the support of half the party voters. Sure, maybe the primary results will be different, but when that many people in the party express support for their kinds of policies, how can you state with confidence that they are not "really" representative of what the GOP has come to stand for?
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I was just saying Trump wasn't a republican. I wasn't saying anything about Cruz or Carson.
@Bense: It's been plenty lively over on the Democrats' side — we got the policy debate that we wanted, a debate that forced Hillary Clinton to clarify her positions on a number of very important issues. Sanders had his shot at an insurgent campaign, but has fallen short due to being something of a one-trick pony. However, there is no real schism on the Democrats' side; rather, there are matters of degree: how much you feel a given issue is important tends to determine which candidate you support.
You aren't exactly doing yourself any favors by using the current Republican primaries as a model for good campaigning. All of the Democratic debates and forums so far have been policy-focused and contained real, substantive discussion. The Republican debates have been a circus.
If your goal in the primaries is to Pass the Popcorn, then sure, the GOP has offered tons of fodder for the late night comedy circuit. But that's not how a country should be governed.
edited 8th Dec '15 9:54:42 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Fox is not a news network; it's a propaganda machine. There's no way the DNC would allow them to host a debate. And there isn't one on the schedule.
Anyway, from what I saw of the various GOP debates so far, the "circus" has been them attacking each other on various trivial matters and delivering scathing attacks at Obama and liberalism in general. Whenever a moderator brings up a legitimate policy issue, even simply asking them how they plan to pay for their tax plans, it becomes, "Why is the media being mean to us?"
Just as one example, not a single candidate has proposed a tangible replacement for Obamacare, which they all plan to repeal.
edited 8th Dec '15 10:09:10 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"If you look for flaws in people, you will find them.
No one is perfect.
Except me. I am the perfect bad example to not follow.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesEven if I accepted your judgement of Fox it would only strengthen my point. Of course some of the Republican debates have not been policy focused - the moderators of most of their debates had no interest in anything but providing a circus. The CNBC moderation amounted to "come look at the freaks!" The Democrats would face the same problem if they held their debates on networks with moderators as unfavorable to their political views, or candidates willing to mix it up a little. Instead we get a "debate" where the opposing candidate says right at the outset "I'm perfectly willing to ignore your most obvious flaw." Dull.
"If you look for flaws in people, you will find them. No one is perfect."
Which is why we prefer a representative democracy to an absolute dictatorship. If we could find a perfect person we could trust them perfectly, and get rid of all this silly "checks and balance" nonsense that gets in the way of doing stuff that needs to be done. But as you point out, the perfect leader doesn't exist.
Elections are for letting us pick "good enough for now," and a process of finding the faults that make a candidate not good enough is therefore valuable.
edited 8th Dec '15 10:21:22 AM by Bense
Tubman most popular replacement for Jackson on 10$Bill
.
I don't see why we're trying to replace Alexander Hamilton.
Oh, here's an idea! Replace Jackson with Hamilton! There we go!
Leviticus 19:34"I am just saying: If any of the republican candidates are currently deemed "good enough", collectively, the Republican Party seems to have the same standards as someone who would date me."
Thank you, I needed a laugh. If it's any one's business, my "good enough" pick in the last election was Romney, but he appears to be too smart to run again.
Would you accept it if Rupert Murdoch himself said so? Because he's on record as having said that spreading his ideology is what is most important to him. There's a reason why every single one of the (at the time) 170+ newspapers and media outlets that he owned around the world all supported the Iraq war, even ones in countries where 80% of the national population opposed it.
Facing that, why would any sane Democrat ever agree to do a debate on Faux News? Most news outlets are incredibly craptacular, but at least they're just companies chasing the dollar and giving their audience the crap they believe their audience wants. Faux News is aggressively out to shape the news and their audience to their desire. Might as well ask for a US Presidential debate hosted in Stalinist Russia or by Iranian Mullahs.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |

I'm still not on board with Obama's position on the no-fly list, but that's more a generic problem with the list being illegal than a gun-control problem in specific.