Is America Still Red Vs. Blue, or Purpler?
9th Nov 2005, 20:46 GMT
That’s the question posed in Erin McClam’s recent article. As you’d imagine with an AP story, there’s some ’sloppiness’ in their facts and a bias in their opinions that aren’t fact-based. Here’s a sampling of this phenomenon: Family dinners became shouting matches. Bush and Kerry signs were snatched from yards. Blue and red were at war. Technically, these are factually accurate. That said, far more Bush signs were snatched from yards than Kerry. In the city where I live, the local Bush-Cheney office recorded that a third of the lawn signs issued were stolen or destroyed. This is nothing more than the AP’s attempt to play the ‘moral equivalence card’ and it’s offensive. If you want signs of hope, you can read about the hundreds of millions of dollars that poured in for relief after a nation watched, united in its horror, as a humanitarian nightmare took hold in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. You can remember the nomination of John Roberts for chief justice, which sailed through the Senate. And if you want reasons to despair, you can flick on your computer and read the blogs, where conservatives accuse liberals of being unhinged “moonbats,” and liberals fire back that the right is a collection of “wingnuts.” Or you can reflect on the immediate partisan warfare that broke out over President Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Let’s critique this paragraph: 1. Americans ALWAYS help each other out and always will. Alot of this is attributed to what gets mentioned in passing as our Judeo-Christian heritage. While much has changed, that still hasn’t. 2. “You can remember the nomination of John Roberts for chief justice, which sailed through the Senate.” The reason it sailed through because he was so extraordinarily qualified that an fifteen-year-old noticed it. It wasn’t because the moonbat wing of the Democratic Party got reasonable. I won’t cite specifics on this. Instead, I’ll simply direct you to Democratic Underground or The Daily Kos. Read their daily conspiracy theories and tell me that they’re reasonable. Then read Powerline Blog, Hugh Hewitt.com, and California Conservative and tell me how reasonable sounding those people are. The difference is like night and day. Yes, you can disagree with Hugh Hewitt, the Powerline guys or our great team of conservative writers at CalCon but it’s impossible to say we’re totally unreasonable. If you disagree with the Kossacks, they’re likely to call you fascists or Nazis. That doesn’t sound reasonable to me. What say you? But ask Guy Burgess, who leads the Conflict Research Consortium at the University of Colorado, and he will paint a bleaker picture. —– To Burgess, this is still a nation of dueling political slogans rather than of real, substantive discussion. “I’m not sure that it’s gotten any better,” he says. “It may be a little more polite and a little less focused than before the election. But that’s just because the election was an immediate power contest that tends to bring out this kind of thing.” The notion that a political scientist like Mr. Burgess could say that Republicans are about spewing “political slogans rather than of real substantive” issue arguments is stupid. The truth is that Democrats are devoid of newsworthiness but are worthy of coverage only because of their mantra of “culture of corruption”. It all reminds Stathis Kalyvas, a professor at Yale University who studies international politics, of Europe in the 1970s, when all politics was about division and it seemed no one could agree on anything. Today, he notes with irony, governing in Europe is about moderate platforms, appealing to the center. “In the U.S. today one gets the sense a lot of people have difficulty just discussing things with one another,” he says. “There seems to be a lot of bad feeling. The bloggers, the public, you get a sense that people are much more fanatical.” There you have it. Bloggers are fanatical and they’re to blame for the polarization. At least in Stathis Kalyvas’ mind. This thought should be eliminated and minimalized at every chance. Unless he’s thinking about DU or The Daily Kos. Then I’m with him. If it’s substance you’re looking for, you won’t find it in the Democratic Party. (Other than Joe Lieberman anyway.) Cross-posted at BoxerWatch
Latest news from California Conservative:
- Dems Suggest Bush Lead the Way on Iraq
- Dems Suggest Bush Lead the Way on Iraq
- Public Education At Work: California Student Ban Pledge of Allegiance
- Unlike Democrats, Romania Will Not Abandon Iraq
- ACLU Seeks Again to Block Wiretaps
- Why Do Terrorists Prefer Democrats?
- Gen. Pace’s Alternative to the Iraq Study Group
- San Francisco: Past and Present — A Reader’s Retrospective
- Why the U.S. Cannot Timetable Iraq
- San Francisco School Board Votes to Dump JROTC Program