Why GOP embraces simpletons and how it hurts America

Let's end this myth once and for all. Because near the top of the list in the GOP simpleton playbook.

Afghanistan bankrupted them.
70 years of an inefficient economic system bankrupted them.
Declining worker productivity bankrupted them.
Gorbachev's economic policies bankrupted them.
Tumbling oil prices bankrupted them.

 

Lots of things bankrupted them, it's true. But RR has to get the credit for being willing to push that bear over the ledge. When I was in college, the USSR was an ominous presence, one most of my cohort assumed would be with us for the long haul. RR, to his credit, was willing to see just how much more they could take.

 

This narrative is so utterly and completely tired. Seriously, this is a way for the Democrats to set up a double standard and argue that the Republicans have to behave one way and as for Democrats misbehaving, well, everyone knows Democrats have no morals. Is that the angle you want to push if you are a Democrat?

 

How many people were predicting the USSR's demise? Even up to the very end?

Reagan did predict it. And he worked to achieve it.

 

That's hardly a prediction. It's a "hope." As he says.

 

Smoke and mirrors and impressive military parades, that's what the USSR was made of.

Nobody was predicting their demise because it was not politically advantageous to point how how weak and technologically inferior they were. We ALWAYS make our boogeymen out to be more then they are, because that's how you win votes and control the people. Tell them what they need to fear, and tell them that YOU are the one who can beat the enemy. Does the term WMDs ring a bell?

Victor Marchetti, the CIA's top Soviet military analyst, once said: "You'll never get court-martialed for saying the Soviets have a new type of weapon and it turns out they don't. But you'll lose your ass if you say they don't have it and it turns out they do."

There was another famous saying whose origin and exact wording I cannot recall. But it went something like this: "Any person who believes the Russians have a technological upper hand obviously has not spent any time over there."

Of course they were something to fear, because they had 42,000 nuclear warheads. They still have 10,000 and could destroy us tomorrow, but we just decided not to worry about them anymore. Iran's the new boogeyman, and they might get . . . one . . . someday.

By the way, the USSR did not dissolve until the end of the third year of . . . Bush41's term.

 

Very interesting thread. I would posit the idea that the reason the GOP has gone to more of a populist/dumbed down angle is a creation of Fox News. They dumb it down so the greatest number of people can understand the simple "truth" they are pushing and then the GOP automatons just keep repeating it. Then they all vote for it and, presto, GOPer wins! Having said that, I'd disagree that Jimmy Carter was our smartest president. I can't really speak for those I haven't observed but I would say that Bill Clinton is one of the smartest I've ever seen. And he had the double whammy, incredibly smart and yet able to relate difficult issues in a simple manner to speak to a large number of people. Yes he had some flaws but as far as pure intelligence, I'd say he had it.

 

You know what? Yeah, it is.

Democrats, by and large, do not spend a lot of time foghorning about how everyone must conduct their own personal/sexual/spiritual lives, and attempting to enforce these views by a variety of laws, preferential economic treatment, and other forms of coercion.

Republicans, especially the Shiite bible-beater wing, do.

So it's time for a double heapin-helpin' of schadenfreude when one of them gets their schlongs caught in a wringer.


I don't really give a fuck if Anthony Weiner is swinging his wiener all over half the country, because Anthony Weiner (to my knowledge) has never attempted to tell me what I should or should not do with my own wiener. I care in the sense it probably damaged his effectiveness as a legislator and I care because it indicates he's probably on some level a fuckin' idiot, but do I really care if he's sexting with half the people in New York? No.


But a fuckin' sleazebag serial slutfucker like Newt Gingrich? You're goddamn right I care if he is caught (yet again) tomcatting around, because he's spent decades lecturing the nation at large (including me) on moral values.

 

Do you have any idea what happened to federal revenue from 1981-'89? Apparently not.

 

He laid out his plan to see it come true in his very next two sentences.

 

A plan is not a prediction either.

 

Nope. No way. It's not the Democrats' fault the Republicans insist on telling everyone how to live their private lives. Only one side concerns itself with the personal morality of each and every person in the U.S.