OJsDad wrote:gcomeau wrote:That assumes a GOP controlled House would work with *anybody*. They can barely even work with themselves these days... they're so far down the ideological "government is the root of all problems" rabbit hole they have no real serious interest in all the fine details of seriously governing.
It still astonishes me that after 40 odd years of half the country electing people to run the government who insist the government not only doesn't but *can't* do anything right on most issues then watching those people proceed to screw up the government in every way possible as an act of self fulfilling prophecy people continue to vote for them because "Look! Government broken! So they're RIGHT!"
I find it interesting that the Dems have been pushing their agenda forward for 80 years now, claiming to be helping the little people. But every time I look around, the people are less and less happy. Let's make worker safety laws and environmental laws because we want control. Then scratch our butts wondering why the jobs left the country or companies find ways of doing the work without as many workers. Lets not allow our teachers to be fired for not being able to teach, but then complain our education system is broken. Nothing wrong with home loans, Fanny and Freddy are fine. Oops, housing bubble bursts and now we need Dodds-Frank, the two that claimed there was no problem. So explain how the Dems have done anything to make lives better. They haven't. The party of the slave master is the party of the want to be slave master. This time they don't care about skin color.
I'm honestly struggling even knowing where to begin to respond to... that. Sentence to sentence you're just leaping all over the place.
Ok, for one thing you will note I spoke of a specific ideology being pursued within a specific timeframe. The period in which the GOP has been both vociferously and more importantly
successfully to a significant degree anti-government and anti-taxes, which really got in gear under Reagan and has just kept getting worse since.
In response, you came back with "80 years of 'Dem' policies".
The Democratic party has taken some rather drastic shifts over the course of 80 years but you appear to be either blind to or ignorant of that fact. If we're talking about the first half of those 80 years they were significantly more economically progressive and significantly LESS socially progressive. They were very much on the wrong side of the civil rights issues, but very much on the right side of the economic ones. Beginning with FDR and continuing through the next several decades the bulk of the American middle class was effectively *created* under those Democratic economic policies... until Reagan came along and took advantage of getting away with blaming a recession driven largely by global economic factors that had nothing to do with domestic American economic policy on the successful policies of 4 decades, trashed the system, and the middle class has been in decline under accelerating conditions of wealth and income inequality ever since.
But at the same time the Democratic party had an extremely poor track record on racial issues. Yes, they *were* (past tense) the 'slave owner' party. The party of the people still sulking and resentful that the uppity black people were trying to be equal to white people.
And then along came Johnson and Nixon.
Johnson threw his support behind the civil rights act, tons and tons of (largely southern) Democrats threw a screaming raging fit, Nixon saw an opportunity and instituted his Southern Strategy to appeal to racists to flip Democratic supporters in the south, and the rest is history. The GOP effectively peeled off the racist segment of the Democratic party and secured a strong hold on the southern states ever since and the party on the right side of the civil rights issues flipped. Which is why these days minorities generally don't vote Republican. They're not freaking blind, they know what side the GOP chose to take and continued to choose to take decade after decade afterwards
Which is how the Democrats came to be on the right side of both economic and social issues. Or at least on the more right side on the economy, since they've been dragged to the right there in reaction to Reagan's successful promotion of idiocy as a good idea.
As for the other disjointed bits of your rant, it seems to be a haphazard list of talking points that largely misrepresent reality. Freddie and Fanny had issues, but they were NOT the primary cause the housing bubble collapse. Insufficiently regulated private sector firms that were engaging in totally out of control mortgage swaps and lending did the vast majority of the damage there. I don't particularly like the strength of some of the restrictions unions place on the ability of employers to fire their members for cause but that is a minor contributor to the state of the education system. I cannot fathom what is going through your head that you're pissed off at worker safety requirements... all bent out of shape that the US isn't over-run with child labor sweat shops? What?
