Democrats : 3 Rungs Lower Than Whale Shit

MHBDemon said:

What bill was the assault rifle ban in?

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MHBDemon said:

None of the rest of your post is relevant. I believe people are redeemable. That is not relevant to whether I think the criminal justice system is redeemable.

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RJKarl said:

Using things that happened 30 years ago is totally dishonest.

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RJKarl said:

"The “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994,” referred to here as the “Federal Assault Weapons Act,” was passed on September 13, 1994, as part of a larger crime bill—The Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The Assault Weapons Act has a 10-year sunset provision."

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When Bush kicked off the 1990s by putting forward a crime bill based on his National Drug Control Strategy, Biden responded with a bill of his own that was nearly identical. There were some differences: Biden’s included a ban on assault rifles, put more money toward treatment, and excised some of Bush’s worst excesses, such as extending the death penalty to “drug kingpins.” It was also $4 billion bigger, with nearly double the aid to state and local enforcement, triple the added FBI agents, and more DEA agents and prosecutors.

At first glance, one could give Biden credit for reining in Bush’s worst impulses. But it quickly emerged that Biden was happy to jettison any reservations about Bush’s measures if it meant having a tough-on-crime law he and the Democrats could take credit for.

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MHBDemon said:

You literally told me I couldn't talk about the Crime bill and then you talked about the Crime bill. :bowrofl:

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Conventional wisdom says that the middle is disappearing from American politics: The Republicans have moved far to the right, the Democrats far to the left, and woe to any moderate voters looking for politicians to represent their views.

Well, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The Democrats have not actually become radical leftists, or anything close to it.

You keep hearing this story partly because Republicans have an obvious interest in promoting it and partly because large parts of the news media find it irresistible. It’s a “both side do it” angle that allows us journalists to appear tough, knowing and above the partisan scrum. We love that image. But the facts don’t support the story in this case.

For starters, look at this year’s primaries, which finished last week. Across the country, a grand total of two Democratic incumbents in the House lost a primary. Zero Senate candidates did. In conservative states with moderate Democratic senators — like Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia — not one of those moderates even faced a serious primary challenge.

The situation was very different in 2010 with the Tea Party, which pushed the Republican Party to the right. Multiple incumbents lost that year, as Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report noted last week. “Please stop with the ‘revolution’ in the Democratic Party narrative,” she said. This year’s real story is the one that the political scholars Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol have tried to tell: Anti-Trump activists have taken a strategic approach, backing either moderate or more progressive candidates, depending on the district.

It’s true that a few proudly left-leaning Democrats won gubernatorial primaries, like Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida. But I encourage you to watch a few of their speeches. For one thing, both are strong candidates. For another, they are hardly socialists. And the list of progressive insurgents who got thumped is much longer. In New York, Cynthia Nixon didn’t crack 35 percent.

Meanwhile, in Congress, the party’s reaction to President Trump tells a similar story. Political pundits sometimes talk about “Trump derangement syndrome” — a condition, supposedly, in which his presidency has made Democrats go crazy. Except that it hasn’t.

To take just one example: There is strong evidence that Trump has broken the law, both by obstructing justice and by using the presidency to enrich himself. Still, Democratic leaders refuse to push for impeachment. They say the country should wait for Robert Mueller’s investigation to finish. I think that’s wise. Either way, it’s certainly not deranged.

Finally, there is policy. Democrats have indeed moved somewhat to the left over the last few decades, on both social and economic issues. As Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary (and no lefty revolutionary), likes to say, the last 15 years should have nudged open-minded people to the political left: The free market isn’t delivering healthy increases in living standards for most Americans. In response, Democrats are focusing less on Bill Clinton’s old themes, like personal and fiscal responsibility, and more on using the government to help people.

But think about what a truly left-wing agenda would look like: Top tax rates of 70 percent (which we had as recently as 1980) or higher. A generous “universal basic income.” The elimination of employer-provided health insurance, with a system more like Britain’s. These ideas remain limited to the margins. None is likely to happen even if Democrats sweep the elections of 2020.

I’m not suggesting that the party has completely avoided Trump overreaction. In our polarized era, Democrats do sometimes confuse its progressive base with the country as a whole. They are to the left of the American public on immigration policy, for instance.

For the most part, though, the Democratic agenda remains decidedly center-left: Raise taxes on the rich, and use the money to help the middle class and poor. Protect civil rights. Expand educational access. Regulate Wall Street, and fight climate change. Expand health insurance using the current system. And compromise with Republicans when necessary.

The radical agenda is the Republican agenda: Make climate change worse, unlike almost every other conservative party in the world. Aggravate inequality. Sabotage health-insurance markets. Run up the deficit. Steal a Supreme Court seat. Keep dark-skinned citizens from voting. Protect Trump’s lawlessness.

If you consider yourself a moderate — whether you lean slightly right or slightly left — your choice in this year’s midterms is clear.

And if you consider yourself a leftist, I understand you are probably frustrated that the Democrats won’t go further. But look at the big picture. The Democratic Party may not have moved nearly as much as you would like, but the party has moved. It has adjusted its agenda in response to soaring inequality and stagnant living standards.

The one mistake no voter should make is pretending that the two parties are just different versions of the same thing.

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RJKarl said:

You are easier than a virgin on prom night...

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In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”

Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The longtime Iowa Republican representative Steve King has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”

Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme?

Everywhere you look lately, centrists are panicking about the emboldened left. Moderates, reported Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News, “are warning that ignoring them will lead the party to disaster in the midterm elections and the 2020 presidential contest.” Former Senator Joe Lieberman wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, over Representative Joe Crowley “seems likely to hurt Congress, America and the Democratic Party.” James Comey, former director of the F.B.I., tweeted, “Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left,” arguing that “America’s great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.”

Though Comey’s judgment about things that affect political campaigns is not good, I think he’s sincere in wanting Democrats to win in November. But his worry is misplaced. Partly, this is because Democrats are not, in fact, rushing to the socialist left in great numbers. “Overall, it's not really true that the insurgent leftist candidates, like the candidates who are affiliated with the D.S.A. or Bernie Sanders’s group, are doing all that well,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who specializes in partisan polarization. With many of this year’s primary races completed, Crowley is the only Democratic congressional incumbent so far to lose to a challenger from his left. Ocasio-Cortez is a bright, exciting new figure in the Democratic Party, but she doesn’t define it.

And even people like Comey — center-right figures who are momentarily allied with Democrats because they abhor Donald Trump — should be cheered by the energy that Ocasio-Cortez and others like her are creating. In the midterms, passion is likely to matter more than appeals to an ever-shrinking pool of swing voters, who at any rate tend to be idiosyncratic economic populists rather than the judicious centrists of Beltway imagination.

I’m not wholly unsympathetic to people of good faith who want Democrats to win in November, but who fear that America is more conservative than left-wing activists like to believe. I grew up at a time when Democrats were deeply afraid of liberal overreach. For many of the people who taught me about politics, the debacle of George McGovern’s 1972 rout was formative. Its lessons were reinforced by the overwhelming defeat of Michael Dukakis, who was painted as soft on crime and mocked by George H.W. Bush for being a “card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U.,” as if concern for civil liberties were shameful. I wasn’t old enough to vote when Bill Clinton was first elected, but I remember what a relief it was when he broke the Republicans’ 12-year stranglehold on the White House, and how necessary and worthwhile his compromises seemed.

Now, however, Hillary Clinton’s defeat has overshadowed McGovern’s as the Democratic Party’s paradigmatic trauma. There are several lessons you can draw from her loss, some of them conflicting — some voters saw her as too corporate, others as too liberal. But it’s clear that in a polarized electorate, grass-roots fervor and a candidate’s charisma matter a lot, and an agenda that seems too modest can be as risky as one that appears overly ambitious.

After all, the economic demands that animate the left are generally quite popular. Though “Medicare For All” means different things to different people, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from last year found that 62 percent of Americans view it positively. A recent Rasmussen poll found 46 percent of likely voters support a federal jobs guarantee, a more radical proposal that was barely present in American politics a couple of years ago.

Centrists might not think these are good ideas, but they are not wild fantasies; they represent efforts to grapple with the chronic economic insecurity that is the enemy of political stability.

Democrats will not defeat Trump and his increasingly fanatical, revanchist party by promising the restoration of what came before him; the country is desperate for a vision of something better. Whether or not you share that vision, if you truly believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, you should welcome politics that inspire people to come to democracy’s rescue.

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MHBDemon said:

None of the rest of your post is relevant. I believe people are redeemable. That is not relevant to whether I think the criminal justice system is redeemable.

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PhDeac said:

This thread is full of examples of you saying Republicans and establishment Dems are not redeemable.

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MHBDemon said:

Show me where boss.

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PhDeac said:

Well then why do you disagree with me that it's worth trying to bring white moderates into the fold?

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PhDeac said:

Well then why do you disagree with me that it's worth trying to bring white moderates into the fold?

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MHBDemon said:

"trying to bring white moderates into the fold" sounds all fine and good until you recognize how it forces the party to the ideological center, protects the status quo of corporate shilling, excuses all the bad shit the party does, and comes at the expense of organizing poor and working class people and people traditionally disenfranchised.

I think that I would argue that watering down and compromising on progressive policies is what made Obama so ineffectual, and what made Bill a republican.

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