Did Bush make Obama possible?

[chance1]

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seems to be many people who feel that palindros thread is spot on

many respectable members of JUB

try it

u might like it

 

[youngnihilist]

It's 47%. And that's nearly half the population. Electoral college is irrevelant, McCain lost by less than 1 percentage place in places like Indiana and NC, and close in Ohios, Virginia, etc.

Senate losses were primarily due to Republican candidate's incompetence. House too. That's not because of BO - we were fucked for senate/house as early as last spring, before BO was even nominated. We didn't lose any governorships, well 1 in Missouri, but with Obama's appointment of commie napotilano to homealnd sec, we get back Arizona. State legistlatures.. uhh no, keep dreaming.

I never much liked McCain. Too liberal and too willing to play ball.

I wish BO luck but America is a conservative country, and we'll be back. Count on it.

 

[Kulindahr]

In the months after 9/11, the majority of people in this country were scared shitless. So scared, that lawmakers pretty much let the Bush administration do whatever they needed to do. Years later after all the dirty work was done, people started to feel safe again, it became politics as usual. How different things would have been had Bush actually failed, and there had been a few more attacks.

If there'd been another attack, Bush would have done what the anti-human-dignity folks do when their "gun control" laws are shown not to work: scream for more of the same. We would have gotten legislation that made the "USA PATRIOT" Act look tame, and the same Democrats who handed Bush his hunting license for Iraq would have voted for it.

Bush did everything right. The problem was the pussyass American people couldn't stomach what he was doing, so he got unpopular. Cry me a river. So yes, Bush made Obama possible partially. But let's not forget McCain was leading in September. If it wasn't for The mainstream left wing commie media skewering Palin (aided by that bitch Tina Fey) + the market meltdown, then McCain probably would have won.

Let's see -- Bush put a tourniquet on a number of Constitutional rights, he doubled the national debt, he ignored warnings about the coming bank/financial crisis, he let Rumsfeld misplan and mismanage the Iraq adventure....
He did a few things right. Mostly, though, he sat as a smiling figurehead for Cheney and the money men who bought another Bush presidency so they could get richer yet off taxpayer dollars.

Bitter, so bitter.

46%, not 47%. Obama had 8.5 million more votes than McCain. Obama won more than twice the number of electoral votes than McCain. The GOP evaporated in the Senate and House, in governorships, state assemblies offices for dog catcher, etc. The GOP is finished, it's the party of old white men in white robes.

We keep wondering why you're so bitter, Alfie -- bitter enough to lie about people who don't need lying about to show their failures, or just to tarnish them. Too bad you're not spending your energy getting Democrats to love America enough to defend the country.

The GOP is finished?
We could only hope... but the same thing was said about the Donkey Party by happy Elephants when Clinton and Co. faded from the scene. Remember the books like "The Last Democrat To Sit In the White House"? Like those authors, you underestimate the corrupt power of the self-appointed two-party system and the shallowness of the American people, who though they know one ditch is toxic and the other full of disease nevertheless lurch from one to the other rather than rejecting both and walking proudly down the road.

 

[Kulindahr]

I agree 100%. After years of war people want surface not substance. They want cool not qualified. Obama won for the same reasons Madonna or Britney sells records, marketing. He had the right party, race, age, family and X factor at the right time.

Obama also won because he was up against a man who never met a part of the Bill of Rights he really liked. McCain's record shows him opposed to free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, protection against search and seizure, protection against self-incrimination, the right to privacy....

We didn't have a qualified candidate offered. So when the choice is between an man on the record who loves total authoritarianism, and "cool", "cool" is not a bad choice.

Yes, Bush made Obama possible, but so did the record of a man focused on some ideal of "America" that had little to do with liberty.

 

[HenryReardon]

Forgive me for being simple but who/what is the great unwashed?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the+great+unwashed

 

[Ben1]

Yes, he did!
Funny/sad but true!

 

[Kulindahr]

Forgive me for being simple but who/what is the great unwashed?

I was unwashed for a while last week, and there wasn't anything about it that was great.

 

[jmidnight]

Forgive me for being simple but who/what is the great unwashed?

ummm you answered your own question. lol

 

[Kulindahr]

ummm you answered your own question. lol

And you just illustrated the snobbery that generated the term to begin with.

 

[Kulindahr]

And now we have new a president and we have no idea how he will sign/veto at all. Many of the choices he made during his pres-elect stage shocked people. I love to gamble in Vegas like anyone but I don't like to gamble on what a president's record will be. Regardless of how "cool" and racially significant he/she may be. America should have known better and they should have demanded a better Democratic candidate and perhaps a better Republican one.

I'm not sure either party really had a better one. In the days when it wasn't just a popularity contest, maybe an effort could have been made to find a candidate who actually honored the whole Bill of Rights, instead of just the parts he feels good about (if any), but we don't have that chance any more.

We know one thing already: all the anti-Second Amendment slop so dear to Biden's heart is back on the website.

So much for Obama's "respect" for the Second.

 

[Kulindahr]

I think we should always question the relevance of the Bill of Rights and what "rights" should be added and what "rights" should perhaps be taken away. I dont't think any president should be a "tool" of the Bill of Rights. They should honor them but at the same time should always question how the gov't and our Constitution should evolve. The fathers never expected the Cons. to stay the same. It is possible a time will come when peace is so widespread that gun accidents actually kill more innocents than guns protect from crime. Perhaps then we will need to re-evaluate the 2nd ammendment.

I think the most Obama would do is gun control. I doubt he would ban all guns in America.

Rights are rights; they can't be given, so they can't be taken away. They can be trodden on, encouraged, penalized, or honored, but they are what they are.

What Obama and Biden favor is eliminating most of the firearms sold in America, reducing the number of rounds a weapon can fire to the point that if you aren't a sharpshooter you're meat for any criminal who wants you, slapping a tax on ammunition high enough that only the rich can afford weapons (and they say Bush favored the rich!), making it so anyone and his brother can find out who owns a weapon, what kind, and where the owner lives, imposing technological requirements that exist only in science fiction....

and that's just what they've been honest enough to put on their web page. What they're pushing is a sorry set of measures already known to not only not help fight crime, but to make it harder, measures opposed by many policemen and police organizations, measures based not on facts but on appearances -- measures that will make it possible for the next right wing administration to turn the U.S. into a police state with one simple order. He's doing just what the Nazis told the Jews of Warsaw: "Trust us."

The JPFO knows better.

 

[Kulindahr]

Rights may be rights but since we don't all possess the same discernment of the Universe we, as a society, have to agree, on paper, in law, what our rights are and how they will be honored. One thing I think all people can agree on is that we don't all universally agree on everything, if anything at all. There is a group of men (the man boy love group I think) that is convinced they have and should be legally granted the right to have sex with young boys. Obviously many of us don't agree. So how do we resolve it? Since there is no list of right's universally accepted we have to take a vote. I think resolving scenarios, like the above mentioned, is the 90% of the purpose and function of gov't.

The sole function of government is to protect the rights of its citizens.

The Bill of Rights should be inviolate. It also needs a proviso the Founding Fathers would have taken for granted: in all matters of dispute in law, the position which best favors individual liberty is to be preferred.


As for NAMBLA, their position reduces some people to property, so they have no moral standing. All rights rest on the observable fact of self-ownership; the only issue is at what age, or on what conditions, we as a society are going to define the ability to exercise that self-ownership. Since clearly a young boy is not on an equal footing with an adult, the boy can't properly exercise self-ownership, so NAMBLA's position fails the basic morality test.

 

[Kulindahr]

Everything you have stated is not universally accepted. And NAMBLA, according to Wikipedia, wants age of consent laws to be abolished and for children to be able to choose whether or not to have sex with eachother or older men. Morality is not universal. To some this is acceptable. Therefore a vote is needed to gauge where the majority fall.

The Bill of Rights is only the Bill of Rights because a group of men came to agreement and wrote it. A generation 200 years from now may find aspects of the Bill of Rights to be oppressive or no longer relevant and may entirely rewrite a new gov't. They may decide to give animals a right to life or decide that guns are not a right. What was written in the late 18th century may not be the be all and end all of all gov't for the eternity of our planet. What rights will be accepted under law is up for grabs and only the future will tell.
I still contend that the 2nd ammendment is an interpretation of the universe that the majority at the time accepted, not a universally accepted right. Barack Obama may strongly believe that gun ownership should not be a right. What makes him any more or less right than you? And how can you prove that gun ownership is some intrinsic right of humanity?

Whether something is "accepted" has nothing to do with its being a rioght; the only thing that matters is whether it honors, or is part and parcel of, your self-ownership.


If you're not allowed to defend your life, then your life is worth nothing.
If you're not allowed to make your own choice about how to defend your life, being allowed to defend your life is worth nothing.

Thus to say that a person is not permitted to own a firearm for self-defense, and carry it at all times, is to say his life is worth nothing.


That's one way to view the foundation of rights: that your life is worth something. Any politician who wants to make it harder for me to obtain a firearm of my choice than for a criminal to obtain one of his choice is saying that my life is worth less than the life of a criminal.
According to Obama's website, therefore, Obama and Biden believe that my life is worth less than that of a criminal.

 

[Kulindahr]

You seem convinced that rights are born from some intrinsic place rather than a construct of man. So I would ask you where is this intrinsic place, prove it exists and prove rights exist seperate from the interpretation of man. So far you have been stating you opinion, personal philosophy and beliefs in things like self-ownership, but you haven't really demonstrated these are anything more than just your political theory.

"Thus to say that a person is not permitted to own a firearm for self-defense, and carry it at all times, is to say his life is worth nothing." - This statement is a bit unrealistic. There are many things that one can protect his/her life with that we are not allowed to carry around. That does not mean our lives are worthless. If gun control is designed to protect people from gun violence and accidents than it is exactly to protect and honor life. That is the place, I believe, Obama is coming from.

Self-ownership is a self-evident fact of existence.
You generate your thoughts, so they belong to you. You move your limbs, so they belong to you. You choose and make your words, so they belong to you. We recognize this every time we say, "My hair", "My idea", "My body", "My life", or any other of scores of things we use every day. "I trimmed my nails today" is a statement of self-ownership; it recognizes that you did the trimming of something that is yours because it is part of you.
Self-ownership is the basis of all human interaction, even of interaction with one's own self -- the basis of mental health is self-ownership. The basis of responsibility is self-ownership. The concept of crime is based on the fact of self-ownership -- it's why we laugh at "The devil made me do it!" and refuse to acknowledge "God told me to" as a positive defense.

Disproving self-ownership would be straightforward: show that you can generate the thoughts in another's head, make someone else's arm move merely because you decide it should, or grow fingernails that belong to you on another person.

There's no such thing as "gun control ... designed to protect people from gun violence and accidents". Gun control never does anything but inflict hardship on the law-abiding while leaving the criminal to do as he pleases. Forbidding ordering guns through the mail has never kept a criminal from getting a gun, banning guns from campus has never kept anyone safe from a gun, refusing to let teachers be armed has condemned students to attack by guns. The so-called "assault weapons" ban didn't keep one criminal from getting any gun he pleased; it was a lie on several levels, because none of those were assault weapons, and none were generally used by criminals -- all it did was employ more people in government, offer more chances for corruption, and cause grief and annoyance for ordinary law-abiding citizens.

Gun locks make it easier for criminals to kill people -- that's documented.
Waiting periods make it easier for criminals to kill people -- that's documented.
Instant checks more often keep law-abiding people from obtaining perfectly legal devices for perfectly legal activities than they do to catch criminals who want a gun -- as Bill Clinton proved thoroughly, when he bragged about how under his administration tens of thousands of felons were allowed to violate the law and walk off free.

It isn't your job to decide how I should protect myself -- because my self is mine, not yours. Such laws all boil down to a simple concept: that people are free to do whatever they please, so long as it's what pleases you.

Otherwise, why did we complain about Bush? Why protest restrictions on free speech? Why care if Rick Warren were made head of the FBI and Fred Phelps were put in charge of Homeland Security? If there's no self-ownership, those things wouldn't matter. If there's no self-ownership, rape isn't a crime.

And if there's no self-ownership, then we get 9/11 all over again, because that day of terror was made possible by people who had been taught to believe that they didn't really own themselves, that they were to behave as though they were sheep, not people. On one flight, a few people realized that their choices lay between actually owning themselves and being someone else's tools -- and they chose self-ownership, which is why they're considered heroes.
And if they'd had a firearm or two among them -- well, if good citizens were actually allowed to exercise their Second Amendment rights, there wouldn't have been any airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers, because people could have actually made their self-ownership stick rather than just being mass for someone else's projectiles.

 

[Kulindahr]

There were times when the Catholic Church believed its laws and doctrines were supreme and should never be changed. People who are afraid to change are afraid of progress. People who cannot see that a gov't structure may not be applicable to a society 1000, 10000 or even a million years from now are blind to the natural order of progress. The Constitution is designed to change and if, within our laws, we as a society, decide gun ownership is no longer a right, so be it. The Constitution was not designed to trap us in the status quo of 1776. If that were the case, blacks and Indians would be, what, 3/5 a person?

And I think u misunderstand. Im not saying the rights in the Bill of Righs are bad or should be taken away. I am saying that humans in the future should be free to decide what rights they should have under law and live in the kind of system they want and is relevant to their civilization. Afterall that is exactly what the founding fathers did.

Do you hear yourself?
You're saying that because some societies in the past didn't believe that people owned themselves, we or some society in the future should be allowed to turn people back into property.

What the Founding Fathers did was to cast off the chains of tyranny and openly proclaim that every person belongs to him or her own self, not to some tyrant or even a legislative body. They established a system meant to let everyone enjoy self-ownership, to be able to exercise the liberties of that self-ownership -- and suffer the consequences. What you're proposing is exactly the opposite: that people should be able to turn others into property again.

In different terms, you're arguing that now that we have the periodic table of the elements, we should encourage a return to alchemy and witchcraft. See, progress, doesn't just mean things becoming different, but rather things conforming more and more to reality. The Soviet Union fell, and that was progress, because it didn't conform to the realities of human existence -- realities such as economics and the determination of people to exercise self-determination.

You're arguing that people should be property, which is the ultimate belief of the ultimate democrat -- that might makes right, so people can't be in charge of themselves but have to conform to the wishes of others. Counting noses is no more sacred than the "divine right of kings" as a foundation for power; it just lets everyone sound off.

Now, if you really mean that "humans in the future should be free to decide", then you'd have to agree that the Declaration of Independence should read like this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the unanimous consent of the governed...."

Think on that.

 

[Kulindahr]

Will you listen to yourself? Let's assume we "decide" we don't want some of our rights and then 20 years later, we want them back. How do we get them back? You obviously have no comprehension of how many people have died fighting for these rights.

History paints a pretty bleak picture of what happens when people are foolish enough to listen to people like you. We've read this story before. We know how it ends. Piles of bodies in mass graves. If you feel that the Bill Of Rights is an imposition on your right to have no rights, you can apply for citizenship in China or similar, where you'll be relieved to know you'll be a lot safer from your fellow citizens than you will be from your government.

That last line is telling!

That's what the Founding Fathers were up to -- protecting people from their own government, not just changing things to suit themselves. They obviously didn't do a very good job if the latter was their goal, since most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence got ruined lives out of it. Their genius was to see that the history of man is one of either being the property of one's government, or the property of one's self, and that they set about fashioning a government that would be very limited in what it could do, so that people could be in charge of their own lives.

Anything which falls in the tradition of freeing us from government dictates, then, is what follows the example of the FFs; anything else is a return to subjugation.


Good stuff, Random!