New Tone: Obama Says GOP "Holding Gun to the American People's Head"

Don't worry. The NYT will call them out for sure on this "eliminationist rhetoric"

Except people are dying and will continue to die due to Republican policies that deprive people in need of food, shelter, and/or medical care.

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Originally Posted by SDW2001 

 

Which Republican polices deprive people of food, shelter and/or medical care?  

The ones that don't give them away for "free".

Oh noes!  The foreign born usurper who needs to be impeached because he's taking away our freedoms with his autocratic, fascist attacks on normal Americans and his implacable hatred of democracy that derives from an unholy mix of Chicago style thuggery and black liberation theology, to the point that THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY LITERALLY HANGS IN THE BALANCE AND ALL FREE MEN WOULD BE WELL ADVISED TO STOCK UP ON GUNS, AGAINST THE DAY OF RECKONING is using slightly sharper language to describe a particular congressional Republican stance on a particular issue!  What a maniac!

Oh, and it's entirely accurate sharper language- demanding that the Administration enact spending cuts or they'll destroy the American economy can only be termed hostage taking.

So, yeah, just terrible.  And yeah, "incompetent" is certainly the very mild term that Republicans have been applying to Obama, so Obama's wildly disproportionate response is indeed horrifying.

Have you ever considered that the Republican cause would be better served by calling them out when they do self-defeating, deeply unpopular stuff, instead of finding ever lamer equivalencies to prove that they're not the craziest people in the room?

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Originally Posted by FloorJack 

Don't worry. The NYT will call them out for sure on this "eliminationist rhetoric"

So you have no idea what "eliminationist rhetoric" means.

Again, lame and increasingly desperate equivalencies don't help your cause.  Have you looked at any polls lately?  

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Originally Posted by signal1 

 

So you have no idea what "eliminationist rhetoric" means.

 

Again, lame and increasingly desperate equivalencies don't help your cause.  Have you looked at any polls lately?  

I could go with the Krugman definition but by definition that would be incorrect. Polls? Is there an election near?

So you start a thread claiming outrage at the terrible hyperbole of Democrats and immediately affirm your belief that Obama is a tyrant who is destroying America and seizing all our liberties.  

I know, you think it's all objectively true and you think your version of "our country" is the only true faith.  You're wrong.  People like you will die bitter and enraged, as the country slips further and further from your grasp,  and the rest of us will be just fine.

Just maybe, if the Republicans could figure out how to stop being such obvious lunatics, they could inflect the progress of that future.  Have something to contribute to fiscal policy, or foreign policy, or social issues.  But it's all "The Heritage Foundation's scheme for free market health care is the end of freedom!"  "Allowing tax rates to revert to where they were during a time of unprecedented prosperity is fascism!  Gun control that Ronald Reagan would have endorsed is tyranny!"

Can you not see how alienating this all is?  You can't, I know.  And so the Republican Party becomes increasingly irrelevant, cheered on by people like you.   You are utterly, relentlessly, reactionary, which means you are not in charge.  All you can do is fulminate, wildly and disproportionately, against anything and everything that Obama does.  Doesn't matter how recently you might have endorsed something materially the same, doesn't matter how far out of the mainstream it puts you, doesn't matter how damaging to the country it is, your protestations notwithstanding.  If Obama and the Democrats are for it, your'e against it.  And not just against, but insanely, bug-eyed crazy against it.  The end of all that's good and decent against.  

And that's a losing proposition, electorally, philosophically, and morally.  People can actually tell, you know.  People outside of the Fox epistemological closure, I mean.  Coming up with cute ways to claim "they do it to" doesn't help.  Invoking some kind of Red Dawn freedom fighter lunacy doesn't help.  Huddling with the like minded and deciding, yet again, that everyone else is wrong doesn't help.

You guys really, really need to come back to reality, if you want to participate.  I mean it.  Obama is, by recent historical standards, a moderate at best.  It's just merely true, as any level-headed comparison of actual policy initiatives will show.  Insisting that he is a dangerous radical makes you look like fools at best.  Get over it. 

And the compliant frogs cheer and agree that turning up the temperature another small notch is just fine. We're all comfortable in here. Come on in, the water's fine!

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Originally Posted by MJ1970 

And the compliant frogs cheer and agree that turning up the temperature another small notch is just fine. We're all comfortable in here. Come on in, the water's fine!

Excellent.  Continue to explain to the American people that we face existential doom, on account of the socialism or whatever.  Maybe it's time to go all in on the Sandy Hook is a plot to take away our guns "theory."  Make it clear that the electorate are stupid, lazy sheep that are hastening their destruction by failing to, I dunno, eliminate Social Security and slash taxes and suspend most regulations?  

It's persuasive.  

Quote:

Originally Posted by MJ1970 

 

What's even more persuasive is your incoherent babbling.

 

Well played.  Another top notch rebuttal.  

Here, let me make it clearer, since I guess anything more than angry barking noises doesn't register:  On the one hand we've got Republicans that sound like they're speaking in tongues, busily losing the trust of the electorate.  Then we've got libertarians that can't contain their contempt for the American people, and want to preach the fire and brimstone of total collapse.

Both of these "ideologies" are marked by their intransigent fundamentalism. And fundamentalism doesn't really want to work with the process, or effect gradual change, or accept compromise, or settle for anything.  It only wants what it wants, or it stamps its foot and wails, or it takes its toys and goes homes, or it bitterly denounces the fools that thwart it and darkly predicts their comeuppance. 

And that behavior, the behavior that is becoming so familiar from the right, is going over like a lead balloon.  The American people tend toward pragmatism, so hysterical displays of all sorts are sort of a turn-off.

Of course, the fundamentalist response to all this is better to keep the faith than tarnish ones clear vision with this messy idea of compromise.  Which, for a person of my persuasion, is great, because it means a lot of ideological nonsense is voluntarily benching itself.  For you, it means you wait impatiently for terrible things to happen so you can be proven right, about the slack, mindless drones that you're forced to share your steely, squinty eyed world with.

Which, you know, and again:  

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Originally Posted by tonton 

Are you blind? Let's start with extending the Bush tax cuts, and finally making them permanent. If that's not a compromise, then you're the King of England.

Yet everyone's taxes went up this year, didn't they?

Wait... you are so intellectually dishonest it's insane.

Your own words... "Obama never opposed extending the Bush cuts for people making less than $250,000 a year."

What was the income level that the Bush tax cuts were extended to in 2010, and what was the income level that the Bush tax cuts were made permanent to in 2013?

Thanks.

There is much speculation about what Obama's initial proposals were.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/01/04/fact-check-obama-fiscal-cliff/1809179/

"Many politicians do not view [expiration of the payroll tax holiday] as a tax hike, but rather as simply the expiration of a two-year tax cut that was always designed to be temporary. Extending the payroll tax cut was not part of Obama's 2013 budget. But whether it was part of the Obama administration's initial fiscal cliff proposal is a bit fuzzy. As we reported on Dec. 5, the president's opening offer in the fiscal cliff negotiations included $200 billion in new stimulus spending. At that time, Treasury declined to give us a detailed list of proposals for new spending, but it did confirm published reports that some of the elements of the stimulus plan might include an extension of the Social Security payroll tax holiday, as well as infrastructure spending. Those were not part of the law that passed."

That looks like a compromise to me.

But the fact that the Bush tax cuts were temporarily extended for all incomes for two years... and then for all incomes up to $400k, NOT $250k as Obama pledged... that can under no circumstances be denied as a compromise.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SDW2001 

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonton 

Wait... you are so intellectually dishonest it's insane.

 

Your own words... "Obama never opposed extending the Bush cuts for people making less than $250,000 a year."

 

What was the income level that the Bush tax cuts were extended to in 2010, and what was the income level that the Bush tax cuts were made permanent to in 2013?

 

Thanks.

 

So he compromised on the income level....fair enough.  Anything else?  Let me ask...why did he insist on rate increases when the same amount of revenue would have been raised through eliminating loopholes and exemptions?  

As far as I know, he did both.