The Good Post Gallery

[Kaine for Senate '18]

This is truth.  The Left has this horrible infantile tendency to lionize and venerate anyone who fights the same people they dislike, turning that figure into a hero, a saint, and, inevitably and always, a martyr.  The modern hard Left has more hagiography going on than the Venerable Bede published in a lifetime, and you can tell they're hungering for Assange to die a horrible death so they can pin him up with Trotsky and Che Guevara on their "martyrs in the heroic struggle" Tumblr background while continuing to not actually do anything other than talk about their masturbatory fantasies of life "after the revolution," when suddenly scarcity, hunger, and unemployment will magically disappear.  Assange's sins will, nay, must be pardoned, just like the Trotskyites have forgotten the Kronstadt Mutiny when Trotsky murdered the sailors who helped make the Revolution a reality in the first place, because the idea of Assange is more important to them than Assange the man is.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

Reading Naso's worshipful idealization of a decade he was about 15 years too young to experience never fails to amuse.

His knowledge of the 80's based on sitcoms is like basing one's knowledge of medieval history on a Rennaissance Faire.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

Of course, and I supported it in real time. The idea of branding cohorts of folks as second class, inferior, and unwanted, is facially just plain evil to me. It does not comport with my conscience. The idea that the libertarian right to control of property should be allowed to trump avoiding slapping scarlet letters on folks suggests a value system that lacks peripheral vision, to put it most euphemistically.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

Oh, how I long for the day when one of my posts will make it into the Good Post Gallery.

There's a relatively simple solution for that. Any idea?

It'll never happen until he defeats the evil racist revisionist Democrats!

[Kaine for Senate '18]

My, the replies do come in. Those who know of me will damn well know how I feel about him.

But first:

If you can't say anything nice in the minutes after someone's death, stfu. Seriously trashy. I'm not a Chavez fanboy by any strecth, but have some basic respect for human dignity.

Did you and yours do so when Jerry Falwell died, Hugh? Just wondering...

I would like to add, that to those here calling Chavez's opponents "trashy", there was a thread called "Were gonna have a party when Thatcher dies." I know for a fact that half of you would celebrate the death of Dick Cheney, who was just as evil during his time in office, if not more evil, than Chavez ever was. So please, get a little bit of consistency in your hypocritical minds.

Quoted for truth. But don't interfere with the usual liberal circle-jerk that goes on on this forum

LOL. I've never heard of people killed by Chavez regime. It seems that the propaganda machine works well.

My, lefties take a seriously revisionist approach to the history of April 11, 2002, don't you?

Here's a hint: the Chavistas fired first.

Want my source for it, Hashemite? Perhaps you can come down off your pedestal and consider a point of view which isn't blindly pro-Chavez...

The Silence and the Scorpion: The Coup Against Chavez and the Making of Modern Venezuela, by Brian A. Nelson. I've actually met the guy - he is not even remotely one of those 'American right-wingers' you liberals trot out when you're defending leftie tyrants. He actually was pro-Chavez when he began his research on the 2002 coup, but when he discovered the facts, well, not so much.

I don't expect to convince a single person, but I so despise the adulation of Chavez by the left that the hell with it, while I don't revel in a creature's death, I won't shed tears for the fall of a tyrant, either. You lot are so anti-American that you'll forgive anything for someone who OPPOSES THE EVIL AMERICANS!!!

[Kaine for Senate '18]

This is why left-wingers like myself are somewhat skeptical of right-wing critiques of Chavez's supposed corruption and disdain for democracy.

Have you ever lived or worked in a high-corruption environment? Where you can be stopped by the police just because they want some cash? Where you are harrassed by bureaucrats whenever you require some kind of document, be it a driving license, a birth certificate, renewal of your car registration, certification that your coffee-shop has adequate fire protection, whatever.? Where your final school exam score depends on how much your parents paid the the teacher? Where hospital doctors ask you for extra payment before they start to look at your sick child?
It is dehumilating - surely, not as dehumilating as being forced to beg for food - but still dehumilating.

And don't pretend that Venezuela is only supposedly high-corruption. Transparency International is anything but a right-wing propaganda organisation. Their rankings are pretty credible, and when they rank Venezuela equal to Haiti and the Chad, corruption there must be really bad. Ask yourself - how come the Venzuelan government's massive investment into the health sector has yielded such poor results ?  Maternal mortality has remained virtually unchanged at apalling high levels, while most other Latin American coutnries have made remarkable progress over the last years. You don't know the answer? Look above.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

To say that oil and gas extraction is the best thing about the planet--which provides, in addition to 'one of the foundations of modern society' (which, in its present incarnation, is so wonderful--why, exactly? This is one of those things we often see asserted and seldom actually argued for coherently. Conservatives didn't used to be pat modernists, or at least weren't so insufferably triumphalist and smug about it), all of our food, all of our water, all of our air, all or nearly all of our mineral wealth including but not limited to oil and gas, all of our physical living space and nearly all of the conditions of our physical existence and sense of place and rootedness and embodiment (things about which conservatives have traditionally cared very strongly), and directly or indirectly the majority of the inspiration for our literature and music and art--is, in addition to being incredibly crass and frankly insane, in fact downright dangerous. You, of course, don't care, you rebarbative futurista worm, whether out of ignorance, malice, or both I have quite given up trying to ascertain.

This is a rather odd run on sentence, but in any case, much of Nathan's food, Nathan's water, Nathan's mineral wealth and Nathan's physical living space is of course partially dependent on oil and gas. This is especially true given that Nathan grew up in privilege and wealth not available to most of the world's population.

It's not a run-on sentence, you blithering moron. It's a very long and complex one. There is actually a difference for people who have a reasonably advanced understanding of how English works. Do you want me to make you a syntax tree? While we're on the subject of your education level, what kind of knuckle-dragging troglodyte thinks that access to oil and gas precedes access to food, water, other kinds of mineral wealth, and physical environment, or is more important to the sustenance of human societies? Or, if you'd prefer, what kind of dishonest, amoral POS pretends to think that in a valiant but failed attempt to score debating points? For that matter, how dare you pretend to give a flying [Inks] about privilege? Your own politics are almost literally fascistic. You're exactly the kind of 'conservative' George P. Grant was trying to warn us about. I think I'm beginning to see why you hate teachers so much. Yours certainly didn't do you many favors.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

Exactly. The liberal counter-culture of the 60s and 70s became the biggest share of the Romney 2012 electorate.

Incorrect. 

The liberal counter-culture of the 1960s was a very loud minority made popular by its radical and newsworthy nature.  For every hippie dancing in the Bay Area, there was a kid in Mississippi protesting busing and school integration.  For every veteran who tossed his medals in protest, there's a Vietnam vet angry we didn't keep going until we won the war.  Oh, and then there's this:

Age 18-24 Exit Polls (became 18-29 in 1988)
1976: Ford 51%, Carter 49%
1980: Carter 45%, Reagan 44%, Anderson 11%
1984: Reagan 61%, Mondale 38%
1988: Bush 53%, Dukakis 47%

As you can see, only in 1980 did the Democrat do better with youth than with olds, and much of that was because 18-24 voted most for the John Anderson option, another Republican, instead of Reagan.

If you really want to see the trend, you'll see that the 1976 18-24 demo barely changed at all over the course of their lives:

1976: Ford +2 (18-24 group)
1980: Reagan +2 (24-29 group)
1984: Reagan +21 (30-39 group)
1988: Bush +8 (30-39 group)
1992: Clinton +2 (30-39 group)
1996: Clinton +7 (40-49 group)
2000: Bush +2 (40-49 group)
2004: Bush +7 (40-49 group)
2008: Obama +1 (50-64 group)
2012: Romney +2 (50-64 group)

As you can see, the youths of 1976 have been consistently 2 points more Republican than the population as a whole in every election except 1980, most of that caused by John Anderson, a Republican, receiving double digit support among this group.  Reagan likely would have won young people by 12 points in 1980 without that third party candidacy.   Jimmy Carter was elected by older Americans of the day not young ones.

The idea that people become conservative as they grow older is a huge myth.  Every conservative in Congress today was a conservative when they were in college, you can just ask them.

The olds of the past were the New Deal Democrats, the youths of the past distrusted government post-Watergate and Vietnam.  Today, the youth demand a better federal government.  The olds still distrust government.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

With the shading system for party margins used for some of the parliamentary maps on this site, here are maps of past elections going back to Jackson's first victory:
...

[Kaine for Senate '18]

@Ben: Couldn't you just put a link?

Um, it didn't occur to me   It's been edited.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

MURICA

[Kaine for Senate '18]

PNAC needs a 3rd Pearl Harbor.

This also doesn't make sense as it borders on 9/11 "truth"erism, and refers to an essentially defunct organization (PNAC) and there's no neoconservative influence on the current administration*. It's not 2003 anymore.

*Being hawkish and being a neoconservative are not the same thing, McCain and Lindsey Graham for example are not neoconservatives by any meaningful definition of the word even if their foreign policy views are horrible and default to warmongering. "Neoconservative" is actually a very narrow term in who it refers to, the co-opting of it by some liberals to mean "Anyone more hawkish than me" or by paleoconservatives and libertarians to essentially mean "anyone I disagree with" is a grammatical atrocity. There isn't even really anyone in elected office who could accurately be called a neoconservative, the closest person to one was Joe Lieberman, but he's no longer in elected office either.