Right-Wing Blogger Thomas Lindaman doesn't call himself a Republican, because the current Republicans are not what he considers Republicans.
He feels the right-wingers are not far ENOUGH to the right.
Got it.
Considering how batshit crazy and radical far right the Republican party is right now, that's quite funny. You're not an "Independent" and you've never been a "Libertarian." You're a Republican. And yes, I've seen it "from the very beginning" when you were claiming we found Saddam's WMD's, even after Bush's administration admitted none were found. I saw it when you lied through your teeth and claimed George W. Bush never said Saddam was a threat. I saw it when you defended the Patriot Act. I saw it when you blew off facts like evolution and AGW. I saw it when you gleefully supported the Republican stance on the Terry Schiavo incident. And I saw it when you were belittling people questioning Bush running up huge deficits. It doesn't matter what YOU call yourself. A person can say he's not a murderer until he's blue in the face, but that body in his trunk is why he's called a murderer by OTHER PEOPLE. Just like with your false gods, claiming things doesn't matter. EVIDENCE is what matters.
I don't like how the modern Democrats have gone so far to the right (like softening their stance on gun control and the death penalty). I don't like how the Green Party falls far more in line with what the Democrats are SUPPOSED to be. And I don't even agree with everything that the very liberal Democrats stand for (like legalizing hard drugs). But guess what? That doesn't change the fact that I'm a LIBERAL DEMOCRAT. I don't puss out and try to weasel out of the label. Cowards do that.
Every single stance you've taken, every mouth-breathing soundbite you make, marches right in lock-step with Republicans. That includes using the term "statist" (which you didn't start using until Glenn Beck started using it), because you Republicans know that throwing the ridiculous term "socialist" at everything isn't working anymore. But what's to be expected from a right-wing pundit that can't tell the difference between true "statism" and Keynesian economics? You're a Republican. Got it? Republicans calling themselves "Libertarian" or "Independent" isn't going to score them any hot liberal girls, anyway (which is one of many reasons embarrassed Republicans dodge the word now, too bad the girls have figured out the ruse). You're a Republican. You can be assured that the current Republicans are even more batshit INSANE than they were under the Reagan administration. You modern Republicans would ass-rape Ronald Reagan with a broom handle if he was an unknown and ran for the Presidency now, due to him being too "liberal." Just like you right-wingers would crucify your fantasy Jesus Christ if he appeared now for the first time and preached the same liberal things he preached in the bible. The days of intelligent Conservatives like William F. Buckley are over. The fact you don't like some of the issues of the current politicians doesn't matter. That doesn't change the fact that like always, you're going to continue to vote Republican, defend Republican presidential candidates, and trash any major candidate running against Republicans.
You're a REPUBLICAN. So take pride in your insanity and wear that Republican label on your sleeve. And you Republicans/Libertarians/Independents can also clam up on the "small government" bullshit, too. Every twat who got a B+ in social studies thinks "make the government be smaller" is the answer to everything. Right wingers are only bitching about "limited government" when leftists want to do something that would actually improve people's lives. Otherwise, they believe in dictatorial powers for government to police your life. If states are more repressive as in the case of racial segregation, they're for that and for the states having control; if the feds would be more repressive they're for feds having control. Conservatives are NOT for "government that governs least" and they NEVER HAVE BEEN. They are for government that does the least for people and does the most to regiment their lives with fear and loathing. The "small government" idiots thought deregulation of the markets was a good idea. The cataclysm of the deregulation of the financial markets is one of the great tragedies of our age. Look up "market failure" and "natural monopolies" and "tragedy of the commons." There are many cases where deregulation results in a less efficient outcome. One could look at water and sewer for example. Or anything involved in the provision of public goods. The right pretends to stand for smaller federal government, even as they spend us into record debt. They pretend to stand for state's rights, even as they meddle in state's affairs. You (yes, YOU SPECIFICALLY) showed your true colors in the Terri Schiavo fiasco. We're not buying it. We know now that when they say "limited government," they really mean, "getting our way." Why did rural electrification not happen until the government made it happen? Because laissez-faire economics has been tried. We end up with trusts and monopolies. Deregulation of the energy industry was an unmitigated disaster. Industries that we all rely on (energy, banks, healthcare) desperately need oversight or they become the pawns of those with the least concern for public good. Small, limited government is the best way to go? Like in Somalia? Ahhh, Somalia... the Conservative's dream country. Somalia, where there's no taxes to fix roads in another part of the country. Where there's no funds to art projects. Surely, they are living the American dream! When right-wingers decide that the rich need a tax cut, other services have to be cut to make up for the lost revenue. Services like improving protections against natural disasters. Katrina has proved this to be the case, and proved the leftists are right in that we need a strong Federal Government. The dismantling of FEMA illustrates that a strong government is important and a limited government can be disastrous. The government can be used as a tool of the people to accomplish things that need to be done on a large scale (healthcare especially, as that is a business that benefits from scale and inclusiveness). It can also be used as a tool to provide some basic social services that we can certainly afford to provide. A person would have to be a right-wing tool if they think that smaller government and lower taxes is a viable strategy. Their leaders are a bunch of idiots who used "fiscal conservative" and "free-market" as a shield while they maximized corporate profits and pretended to care about religion and abortion. And it's been going on for a LOT longer than "about a decade." Just ask Ronald Reagan, who fought the Soviets... through unbridled deficit spending. Bush conducted the largest reorganization of federal government since Truman, dramatically expanded government power, and conducted the largest increase in executive power arguably ever. I wonder who has done the most to screw the entrepreneurs, investors, and small businesses into the ground? Entrepreneurs, small businesses, and investors do better with Democrats in charge. Not opinion. Fact, based on the historical data.
And you conservatives wonder why you keep on losing. Isn't 80 YEARS of evidence enough for you to stop trying to destroy what makes America great? Democracy is based on the premise that all the people of a country should have an equal say in how their country is run. Rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight. From bloviating, right-wing, Dominican boy-raping, Oxy addicts... to secret Muslim commie infiltrators from Kenya, every citizen of a democratic nation has the same vote and the same voice... in theory. Unregulated capitalism BREAKS that. When a powerful capitalist class emerges, democracy goes out the window. One man's vote is now not worth the same as the next, because the capitalist class concentrates power in the form of wealth. They buy lobbyists, stage multi-million dollars political campaigns, and generally fund and create large-scale political campaigns designed specifically to damage democracy and perpetuate the inequalities that got them where they are. Unregulated capitalism, at least as practiced in the US, is antithetical to democracy and freedom. We should be looking at more nationalizing of infrastructure, to ensure everyone has access to modern communications and a healthy transit system. We should be allowing dying businesses like GM to fail and putting the factories in the hands of the unions directly. We should be implementing proper single-payer health care and universally subsidized secondary education. We should be eliminating the immortal corporate person and not rewarding people for cravenly exploiting the market while hiding from the consequences of their own actions. Instead, we're saving unregulated capitalism for another day. Saving it from its own excesses, rescuing the capitalist class from the consequences of their actions. And democracy will suffer a bit more for it. At least, however, the Democrats are trying to save both capitalism and democracy, as misguided as that may be. The Republicans, Libertarians, Independents tm and the reactionary right in general want to kill democracy to save capitalism.
The small business owner was killed off long ago, and not because of 'statism'. He was killed off because the cheap workers he would have employed here now live in Mexico and China. He was killed off because the lax anti-trust regulation gave rise to megacorporations. He was killed off because tax laws give breaks to big business over small business. He was killed off because he couldn't compete - and the government just turned a blind eye. So now, he, too, is just another corporate slave for some multinational because he wants to have a decent life for himself and his family. Cos being a 'self-made man' in this country means being Joe the Plumber: Uneducated, blue collar, and lower middle class. It's not worth the trouble. But there's room for a free market. A free market, however, should not be predicated on special legal fictions like the corporation. At its base, a proper market is one person exchanging the value of his labor for the value of another person's labor. Instead, what we are doing is rewarding people for exploiting other peoples' labor and stealing from the common treasury. The hard truth of the matter is that if people kept the full value of their labor, everyone would be able to provide for themselves and their families and live comfortably. The question is whether people want that, or the far less than one-in-a-million chance to become one of the exploiters instead of the exploited. The main points of social programs are to help people get educated, stay healthy, and in tough times maintain a basic standard of living so they can jump back into the labor pool when things turn around (homeless bums can't get jobs). When people are educated and healthy they are productive; earnings and standard of living beyond the basics are still merit-based providing the motivation to work.
You know what constantly astounds me? That the vast majority of the "conservative" base idolizes American life in the 50's and early 60's yet seem completely oblivious as to fiscal policy at the time. America in the 50's and 60's was, in many of their eyes, a capitalist utopia. Yet the top income tax rate was 90%. Sure the tax threshold was different, but the wealthy in this "capitalist utopia" were taxed MUCH more heavily than they were today. And then there's corporate taxes and excise taxes. Not that I necessarily believe we should bring these back to their former prominence, but instituting even a quarter of the percentage we had in the 50's during the height of the red scare would be met with cries of "Socialism! Statists! Buncha commies! You'll destroy the entire economy!" today.
Seriously, today's American right-wing Republicans/Libertarians/Independents tm are even more radicalized than Joseph McCarthy and his enablers were, and they wonder why we say that they're so far to the right? But no, according to Lindaman, they're not far right ENOUGH. These right-wing bloggers guys who fancy themselves self-made captains of industry and "entrepreneurs" (even though most of them live off their parents or work at unskilled jobs) have been encouraging an out-of-control capitalist kegger over the past few generations, and now they're absolutely FLIPPING OUT when someone's telling them that there are consequences for that behavior. It's juvenile as hell, and more than a little narcissistic. It's a giant scam. That's what these right wing politicians do. They exist as fronts for Wall Street to manipulate elite opinion. They're above even the usual propagandists like Limbaugh, who do the "dirty work" down in the trenches with the filthy masses. People like the Wall Street Journal editorial page are there to mobilize elite opinion; to manipulate and deceive the movers and shakers into thinking up is down, black is white, so long as it benefits their benefactors. Yet nearly no one in the so-called "liberal media" is allowed to call them on it. They're off limits. They are untouchables. This is understood in every newsroom of every major newspaper and television network. We've had progressive taxation for decades, it was never a problem before. However now that a Democrat takes office and wants to raise the top marginal rate ~3-4% it's "wealth redistribution"? Get over yourselves. Unregulated Capitalism was a wild success, wasn't it? The problem is that people were deluded into thinking that Unregulated Capitalism was about the betterment of everyone, when instead it's about the betterment of those lucky enough to catch the breaks to become wealthy.
The myth that is failing is the idea that hard work is all one needs to succeed. Hard work makes you a good cog in the engine, but that's it. Pretty scary when an Onion article feels so real: "More Americans Falling For 'Get Rich Slowly Over A Lifetime Of Hard Work' Schemes" This is corporatism, FAR worse than socialism, but Glenn Beck hasn't told you that. Big government isn't necessarily bad; what is bad is BAD big government. Big, EFFECTIVE government is desirable. If there is a social good to be had and it is demonstrated that government can provide this social good better than the private sector, then government should do so. Disagreements are reserved for the minor-premise questions of what is considered a social good and when the government is likely to be effective. But these people screaming "STATISTS!" appear to think that even if something is a good thing and government can do it well, it still should not. Why? There's no metric on deciding if a government is too big or to small. Is there a right size? All there is are different sectors of life, and we need to decide which are better. The countries of Scandinavia would like to have a word with "small government" guys. Its citizens seem to quite enjoy their "big," effective governments. You know, the ones that do things like making sure you don't go bankrupt because of medical bills or worry about how you'll afford to see a doctor if you lose your job. Much of the economic rewards we reaped in the 20th Century also have to do with the massive amounts of spending in infrastructure and research through government grant programs and lending. Our highway system for instance, or hell even the intertubes we type on. The economy exists to serve us; we do not exist to serve the economy.
If the economic model isn't achieving the goals we set out for it, we change it. Our problem is that the goals we set out for our economy is "make more money", and it's doing that pretty well. Just for the wrong people. We have to give our economy a more specific goal, such as "creating of an economically- and politically-dominant single-income middle class". If we had that goal, we would see more of a mixed economy, with government non-profit monopolies running things (or at least paying for things) that are inherently monopolistic AND critical to quality of life, such as health insurance, prisons, education, and utilities such as power, water, and sewage. Labor would be elevated; labor-crushing gigantic corporations and trade deals would be eliminated. Pollution would be controlled rather stringently. Keep the parts of capitalism that work towards this goal. Unregulated capitalism always fails because the best way to make money is to destroy the free-market system and form monopolies. It crushes the competition legally and illegally. To change laws to favor you and disfavor competition. Competing by being innovative in product lines, technology, equipment, marketing, and customer service is HARD and EXPENSIVE and cuts into profits. Nobody wants to compete on a level playing field if they can possibly prevent it. It's that simple. It's far more profitable to simply rape the consumer's wallet then try to convince them that you deserve their hard-earned money. Mixed market economy is the most accurate description of the United States, and it has been since its inception. The first tax imposed on business was in favor of large distilleries and alcohol distributors and was backed up the force of U.S. military arms. The Railroads were largely government subsidized but used private contractors and pieced out to pseudo private entities with considerable government oversight and regulation. At no point in our country's history have we observed perfect free market capitalism within the reach of government forces. The Wild West was perhaps the closest we've seen in our history, but it was closer to anarchy than any sort of capitalist ideal. And you right-wing Independents tm wouldn't last a year in that environment. You'd be face down in a horse's water trough.
The Conservatives' biggest agenda was the deregulation of the markets. It was a very successful attempt to dupe the idiotic "small government" crowd into thinking that the total raping of the financial industry was in our best interest. Right-wing "Independent tm " Americans are self-centered assholes that are too stupid to realize that it is the programs like ARPANET, the interstate highway system and the TVA that gave us the competitive advantage that made us the world's only superpower. Now that the Boomers have thrived from the combination of benefiting from these programs and the lowest tax rates since the Great Depression they have convinced a significant portion of their children that they did it all on their own and they did not need the government. And their little right-wing offspring swallow their bullshit hook, line, and sinker. The Right gleefully takes the fangs out of every governmental agency that even pretends to protect the consumer. You can thank the "small government" crowd for the current state of the economy. They sat idly by while they got fellated by the illusion of a free market, meanwhile laughing at themselves and the citizens of this great country getting reamed up the ass. We've been watching this mess hurl towards its inevitable conclusion for a LONG time. Now that the results are painfully obvious, rational people are losing their patience with those who keep claiming that the phrase "small government" makes any sense at all.
A government has to be large enough to be EFFECTIVE. You want a small government, move to a small country. Government can help people. Because WE are the government. Without government, there can BE no freedom. The Constitution was created to make government more efficient, AND TO MAKE THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT MORE POWERFUL. This is contrary to every conservative utterance. And there's a reason for that. Here's an example: The State governments were imposing a racial theory on people. George Wallace wasn't just some guy; he was the embodiment of the government of Alabama (he was a Democrat, just remember this was the South during the Conservative "Dixiecrat" days). He got beat down by a bigger government, and a right-wing mythology developed wherein Wallace opposed government intrusions. But what's more intrusive than the local government telling you which water fountains to use? That sounds like an extraordinary level of government control over your life. And THAT, my friends, is why Conservatives hate "big government." The entire conservative philosophy is a complete fuck-up: They believe that government should be limited in the aspects of helping with personal freedom, but should be intertwined in big business dealings. Liberals, on the other hand, believe the government should stay out of personal affairs (abortion, gay marriage), but involve themselves in helping the American people and having regulations pertaining to business (tariffs, corporate tax codes, etc.) There are many signs of movement towards a more repressive authoritarian State and it happens to be... conservativism. They want a very powerful State to control personal life, the economic world and international society, and they use force if necessary. "Limited government out of people's lives... except for your morals, your body and your love life." "Limited government spending... except for MIC or when we need to (prescription drug plan) so we can retain power." "Limited government preserves state's rights... except for when people in a state pass something we don't like." And the fake Libertarians and "small government Independents tm " that claim "No, I don't want the government involved in either social OR economic issues!" are lying. Just watch whom they support, whom they are against, and how they vote. They are right wing, reactionary... statists.
Reagan dumped mental patients on skid row and tried to jam prayer into school. Yet he's the conservative ideal, folks! Perhaps we should give the "less government" people the backward states like Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Mississippi. Let them secede and try running things without government. They would be walking into walls with their stupidity. I swear, this "anti-government" shit is the dumbest philosophy I've been exposed to in my lifetime. And I hope Zombie Reagan feels pain every time they suffer because of his bullshit philosophy. Again, the GOP simply does not care about small businesses, because they get their big bucks from big business, which only sees small business as unwanted competition. Big business doesn't mind paying taxes, since they get it all back in the form of government contracts, subsidies and tariff protections. The Right love to bitch about how we need small government, while they get to live in the comfort of a country that doesn't have it. Because they wouldn't last a month in their fantasy country. They claim they want to live in an isolated void, but they won't actually do it.
It's not about the SIZE of the government. This is really the heart of the disagreement between the Conservatives and the Liberals about the ROLE of government: Conservatives think government's business is to support big business; the Liberals think it is to serve the actual people. And that's why Conservatives will NEVER be correct, no matter how many labels you pseudo-sneaky guys apply to yourself (Republican, Libertarian, Independent tm ). Or the bullshit lying labels you try to apply to others ("Faux Liberal!" "Statist!") Because in the end, it's still only the Liberals that actually give a shit about Americans, and thus AMERICA. Liberals are what made America strong.
