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Left/Right: Who has won the PR battle?

WCH said:
The abortion and Gay rights issues are the major hamstrings but, when it comes down to what voters believe are our top problems, these hardly show up on the radar.
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Compared to integration and the war in Vietnam, those issues are just little blips. Most people don't care that much, and they understand that the politicians can't do anything about them anyway.
 
US Conservative said:
(looks around at Obama economy)
False on its face.
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That's a shame, how long have you been out of work? Have you also lost a lot of money on the stock market? Are your neighbors out of work as well?
 
US Conservative said:
Still blaming Bush, eh? Totally makes your case that Obama is a great President.
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You judge someone by comparing what they started with by what they ended with. There's no doubt the economy is in much, much, much better shape near the end of the Obama Presidency than it was when he took over.
 
pbrauer said:
That's a shame, how long have you been out of work? Have you also lost a lot of money on the stock market? Are your neighbors out of work as well?
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I haven't been out of work since I started working at 16. Its called a work ethic and learning the skills that other people will pay you well for.

That used to be called common sense, but the left lost that some time ago. Perhaps they never had it.
 
How does a thread about partisan sides (generically) performing in appealing to the public somehow turn into a debate about specific presidents and how economic criteria is measured? :roll:

Actually, I could point the finger at one specific person for derailing the thread, but I won't.
 
US Conservative said:
I haven't been out of work since I started working at 16. Its called a work ethic and learning the skills that other people will pay you well for.

That used to be called common sense, but the left lost that some time ago. Perhaps they never had it.
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So you think only "the left" is out of work? Please explain.
 
US Conservative said:
Pete, go back and read your last several posts. You brought up unemployment, not me.

I sometimes think you just randomly type things.
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I was being facetious, you couldn't see that? ;)
 
celticwar17 said:
Yea, I agree with you... the only media the right wins is talk radio.

Do you think this is a good thing? Or would you rather The PR battle be evenly matched?
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More evenly matched would give conservative values a fair hearing, which they aren't getting now.

WCH said:
I recently got some grief for posting political opinion on FB. Personally it's all social media to me except for the echo chambers
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Same here. Seems that social media is going along the same vein as 'either agree with me or shutup' so prevalent in the left echo chambers.


Dittohead not! said:
Yes. Better to debate politics with people you're not likely to ever meet in the real world.
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WCH said:
That's sad. No wonder we're in such a mess.
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I agree. These taboo topics really need to be discussed with mutual respect for other's point of view and opinions. I think the mess we are in is largely due to the lack of this respectful discussion.

radcen said:
I'm willing to DISCUSS politics with anybody, even in person, but I require civility and honest give and take.
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Where we collectively need to be. I agree.
 
Actually this thread delivers. It shows how political partisan takes over the debate and not the ISSUES. We will never really address issues if we keep fighting left vs right. Take the economy for instants. The issue is how it works which is mainly through financial manipulation and speculation. It keeps getting worse as the decades go on. In the 70s, the economy was mostly based on production and just a little of the aforementioned.
 
It seems like social is fairly evenly divided between liberal and conservative, and I consider that to be a huge win for conservatives. The MSM is so dominated by the left, many people think that you're a psycho if you aren't a liberal. Because of social media, many people have learned that their own friends are conservatives. Before that they thought that conservatives only lived out in the woods in bomb shelters.
 
US Conservative said:
Still blaming Bush, eh? Totally makes your case that Obama is a great President.
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Absolutely. Bush left a huge mess...the fact that he has been out of office 6 years doesn't change the facts (as much as you guys hope that it does). Bush is absolutely to blame for driving our country to the brink of economic and moral bankruptcy, the likes that this country has not known since the great depression (which is why GWB will always be remembered as the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century). Has Obama been a "great" President. I would say no. Has he been a good President, the facts would say yes.
 
disneydude said:
Absolutely. Bush left a huge mess...the fact that he has been out of office 6 years doesn't change the facts (as much as you guys hope that it does). Bush is absolutely to blame for driving our country to the brink of economic and moral bankruptcy, the likes that this country has not known since the great depression (which is why GWB will always be remembered as the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century). Has Obama been a "great" President. I would say no. Has he been a good President, the facts would say yes.
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I disagree-Obama HAS been a great president-great at blaming others for his own shortcomings.

Just what we need for a POTUS. :roll:
 
Why do I sense that you are one of those people who deflected blame for 9/11 off of Bush (although it occurred on his watch) and tried to blame in on Clinton. I venture to bet I'm right, correct?
 
disneydude said:
Absolutely. Bush left a huge mess...the fact that he has been out of office 6 years doesn't change the facts (as much as you guys hope that it does). Bush is absolutely to blame for driving our country to the brink of economic and moral bankruptcy, the likes that this country has not known since the great depression (which is why GWB will always be remembered as the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century). Has Obama been a "great" President. I would say no. Has he been a good President, the facts would say yes.
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Here’s a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

Who Caused the Economic Crisis?
 
As in most discussions of right vs left, conservative vs liberal, we haven't defined our terms. Reading over the above posts, it appears that the meanings of those terms are shifting from one person and one post to the next. Some appear to have an imagination populated by "those of the left" or perhaps "rightists" that exist only in their imaginations.

Does conservative mean Republican and liberal Democrat? Not in my lexicon. It seems to me that there are several unrelated issues that get lumped together under one banner or the other, with most people taking different sides of those issues.
 
Dittohead not! said:
As in most discussions of right vs left, conservative vs liberal, we haven't defined our terms. Reading over the above posts, it appears that the meanings of those terms are shifting from one person and one post to the next. Some appear to have an imagination populated by "those of the left" or perhaps "rightists" that exist only in their imaginations.

Does conservative mean Republican and liberal Democrat? Not in my lexicon. It seems to me that there are several unrelated issues that get lumped together under one banner or the other, with most people taking different sides of those issues.
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IMO, precious few people follow an actual ideology and examine the world according to the precepts thereof. The large majority simply conform to whatever it is their little peeps are saying on the subject. Instead of asking "is this in line with liberal or conservative principles", all they ask is "what are liberals or conservatives saying about this?". When you factor in levels of authoritarianism and dogmatism, what is often passed as liberal or conservative isn't liberal or conservative at all.
 
Gardener said:
IMO, precious few people follow an actual ideology and examine the world according to the precepts thereof. The large majority simply conform to whatever it is their little peeps are saying on the subject. Instead of asking "is this in line with liberal or conservative principles", all they ask is "what are liberals or conservatives saying about this?". When you factor in levels of authoritarianism and dogmatism, what is often passed as liberal or conservative isn't liberal or conservative at all.
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Exactly. And, when the person who identifies with the "right" or the "left" finds himself on the opposite side of a given issue from others who self identify in the same way, then we begin to add prefixes and adjectives: Neoliberal, paleoconservative, whatever. The fact of the matter is, the world is far more complex than a one dimensional continuum from right to left.
 
radcen said:
Left/Right: Who has won the PR battle? Non-MSM battle, I mean. I'd say it's something of a split.

The Right long ago won the talk radio battle. The Left tried to counter with people like Al Franken and others, but pretty much every Left talk show has been an utter failure. Talk radio is still the Right's domain, and I expect to remain so for a long time.

Where the Left has won, or is winning, is social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc. From my perspective, Left points-of-view are all over the place and overwhelming the Right point-of-view on pretty much all topics. Right voices, again from my observations, and I have a pretty diverse set of friends and acquaintances, are few.

Now, if I were to analyze the effects of this, in my estimation this bodes well for the Left. Talk radio is "old school" and static and appeals to more introverted people, while social media is new and trendy and dynamic and appeals to a younger audience that is more apt to interact more diversely.
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Particular battles? Sure, one side or another may claim victory. As for the war: everybody has and continues to lose.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Exactly. And, when the person who identifies with the "right" or the "left" finds himself on the opposite side of a given issue from others who self identify in the same way, then we begin to add prefixes and adjectives: Neoliberal, paleoconservative, whatever. The fact of the matter is, the world is far more complex than a one dimensional continuum from right to left.
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What I think is missing from any sort of political axis is the dynamic between conformity and independence. People who are ultra-conformist create terms like RINO and DINO to try to shame people into falling in line. The dichotomy between our individuality and our need to form social groups comes into play in so many myriad ways that the labels cannot really address.

I also think that identity politics and multiculturalism have resultied in almost a paradigm shift in relation to liberal being associated with left and conservative with right. A perfect example of this would lie in the reaction to the wearing of the Burka, where it is now quite common for those on the left to defend this barbaric apparatus that represents the complete domination of women , while conservatives assail it for the expression of extreme misogyny it represents. The left, in this case, is more prone to supporting the arch conservatism inherent in the practice and the right more prone to advancing social justice, and this only because of the highly conformist mind set created by the dogma of multiculturaliusm.
 
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