Comments

1. Slovenian Guest says:

   January 3, 2016 at 5:07 pm

   Especially conservatives must be, El Rushbo:

   The country was just sold down the river again by your very Republican Party.

   I have a headline here from the Washington Times: White House Declares Total Victory Over GOP in Budget Battle. That headline’s a misnomer. There was never a battle. None of this was opposed. The Republican Party didn’t stand up to any of it, and the die has been cast for a long time on this.

   Republicans have the largest number of seats in the House they’ve had in Congress since the Civil War. And it hasn’t made any difference at all. It is as though Nancy Pelosi is still running the House and Harry Reid is still running the Senate. Betrayed is not even the word here. What has happened here is worse than betrayal. Betrayal is pretty bad, but it’s worse than that.

   This was out-and-out, in-our-face lying, from the campaigns to individual statements made about the philosophical approach Republicans had to all this spending. There is no Republican Party! You know, we don’t even need a Republican Party if they’re gonna do this. You know, just elect Democrats, disband the Republican Party, and let the Democrats run it, because that’s what’s happening anyway. And these same Republican leaders doing this can’t, for the life of them, figure out why Donald Trump has all the support that he has? They really can’t figure this out?

   And Severian from Rotten Chestnuts:

   News flash: The culture wars are over, and we lost. Big time. We lost Red-Army-in-Berlin, Enola-Gay-over-Hiroshima style. Leftism is now standard operating procedure, even on the Right. Think carefully: When was the last time you heard a Republican politician urging an actually conservative approach to anything? The GOP pitches itself as better at fiddling the welfare state’s knobs and switches than the Democrats. That’s been their strategy for going on two full decades now. How’s it working out?

   With enemies on the left, and false friends on the right, why even participate in the charade?
2. Lucklucky says:

   January 4, 2016 at 8:34 am

   No.

   Democracy is changing into Totalitarian Democracy due to arrogance of progressive supporters that want it to have no limits and bounds, forgetting that USA is a Republic first, then only after that a Democracy.
3. Graham says:

   January 4, 2016 at 9:45 am

   I’ve never understood the whole ‘young people are tuning out of politics meme’, which is at least 2-3 generations old at this point, even if millennials are imbibing it at a prodigious rate.

   Politics has always been the means by which resources are allocated in society and the means by which disputes are resolved to the point of a compromise with which no one is happy. Those are its purposes. It IS starting to fail at them, but young people have been disillusioned for much longer and far more intensely than this warrants, suggesting not for the first time that they have developed an incorrect understanding of what politics is for and how much disagreement there is in societies generally.

   Presumably they assume they all think alike, all others think like them, and so politics only works if it allows them to steamroller all opposition en route to their particular vision of a perfect society.

   —

   Most millennials don’t think it’s essential to live in a democracy. As the term was traditionally understood in the 20th century Anglo west, I do. [That is to say, rule of law under constitutional institutions with representative components elected freely and exercising all the power.] although, if this makes millennials fodder for a neoreactionary project, I’m open to the conversation.

   # 6. I’ll just bet it is. They assume the illiberal state will serve them, and it will for a while.

   # 5. Clearly more Americans haven’t heard that the Pentagon is at least as dysfunctional and incompetent as any other part of government. Which is kind of proof right there that more Americans don’t read the news or pay any attention.