If you care about civil rights you should be a Republican

SouthernDemocrat · 01-21-08, 11:29 AM

Since this keeps coming up in other threads, I will just restate my arguments about why this is just absurd.

In the entire history of civilization totalitarianism has never been established through a social safety net, civil rights protections, environmental protections and oversight, labor protections, a separation of church and state, nor through vigorous civil liberties protections.

Without exception, totalitarianism is always established by governments that convince its citizens into surrendering their rights to privacy and other civil liberties in exchange for promises of security, ultra-nationalism, fostering bigotry, using the government as a vehicle to impose specific religious beliefs, and through the mixing of government and religion.

That does not sound like an American Liberal to me.

The only area I can possibly think of where liberals have attempted to intrude upon civil liberties is in overly restricting gun laws which I do believe are a mistake on their part.

In terms of Civil Liberties, some of the provisions of the patriot act, and other Bush Administration measures largely stemming from executive orders and signing statements certainly are intrusive into Civil Liberties. The suspension of habeas corpus for enemy combatants, their efforts to circumvent judicial oversight on wiretaps, and various other "big brother" attempts by the Bush Administration are all attacks on Civil Liberties.

Of course it goes it goes much further than that, the philosophical criteria for Judicial Appointments is alarming as well as it seems to be one where Federal Constitutional rights and protections for the individual in their view does not extend to the state and local level. In essence it would seem that in their view a state or local law can intrude upon a federal constitutional right. The Bush Administration's attempts at restricting public input into the management of public lands comes to mind as well, while it has not gotten a lot of news coverage, its unprecedented, and it smacks of totalitarianism as public lands by definitions are lands that are in the public trust, not the kings estate.

Moreover, their attempts at extending executive branch power are alarming as well. With the unprecedented number of signing statements, their attempts to completely avoid congressional oversight, and the general philosophy behind many in the Bush Administration of an executive branch that in many ways usurps other branches of government, smacks of an authoritarian philosophy. After all, historically totalitarianism does not tend to arise directly from legislators, but rather from executives that usurp the power of other institutions of government.

Finally, their disregard for a fundamental principle of liberty, in that an individuals right to live their life as they see fit extends so far as to not impede another individuals ability to do the same. Their rhetoric against same sex marriage or civil unions certainly conflicts with that basic principle. In a free society when a government seeks to restrict the rights of the individual or group, then their has to be a reasonable overriding concern, the personal bias of an individual or even a majority, is not a reasonable overriding concern like say environmental concerns would be or public safety concerns would be.

26 X World Champs · 01-21-08, 11:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MC.no.spin

Yes I am. We happen to have a perfect record on preventing terrorist attacks since 9/11, and in asking you for a name of an innocent person who lost his civil rights because of the Patriot Act, you failed to name one who actually wasn't involved in illegal terrorist activities. Case closed.

Now this is a typical, mind blowing example of how EVERYONE's rights have been raped by the Patriot Act, Warrantless Wiretapping etc.!

You're demand for an "innocent person" is a bunch of BS because civil rights in the USA are offered to everyone and it doesn't take a high IQ to grasp that if we take away rights of people our government perceives as guilty already that down the road many innocent people will be screwed.

How is it that you are unable to comprehend this most basic and most obvious fact?

I do hope Romney is your nominee because he will lose easier than McCain will....Is there a more disingenuous politician in modern US history than Mitt Romney?

The silenced majority · 01-21-08, 11:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Southern Democrat

In the entire history of civilization totalitarianism has never been established through a social safety net....//

Without exception, totalitarianism is always established by governments that convince its citizens into surrendering their rights to privacy and other civil liberties in exchange for promises of security...

What's the difference?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jray

You want me to keep going?

Yes. I need another laugh after this:

"How about how he relizes that he is simply a republican token yet it doesn't upset him? How about how he relizes that being black in america puts you at a disadvantage yet he doesn't want to try and correct that?"

26 X World Champs · 01-21-08, 11:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MC.no.spin

Here we are again with liberals working overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.

While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security.

Why don't we round up all dem Liberals and ship them to Gitmo so that you can have a nice pure white Christian America...is that what you're shooting for?

Sounds like you have lost or never had the ability to intellectualize our Constitution and how great a document it is and how it allows for society to err on the side of personal freedom rather than your preferred "guilty until proven innocent belief....

the makeout hobo · 01-21-08, 11:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MC.no.spin

José Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir and
Muhajir Abdullah) was found guilty of all charges against him on August 16, 2007, by a federal jury, which found that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was scheduled to be sentenced on December 5, 2007, but his sentencing was postponed to January, due to the death of a family member of the Judge who will sentence him.

I think it's telling that he felt the need to post a picture of Padilla just so we could see how brown and scary he was. Also, if you remember, he was booked for trying to detonate a dirty bomb, a charge that turned out to be bogus.

Who had their rights infringed by the Patriot Act?

For one thing, the FBI has been abusing and misusing the patriot act. More than a thousand times, its estimated.

FBI abused Patriot Act powers, audit finds | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
firstamendmentcenter.org: news

MC.no.spin · 01-21-08, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Liberal Hatemongers
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS
January 17, 2008; Page A16

A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros -- he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, "Southerners are prejudiced."

The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, "The right wing, that is not where America's at . . . It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots."

What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.

As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.

In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.

Mr. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of the forthcoming book "Gross National Happiness."

Liberal Hatemongers - WSJ.com

MC.no.spin · 01-21-08, 05:01 PM

Some excerpts from Angela McGlowan's Bamboozled: How Americans are being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda.

Quote:

"(E)ven when voters are informed about the murderous, hate-filled history of the Democrats, liberals erase their party's entire history with a blanket statement that claims, over the last forty years, there has been a migration of the racists out of the Democratic Party and into the GOP. Secretary Jackson says that's hardly true. "Now the Democrats came back with a unique argument and they said that they all became Republicans. Only one of them became a Republican, and that was Strom Thurmond. The rest of them stayed Democrats until the day that they died -- they didn't change parties....Fulbright and Albert Gore, Sr. (father of former vice president Al Gore), et cetera." -- P.171-172

"Moreover, Americans should never forget that it was as recently as 1967 that Southern Democrats filibustered federal anti-lynching legislation. Lynching! In 1967!" -- P.172

"Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond. See, that's a racket -- they have got to keep this information from being disseminated. They have to, if they are going to stay in place," Secretary Alphonso Jackson said. "That's what most black people don't understand. The civil rights movement is unlike what Reverend King talked about -- it's a business now. So the business is to keep us uninformed -- that's the business. Isn't it amazing that Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Rod Paige have never been on the cover of Jet, Ebony, or Essence, or Black Enterprise magazine? Isn't it amazing?" -- P.181

"The NAACP should know about funding from big groups, because it is funded by liberal white organizations," (Armstrong) Williams told the Washington Times. "It gets money and backing from the NEA [National Education Association], the AFL-CIO, and look at who is sponsoring its convention." Interestingly, the sponsors include some of the very companies liberals love to hate most, such as Wal-Mart, Shell Oil, and General Motors, each of whom chipped in anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 for past NAACP conventions." -- P.191

"It's often said that the Democrats fight "for the little guy." That's true: liberals fight to make sure the little guy stays little! Think about it. What if all the little guys were to prosper and become big guys? Then what? Who would liberals pretend to fight for? If the bamboozlers fight for anything, it's to ensure that the little guy stays angry at those nasty conservatives who are holding him down." -- P.207

"As BBC reporter Nick Bryant has written, "The Kennedy administration taught Washington an ugly political lesson: that politicians could win black support through grand symbolic gestures which obviated the need for truly substantive reforms." P.211-212

new coup for you · 01-21-08, 05:04 PM

so are Republicans going to give me the civil right to marry a man?

MC.no.spin · 01-21-08, 05:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by new coup for you

so are Republicans going to give me the civil right to marry a man?

That is one issue that is not just a Republican view. More than half of the population respects the sanctity of marriage and says that gay marriage is not acceptable.

Even California says no. That says a lot. In 2000, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 22, an initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California.

new coup for you · 01-21-08, 05:18 PM

...it's a Civil Right.

So are you only saying Republicans support Civil Right's when it's popular? Like after the Democrats have won the battle?

01-21-08, 11:29 AM	#21
SouthernDemocrat Libertarian Left Join Date: Jun 2005 Last Seen: Today 02:03 PM Location: KC Posts: 6,720 Thanks: 1,005 Thanked 1,825 Times in 1,010 Posts Lean: Independent Gender:	Re: If you care about civil rights you should be a Republican Since this keeps coming up in other threads, I will just restate my arguments about why this is just absurd. In the entire history of civilization totalitarianism has never been established through a social safety net, civil rights protections, environmental protections and oversight, labor protections, a separation of church and state, nor through vigorous civil liberties protections. Without exception, totalitarianism is always established by governments that convince its citizens into surrendering their rights to privacy and other civil liberties in exchange for promises of security, ultra-nationalism, fostering bigotry, using the government as a vehicle to impose specific religious beliefs, and through the mixing of government and religion. That does not sound like an American Liberal to me. The only area I can possibly think of where liberals have attempted to intrude upon civil liberties is in overly restricting gun laws which I do believe are a mistake on their part. In terms of Civil Liberties, some of the provisions of the patriot act, and other Bush Administration measures largely stemming from executive orders and signing statements certainly are intrusive into Civil Liberties. The suspension of habeas corpus for enemy combatants, their efforts to circumvent judicial oversight on wiretaps, and various other "big brother" attempts by the Bush Administration are all attacks on Civil Liberties. Of course it goes it goes much further than that, the philosophical criteria for Judicial Appointments is alarming as well as it seems to be one where Federal Constitutional rights and protections for the individual in their view does not extend to the state and local level. In essence it would seem that in their view a state or local law can intrude upon a federal constitutional right. The Bush Administration's attempts at restricting public input into the management of public lands comes to mind as well, while it has not gotten a lot of news coverage, its unprecedented, and it smacks of totalitarianism as public lands by definitions are lands that are in the public trust, not the kings estate. Moreover, their attempts at extending executive branch power are alarming as well. With the unprecedented number of signing statements, their attempts to completely avoid congressional oversight, and the general philosophy behind many in the Bush Administration of an executive branch that in many ways usurps other branches of government, smacks of an authoritarian philosophy. After all, historically totalitarianism does not tend to arise directly from legislators, but rather from executives that usurp the power of other institutions of government. Finally, their disregard for a fundamental principle of liberty, in that an individuals right to live their life as they see fit extends so far as to not impede another individuals ability to do the same. Their rhetoric against same sex marriage or civil unions certainly conflicts with that basic principle. In a free society when a government seeks to restrict the rights of the individual or group, then their has to be a reasonable overriding concern, the personal bias of an individual or even a majority, is not a reasonable overriding concern like say environmental concerns would be or public safety concerns would be.
	__________________ *“A drink a day keeps the shrink away”* *- Edward Abbey*

01-21-08, 05:04 PM	#28
new coup for you Upper West Side Jacobin Join Date: Aug 2005 Last Seen: Yesterday 06:59 PM Location: Philly, "The City that shoves you back!" Posts: 10,627 Thanks: 785 Thanked 2,296 Times in 1,550 Posts Gender:	Re: If you care about civil rights you should be a Republican so are Republicans going to give me the civil right to marry a man?
	__________________ And why does your tone suggest that you do not care about children?

01-21-08, 05:18 PM	#30
new coup for you Upper West Side Jacobin Join Date: Aug 2005 Last Seen: Yesterday 06:59 PM Location: Philly, "The City that shoves you back!" Posts: 10,627 Thanks: 785 Thanked 2,296 Times in 1,550 Posts Gender:	Re: If you care about civil rights you should be a Republican ...it's a Civil Right. So are you only saying Republicans support Civil Right's when it's popular? Like after the Democrats have won the battle?
	__________________ And why does your tone suggest that you do not care about children?

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