Intellectual Dishonesty 101: "We can't tell the U.K. what to do"
We know -- the White House has confirmed -- that the Administration had advance notice of the U.K.'s planned detention of Miranda. Had the administration raised an objection, the U.K., our closest ally, would surely have honored such an objection. To suggest otherwise is the absolute height of intellectual dishonesty. And that was the point Rachel was making.
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To me, there is little more important than our civil rights. Each time one of them is violated it diminishes us. If we are to decide that is no longer a topic worthy of discussion, then we need to use another metric. Polling shows us what is important to others, others that we hope by our agreement to join/post here to convince to vote Democratic.
Therefor if we are not going to discuss issues that are personally motivating, then obviously we are going to pivot to other issues that are more relevant to the nation at large. That means economy.
There we are as a party, stymied. We would need to come up with a stimulus plan that would be able to get Congressional approval. On this issue, we are at direct opposites with the Republicans. Especially with the Deficit being another important issue. The Republicans will not approve tax increases on the rich, and we couldn't fund a stimulus without adding to the deficit, which would harm us with still other voters.
That graphic from the Gallup story is very interesting. Those who think the economy is the most important issue give President Obama a fairly low approval rating. Roughly 35% of the people approve of the President's handling of the Economy, which reflects on the party as a whole, but consider it a very important issue.
So what can we discuss on that issue that makes us look good as Democrats? How do we stimulate the economy to give more and better jobs? What plan can we point to? What grand national goal can we point to as the reason to pump money into the economy?
Even the ones which President Obama has better to good numbers on, are considered relatively unimportant.
We can start a discussion on Voting Rights, but nobody cares outside of this board about the issue. We can't post a number of recent articles, because the press doesn't care, nor do the pundits. We could start a discussion on Guns, but we've lost that argument, and we are unwilling to expend more political capital on it. Even if you and I came up with a good plan, all we could do here on DU is start yelling at each other because we have our share of gun nuts that essentially cancel out those in favor of common sense gun reforms.
