lordjedi said:As far as Clinton goes, he had a real Republican congress to contend with during 6 of his 8 years. Remember the "Contract with America"? Clinton didn't get to spend nearly the amount he wanted. And his "surplus" was a projected surplus. See this link http://www.letxa.com/articles/16
Wow, I didn't really ever believe all of the "surplus" nonsense we were fed back then, but that definitely just explained to me why it was bullshit. How the news media can be so complicit with such a lie by our politicians makes me angry. Treating social security income—which has its own obligations—as a fully legitimate income is criminal as far as I'm concerned.
Otherwise, yes, the Republicans did help appose a lot of bad spending under Clinton, but not too much. They began many of their own bad spending habits during those years (we just had the dot com bubble hiding it). Also, you have to admit that Clinton was concerned with cutting spending more than most of his fellow Democrats (and the first-term version of Bush).
lordjedi said:
Yep. The Republicans tried to win the hearts of Democrats by turning into Democrats. Unfortunately, it didn't matter. People hate Republicans because they're Republicans, not because of what they do (historically, they've done far more good than Democrats).
They didn't try to just win the hearts of Democrats with incredibly wasteful spending, they spent even more trying to maintain internal Republican loyalty. The Democrats were completely in control of the United States legislature for almost half a century before them and yet, at the same time, they were a very fragmented and diverse coalition of interests. Each member's loyalty to the Democrat party (and the votes the party wanted) was not maintained via ideaology, but wasteful, you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours spending. A lot of spending was also given to Republicans over those forty years, but not nearly as much (Republicans were treated like dogs deserving only the occasional bone). Republicans finally upset the Democrat majority in 1994 by running on a very idealogically driven campaign. However, once they got into power they immediately stopped being strong on idealogy and instead opted to ensure internal loyalty through spending in an exact mimic of the Democrat party that came before. Not only that, but they didn't even do it very well. They allowed Republicans to have all sorts of goodies in comparison to the loyalty they got back and they even let Democrats go fairly wild. They even sucked when it came to bullying Democrats around in the same fashion that they had been previously bullied. In terms of imitating Democrat leadership, Republicans were still acting like they were in the minority. All in all, they were weak, pathetic, and had no guiding vision or principles they cared about; everything was all about growing a "big tent party" where it didn't matter what Republicans believed or stood for so long as they wanted the R in front of their name.
The main reason I highly dislike McCain is because he's from both the part of the Republican party that resists "conservative" ideology and principles while also being from the part of the party that wants to wimp out and be nice all of the time. It's a bad combination.
Either you should stand on fucking principle or be a corrupt hard ass! Choose one! At least then we know how to regard you. This Mister-Rogers, I'm-such-an-experienced-nice-guy nonsense is obnoxious and ultimately accomplishes practically nothing . . . ah well. :)