Those are the "Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn — Fast" — according to David Brooks (in the NYT).
I think the Democrats do know all these things, they are just too deeply invested in portraying Republics as toxic and can't easily concede that Republican concerns are not bugaboos.
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Now they are setting up a "disinformation czar"? Setting aside Orwell references, lack of self awareness, etc. Can we ditch this idea of czars in the U.S. government? Weren't czars authoritarian rulers that kept the serfs down?
serious question: Could the democrats even state that Capitalism is Better than Marxism ?
i'm betting, NO The demo party has sold it soul to the AOC wing
Who wrote this piece for Brooks?
Brooks will be looking for a new writing gig pretty soon.
Democrats only speak to other Democrats. It’s self reinforcing lunacy. I had a conversation with a Center City Philly dwelling friend yesterday. He told me how well the city is run. I mentioned the vacant high end store fronts, lack of police and crime. He said he had seen no crime. Statistics didn’t change his mind. Another younger friend said Trump was anti-black. When I pointed out that under Trump blacks had the lowest unemployment rate in history, he was shocked and unbelieving. There are parallel universes but only one is real and it ain’t theirs. They won’t change until it affects them directly.
Who wrote this piece for Brooks?
Probably his new young wife. Very poorly written. I have no idea what the New Deal reference is supposed to mean. Does "once" mean "one time only, don't keep thinking you can repeat it"? Or "once" as in "in the past," suggesting that it could be done again? And either way, what does that have to do with the paragraph that follows?
And I note how this "conservative's" primary concern about the debt is that it could "crowd out" more spending on government programs, as if diminished government programs is a bad thing. If only it would crowd them out!
No ma’am, Althouse.
What you call a bugaboo they call a character flaw. The ledge of their self- righteousness is very narrow and high in the sky. You know, good for them. It must feel great to be the bearers of Light and Truth when for years(decades/centuries, even!) people pushing the fences on social &moral issues were looked down upon!! No more fences!! Some tightwad of a cisgendered, heteronormative racist white male wrote something one on fences— f/k him and his outdated platitudes of selfish hubris.
One thing I do know for sure, today’s Democrats do not like to be critiqued. Constructive criticism is bullying!!!
So f/k David Brooks, too.
Sarc/
Schmucky Schroomer said that "the only way to reduced inflation, is to raise taxes"
and, the thing of it is; he's half right. The way to reduced inflation is to balance the budget; increasing taxes and DECREASING spending.
BUT Chuck thinks if you raise taxes, you can INCREASE spending; and thus reduce inflation.
As Jeffersons Revenge says, There are parallel universes but only one is real and it ain’t theirs
There may be a reckoning within the Democratic Party after a couple pastings in elections. But only if Republicans keep their eye on the ball and don't start getting lazy and corrupt just because they think the coast is clear. I have little faith in the Republican's ability to do that.
What we'll get instead is a Republican win that doesn't lead to any real cleaning up of government coinciding with the Democrats tinkering just enough with not being so crazy that they can win again, but without doing any real clean-up themselves.
Next 20 years just like the last 20 years.
Oh- and all heating fuel is well over 6$/gal in the NEK. Kerosene is 6.46$/gal.
Keep on keeping on, smart people. It’s going great.
"Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn — Fast"
Once again David "Conservative" Brooks gives aid and comfort to the enemy - or as I like to call it (checks date on article...) - 'Thursday'.
The Democratic Party got high on its own supply -- the current generation started believing spin and accepting political talking points as truth. The censoring left purged humor long ago, so the younger generation don't recognize sarcasm (e.g., 90% of Trump's jokes) and they treat propaganda as fact. In turn, recent generations became the semi-insane woke who literally cannot tell right from wrong or truth from falsehood. You can't actually be "indoctrinated" into incoherent nonsense -- they are flailing and suffering.
The crisis of this era is to help half the world learn cause and effect, and thereby grow into functional adults.
Adding to the David Brooks list:
1. Gun control does not work. It has never worked. Many case studies. We desperately need crime control and an increased sense of personal responsibility. Both the Defund the Police and Ukraine events made this obvious even for true believers. Personal responsibility was never partisan until the last few decades of obsession about group differences in data and outcomes.
2. Ever more abortions, nonconforming sexuality, and early gender reassignment (i.e., reproductive infanticide) will very quickly end the Democratic Party. The Catholics learned long ago that more babies = continuing and growing political influence. Shifting from pro choice to pro abortion will inevitably cause conservative growth. Just saying. Eat, drink, and be merry if y'all want to go out in a blaze.
Oh please.
When it all crashes down it will be because the Democrats’ agenda was never really implemented.
You cannot reason people out of positions they did not reason themselves into.
Fuggettaboutit, Brooksie.
You can discuss the Democrats insanity at the national level all you want. But the insanity runs throughout the Party at every level, in every city, county, and state government. David Brooks is pissing in the wind with his 'I wish Democrats would just not make it so embarrassing for me to praise them' column. To change the Democratic Party, you'd have to get to the schools and teachers unions, the SEIU, the local governments first. It's a massive task. It took years for the Dems to become so bizarre as to argue for teaching little kids to be taught to question their gender. Years to get to the view of others not accepting multiple pronouns per person as haters. Years to demand that we quit producing energy and instead, use candles to light our homes.
As we read this, as an example, this is what they're working on in Colorado: Time for more expenses added to overpriced homes.
National Democrats are a disgrace. But they're only a reflection of their foundation locally across the nation. To change that Party, you'd need to elimiate it. And the only way to do that is to quit voting for any of them for two generations.
David Brooks is the physician that needs to heal thyself. His list isn't even good from an opposition viewpoint. The only thing really good is "don't politicize everything". BTW, "People of Color" are a thing and dismissing them as nothing would be horrible, but identifying and treating people based on the color of their skin is a thing we need to get past.
Context makes me think that he meant that the New Deal happened only once. English is like that. A lot of phrases can mean one thing and its opposite. If it wasn't carelessness or sloppiness that made him leave out the "only" maybe he was cultivating the ambiguity to attract readers.
The Democrats aren't David Brooks's enemy. Now that the Times has Stephens and Douthat, Brooks doesn't have to pretend to be a conservative anymore. Or maybe it's just that "conservative" and "Republican" are so toxic to Times staffers and readers that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama could get a job as the equal time "right of center" columnist representing the other side.
Brooks's points make sense. The question I'd ask is why didn't he see two years ago that Team Biden had all these things wrong and would mess things up? What about his own blindness and, well ... stupidity?
Without those, what would the Democrats stand for?
It will soon enough be declared disinformation to hint that profligate spending is connected to inflation. Textbooks will be banned, since only Putin could want less Democrat spending.
David Brooks to the rescue.
Insert eyeroll emoji here.
Only Putin could want the Keystone pipeline completed. Only Putin would object to grooming 2nd graders to think about sexuality explicitly. Only Putin wants Americans to have free speech.
It’s amazing the power of propaganda to warp minds.
James K ... I have no idea what the New Deal reference is supposed to mean.
If Brooks really wanted to be accurate and helpful, he would have said "The New Deal failed." Saying "don't repeat it" is as close as he can get in the NYT.
“I think the Democrats do know all these things, they are just too deeply invested in portraying Republics as toxic…”
We live in a republic. Perhaps they should get over it.
I think the Democrats do know all these things, they are just too deeply invested in portraying Republics as toxic and can't easily concede that Republican concerns are not bugaboos.
Of course they do. But maybe they have a different agenda altogether. Maybe protecting and preserving American freedom and prosperity isn't a priority for them.
Leland- I don't think People of Color are a thing. I think it's a desperate attempt to create a monolithic block out of multiple groups of people with competing interests and values. Lumping blacks, hispanics, asians (when convenient) and Asian Indians (when convenient) into one POC block is not working for the progressives, according to the polls I see. For example, hispanics themselves don't see themselves as one block, even as a sub-set of POC. None of the others have any respect for the black community and vice versa, except when convenient for the leadership.
Temujin- Yes, the D party is horrible at all levels but I do know people who call themselves D's who are reachable on an individual level. They have lived in an information bubble for a very long time- decades- and are only now beginning to understand that possibly they've been fooled. Perhaps that explains the lib/prog panic over Twitter. They know if they don't control the permissible message there is a core constituent who will flee their mindset. That also explains the panic over Joe Rogan. They need a media monopoly in order to exist.
This inflation was the predictable consequence of lawlessly shutting down the economy because of covid, paying people not to work, and otherwise pumping more and more dollars into circulation while depressing productivity (e.g., by destroying the domestic energy sector). Too many dollars chasing too few goods.
But here's the thing: While many Dems pretend that their policies don't have unintended consequences, and government can do whatever it wants to bring about "economic justice," the reality is that they don't CARE if their policies wreck the economy. If and when the economy collapses, they will say it's the fault of capitalism and that we therefore need full-on socialism. They want to wreck the economy because it's in their long-terms strategic interests for "capitalism" to fail.
This is a pattern with the left: take over something they don't like in the first place in order to get what they can out of controlling it for a while and then crashing it into the ground. They have taken over the NFL and other sports, they use it to advance leftist narratives and themes, and if and when traditional sports fans walk away in disgust, that's fine with the left, because they didn't like the NFL in the first place.
hispanics themselves don't see themselves as one block
want to have fun?
Be in a bar full of Puerto Ricans, when a bunch of Mexicans walk in.. Hilarity ensues!
Or! Be in a bar full of Mexicans, when a bunch of Puerto Ricans walk in.. Hilarity ensues!
(if you consider fights to be hilarious)
Anyone that thinks "hispanic" is a block doesn't know many hispanics
The Democrats are scared to death of their own extremists. That's probably the biggest difference in the two parties.
In the days when the government started tracking race in earnest (with Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s), all people from south of the border were in the "Hispanic" voting bloc. With pure bureaucratic logic, they lumped together all races and backgrounds into one wacky and lumpy ethnic pot. I guess their logic followed the rather successful white European "melting pot" metaphor from earlier in US history.
So, today one can have a very white European person who's ancestors relocated from Spain to Argentina lumped in with a Central American native, a border-dwelling person who has a lot in common with southern California culture, and Caribbean island people who mix beach life with both African and Spanish or Portuguese cultures.
The Hispanic bloc concept worked fine for the US as long as "Hispanics" were a small minority who voted as a unit. Back when the US was 90% white European. Only. The Democratic Party wished and imagined that this bloc would persist as the population grew and as it developed genuine election power. They also fantasized that all those south of the border people would vote for Democrats, forgetting that many ""Hispanic" cultures are deeply traditional, religious, and have extremely conservative right wing governments.
That's what you get with geriatrics running a party -- living in the past. No adaptation or ability to learn new things. Can't teach old dogs new tricks.
"Blogger gilbar said...
serious question: Could the democrats even state that Capitalism is Better than Marxism ?"
The answer depends on the goal. Certainly Marxism is the better instrument with which to impoverish people or to consolidate police and state power in the hands of a small group of the "best and the brightest".
or boogaloos. what ever happened to those fbi plant boogaloos?
"We choose [our] truth over facts." QuidProJoe, 2020.
Says it all, doesn't it? Well maybe not "all." Have you seen the new Apple pregnant man emoji?
We often read that Ds don't think of the long term effects of their destructive policies, but from their perspective, it makes sense.
Ds are (statistically) less likely to have children so future planning collectively means less to them than current cash flows and current aggregation of power and control. The core of the D party now is the white college grad suburban female, who might have a trophy kid or 2 but mostly they cater to singles, LGB+'s, and BIPOCs. The Bipocs have some kids but are very much overrepresented as abortion industry consumers, so the Ds have sacrificed future voters big time for present support of those who favor abortion for financial or sacramental reasons. The segment of Bipocs that do have kids is Hispanics, who trend religious and politically red.
It would be wise for Rs to sow discord in the black community by subtly emphasizing the devastating effect that liberal abortion policies have had on the black community- the rate for black women is 2.7X white women. That's a lot of missing babies (and votes).
I hope Democrats do not change. They are representing the views of fewer and fewer voters.
"And you say that this week of all weeks"
The difference is that the Democrats let the extremists set the agenda. That is not the case with the Republicans.
"It is possible to overstimulate the economy.... Law and order is not just a racist dog whistle.... Don’t politicize everything.... Border security is not just a Republican talking point.... 'People of color' is not a thing.... Deficits do matter.... The New Deal happened once."
Shorter Brooks: Dems have to stop being Dems.
West Tx Intermediate Crude wrote: It would be wise for Rs to sow discord in the black community by subtly emphasizing the devastating effect that liberal abortion policies have had on the black community- the rate for black women is 2.7X white women. That's a lot of missing babies (and votes).
In having spoken with and read the writings of many on the left, they simply don't care. They see abortion as a big nothing that makes life easier and reduces environmental strain, so they have no moral or future demographic concerns.
The most politically effective way to split the black vote may be for Republicans to come out as pro abortion, not just pro choice. Democrats would then be forced to rapidly flip toward accusing Republicans of anti-BIPOC genocide. This won't happen because each voting base is firmly set in its views, but it's surely a way to shift the debate. It'd also be a wicked brain twister if it ever happened.
Take over student loans under false pretenses, produce voters who can't repay, who then look to parents or government to bail them out. Thats how you produce Democrat voters and bankrupt the government. A nation of Julias waiting in line for biscuits. That is the goal.
Has Brooks decided to go full pedo, or is he still sticking with "half your age plus seven"?
In New York Magazine, Chait writes about the rule of “no enemies to the left” and how that prevents the Democrats from responding effectively to legitimate criticism of the radicals who are part of the left/liberal coalition. He compares this to the McCarthy era where, according to Chait, McCarthy lied about the scale of communist penetration of the US government in order to tarnish the entire New Deal, and the effective response was to agree that Communist spies should be punished while pointing out the many lies that McCarthy made. The ineffective response was to deny that there were any communist spies/agents of influence. In the current moment, Chait says the Democrats must be willing to criticize the few radicals who are pushing radical racial/gender theories in schools, while defending the vast majority of schools that aren’t doing that.
I think Chait is right to some extent, but he greatly understates the degree to which the education schools and the education establishment have been captured by radical theories about race and gender. I think the Democratic coalition has some fundamental contradictions that can’t be papered over.
Of course, so do the Republicans. That’s a story for another day.
Ah Brooksie--too soon old, too late smart. And considering the gerontacracy that controls the Democrat party, they may be too old to get there.
Or more simply put: Fascists can never admit when they're wrong. To do so demonstrates weakness, and fascists must always appear to be powerful.
Enigma-
Rs can take the moral high ground by stating that their anti-abortion stance is against their interest, that abortions decrease (future) D voters, but that Rs are standing on principle against political self interest. That has the advantage of being true, but requires a smart R political strategist. They are rare on the ground outside Tallahassee.
Dream billboard placed in black neighborhood by R candidate, preferably next to Planned Parenthood clinic:
"Democrats: 'We can't enslave blacks anymore, and we can't segregate blacks anymore. Only thing left is aborting them.'"
henge2243 said...
The answer depends on the goal. Certainly Marxism is the better instrument with which to impoverish people or to consolidate police and state power in the hands of a small group of the "best and the brightest".
good point. IF the democrats (hypothetically) were intentionally TRYING to destroy America,
WHAT (if anything) would they be doing differently?
Anyone? Anyone at all?
Such horseshit. The Dems are in full midterm panic like teens not expecting the folks back so soon.
Gee, Brooks is really good at summarizing the Democrat platform. It is a model of concision.
Yes, the New Deal happened once. Back when fascism was all the rage in Europe and massive interventionist control of industry was considered a good alternative to total bureaucratic direct control of the Third International (communists). But Democrats are operating on an accelerated timeline now. Instead of a couple decades of high productivity due to industry rebuilding in the rest of the world, they went straight to the 1960s high expansionary spending and the 1970s high inflation. But wait, also comes the uncontrollable world events that feed the prices outpacing income. Is this year 1978 on the path to a 1980 type change?
We have a FED that has to totally change its philosophy and that usually requires a change of the level of Reagan's election.
Tim Miller writes over at Bulwark:
By January 6th, Trump had been the number one story in politics for five years, upending all the conventional wisdom that came before. He was in the middle of an extended, multi-pronged effort to undermine our democracy. It may have been boobish, but it captured the imaginations of tens of millions of Americans.
You fucking idiots. You maroons. You really thought all this {waves hands} was over? That you were going to be let off that easy? That [perhaps] bipartisanship was coming back to Washington? That the radicals who stormed the Capitol wouldn’t get their dander up over Joe Biden? That the Republicans were going to bring back some old-timey comity?
The Party is over. THIS is the party now.
Gadfly, get back to us when you FIX your own party. Those Squad members run things now.
Brooks has these vestigial conservative appurtenances. He doesn't really have a conservative spine. It's more like a coccyx. Perhaps with further evolution it will completely disappear.
wendybar said...
Gadfly, get back to us when you FIX your own party. Those Squad members run things now.
Wendy, sweetie, I have been a conservative Republican my entire life, which means, far longer than you - when you suddenly decided that MAGA populism equals conservatism. That is the problem Donald brought to GOP politics along with his grift which featured a two billion dollar gift to Jared and Ivanka from the Saudi Prince and a $1.2 billion bailout of Jared's real estate debt calamity for 666 Fifth Avenue by the Qataris. So if the Kushner family got $3.2 billion - how much additional cash came directly to TFG?
So when will you begin helping me fix my Republican party by telling it like it really is?
Bugaboo: an object of obsessive, exaggerated fear or anxiety; a difficult or persistent problem. So Donald Trump is the Great Bugaboo to the Left.
The photo with the column is more interesting to me than the column itself. An upside down view of an American flag, holding on to the pole by a thread, about to blow away, with dark, ominous clouds in the background. I imagine this is how the writers and readers at the New York Times view America right now--under threat, in danger of blowing away. And all because an opposition party exists, exercises power, and has other ideas on how a society thrives.
Here is my take on the "New Deal" reference.
We often hear about the changes that new Presidents make to the art work in the oval office at the start of their presidency. Obama made a point of returning the bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. Well, President Biden's office features a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Carrying that theme forward . . . Biden met with presidential historians early in his presidency -- Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Michael Beschloss among them. It was reported that a major topic of discussion was the parallels that Biden's presidency shared with FDR's. FDR's America was devastated by the Great Depression. And FDR came into office and took action to fix America's problems with New Deal legislation. For Biden, replace "Great Depression" with "COVID pandemic" And Biden moved forward proposing rescue plans, infrastructure programs, and "Build Back Better" . . . proposing to spend trillions upon trillions of (borrowed or printed) money to get America back on its feet again.
The idea of drawing favorable comparisons between FDR and Biden strikes me as ludicrous on its face. Not to mention that FDR came into office on the strength of a landslide, bringing strong majorities into the House and the Senate (House majority was nearly 200 seats). Clearly, FDR came into with a mandate to act. In the alternative, Biden came into office with a fairly narrow electoral majority. The Democrats hold a narrow to non-existent majority in the two houses of Congress. Biden's mandate was to "not be Trump."
So . . . I think Brooks' reference to One New Deal is to remind Democrats that Joe Biden is a poor comparison to FDR, and the idea of President Biden to govern as FDR did is a fantasy.
The New Deal, by the way, is still very much with us, in the form of the two-headed monster, Social Security and Medicare, as well as in a thousand smaller ways. For better or for worse, and worse, and worse, this regime is the linear descendant of the one Roosevelt constructed to save Stalin.
Invoking the New Deal is part shibboleth, part religious dogma. The Democrats have become very much like my father-in-law who spent his childhood going to Mass every week with his very devout mother; he knows when to kneel, when to cross himself, when to make the appropriate mumble that sort of sounds like a response, but couldn't define the Holy Trinity if his life depended on it.
Hey Gadfly, comments are supposed to be about David Brooks and his advice column to Democrats in today's NYT, not your Trump derangement.
The Brooks advice column follows the Mark Penn column with similar Democrats published four days ago in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/opinion/biden-voters-midterms.html.
See Karl Rove's column yesterday in the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/karl-rove-how-badly-will-the-democrats-lose-approval-rating-biden-senate-house-races-midterm-2022-election-inflation-build-back-better-student-debt-11651091790?mod=mhp.
Also see Karl Rove's advice column to Democrats dated April 14: https://www.wsj.com/articles/karl-rove-democrats-advice-midterm-election-11650036764.
Six months until midterm elections. Things look so bad for Dems that even Karl Rove is offering his advice to them...
“I think the Democrats do know all these things, they are just too deeply invested in portraying Republics as toxic and can't easily concede that Republican concerns are not bugaboos”. Well yes, I agree, it’s always easy to fixate on your opponents shortcomings while overlooking your own, and tribalism is running strong right now. But I’d like to draw attention to another dynamic at work here. Both parties draw most of their leadership from the same general class of well educated, wealthy or upper middle class, professional, managerial kinds of people. These people on average are to the left of the country as a whole. This make the Democrats a left leaning party with leaders farther left, and the Republicans a right leaning party with a leadership that is (privately) to the left of their party, although to the right of the Democrats leadership. Elected representatives who differ from the consensus in the Democratic party are almost always people who have to differ to survive electorally, like Manchin. On the Republican side, they often come from red states and districts, like Romney. The result is more internal debate within the Republicans. Trump, or Trump like figures, can challenge the party leadership with some hope of success using the argument that the challenger is genuine, and party leaders (like Romney or Jeb Bush) are phonies. A moderate Democrat can’t make that case. In a left leaning party, the more left person can always easily be made to seem the more genuine. That was why Bernie was such a problem for the party leadership in both 2016 and 2020; ridicules as he was, they really had no just grounds for excluding him. There were real policy differences between Trump and his opponents in 2016, on immigration and foreign policy, for example. In 2020 Biden, Harris, Warren, and the rest; what did they really disagree on? Tactics on how to get where they all wanted to go, and who would be top dog. The Democrats have an inclination to stifle debate, but they also have a structural problem that makes it harder for anyone to get traction against that inclination. This feeds on itself over time. I read somewhere once that the Japanese have a saying “The nail that stands up gets hammered down”. That’s their spirit now.
Good show, gadfly ! That was very amusing. Sad, but amusing.
Some lessons cannot be learned through words, only through brutal, crushing experience.
Gadfly morosely expounded,
"So when will you begin helping me fix my Republican party by telling it like it really is?"
You haven't been paying attention. Trump fixed it. He made it not about privilege and graft. That's good, right?
Peter Spieker- I believe that the R party is much more diverse in ideology than the D party and is also much more honest in it's selection process than the D's, which is why Trump got the nomination and Bernie got bought out and his supporters screwed. That's a strength and I am proud of that.
BUT, it gives the opposition the opportunity to take the most extreme and idiotic parts of the R party and make them the brand. For example, I remember the R a few years ago that said that if a woman got raped she couldn't get pregnant. The D's stay on message better, or more honestly put, are more hypocritical. .
As others have said here, the D's will do anything to win. The R's won't. R's tend to have lives and religion to balance out greed and ambition while D's have nothing but a thirst for power. Of course that's a generalization but not by much. See CS Lewis on who he would rather be governed by.
The New Deal, by the way, is still very much with us, in the form of the two-headed monster, Social Security and Medicare
I’m always amused when the American right speaks of odious Social Security like it’s indistinguishable from Five-Year Plans and the Gulag. Social Security in fact rivals the American military in popularity, especially among oldsters who (coincidentally) vote heavily Republican. The ideological blindness to that fact reminds me of Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on clinging to positions that are popular with 20 percent of the electorate.
Gadfly is a Romney-Cheney Republican.
Gadfly - funny how you obsess over Jared's business deals (which are not illegal!) - but not a peep from you over Biden family crooked-corrupt hidden tax payer laundered secret self enriching ILLEGAL business deals...
Social Security is a good idea. I'm all for it.
But - despite the fact that S S is an untouchable sacred* cow - it's poorly run, under-funded, and is a pitiful pittance.
*fixed
Social Security in fact rivals the American military in popularity, especially among oldsters who (coincidentally) vote heavily Republican.
-Earnest Prole
True enough, but that's because its very generous benefits are being paid today, with the bill being sent to our children.
Even more true for Medicare, except that that bill goes to grandchildren and later generations.
The unfunded amounts scheduled to be paid before we boomers die off is approx 50 trillion dollars.
Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion.
The New Deal sustained the economic and social deficits until the accounts were cleared through war! What is it good for? Then revived under modern single/central/monopolistic schemes.
Emigration reform to mitigate the progress of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform and collateral damage at both ends of the bridge and throughout.
Hah! You can abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too; but, eventually, people... persons recognize the progressive path and grade and will either stand up or take a knee, permanently.
Social Security works because it is funded and operated with fixed inputs and outlays, which allows it to be competitive with private capital (i.e. retained earnings) investments.
Medicare, Medicaid/Obamacares do not work and fail similar to education, housing, etc., because these schemes operate with, not progressive costs, but rather progressive prices and availability that distort and share/shift responsibility.
People of color, brown, yellow, white, rainbow is a thing, a color bloc, or diversity [dogma] division. Colored people is a thing, a reference to an external, low information attribute.
Deficits represent the difference productivity and consumption in borrowing from tomorrow with the expectation that prices will eventually recover and follow costs.
The unfunded amounts scheduled to be paid before we boomers die off is approx 50 trillion dollars.
No shit. Some of us have been saying since the late eighties that very small revisions to the program will ensure its solvency well into the future, but the dopey American way is to ignore the car needs oil until the engine seizes up.
Democrats know all those things. The problem is that they are just unable to resist the immediate thrill of hearing the applause of fringe special interest groups. It's a form of gluttony for the ego centric.
Heh, over the past couple of weeks in my local rag, when discussing the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter, several of the Democrat / progressive posters literally have argued that “Dictators have an agenda of more free speech! That’s what they want! We have to restrict speech to keep dictators away!”
I mean… what? Since when has any dictator pushed for free speech?
But this is the local Democrat party’s argument nowadays.
Of course, they also at their state convention endorsed Evan McMullin, an independent, as the Democrat party choice to go against Mike Lee for US Senate—stabbing their own candidate in the back. So they aren’t real bright, is what I’m saying.
The New Deal? New Deal deficits, adjusted for inflation, were tiny by today's standards.
And even so, after FDR's speeches castigating "malefactors of great wealth" for the 1936 election, the U.S. economy crashed badly post-election, in 1937.
Alternate title: "Seven Things Democrats Have to Pretend They Will Address--Fast!"
Shut up, David Brooks.
David Brooks represents the liberal viewpoint on Fridays on the PBS NewsHour. Unfortunately his counterpart, fake conservative Jonathan Capehart, tends to always agree with David Brooks. They need to replace Capehart with a real conservative.
Social Security in fact rivals the American military in popularity,
People like free money, news at 11.
David Brooks - he's not for Republicans anymore.
People like free money, news at 11.
We're in violent agreement.
So when will you begin helping me fix my Republican party by telling it like it really is?
"My Republican Party" is an antique. Died years ago. Wendell Wilkie was the last candidate.
David Brooks is a liberal who pretends to be some sort of "Conservative". He's made it clear he's not an "American Conservative" or a "European conservative" but some sort of special, unique "David Brooks conservative".
But whatever he is, he's somewhere, maybe 1 inch to the Right of most liberal/leftists, so he's in the NYT's and on PBS as the "Rightwing voice".
Someone wrote that William F. Buckley considered brooks to be editor of the national review, but decided against it ONLY because Brooks is Jewish. Which says a lot about Buckley. And what NR really stood for.
Wendall Wilkie is one of the most unintentionally funny "Republicans" in American history. He was a delegate to the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention, and supported FDR in 1932. He didn't get around to registering as a Republican until 1938, and then ran as the Republican nominee against FDR in 1940.
After he lost, he aupported most of FDR's agenda and dismissed his attacks on FDR as "campaign rhetoric". After his defeat in the 1944 winsconsin primary, he told FDR they should form a new "liberal Party". When he died in the fall of 1944, he still hadn't decided whether to endorse FDR or sit out the election.
Earnest Prole said...
"The unfunded amounts scheduled to be paid before we boomers die off is approx 50 trillion dollars.
No shit. Some of us have been saying since the late eighties that very small revisions to the program will ensure its solvency well into the future, but the dopey American way is to ignore the car needs oil until the engine seizes up."
Just give me my money back. They don't even have to pay any interest. Just give me back my money and I'll work it out from there.
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