Let's Get the Republicans Where It Hurts!
I happen to be re-reading John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty (1859) in preparation for teaching it to a political philosophy class next week.
It occurs to me that we Democrats, rather than trying to 'out moral' or 'out faith' the Republicans, ought to be exploiting the obvious bifurcation in the intellectual mechanisms driving the right wingers of the Republican party: the libertarians who reject state interference with such things as their owning weapons with which they can blow away their neighbors versus the moral absolutists who hate gays and hyperventilate over a conceptus while leaving millions of American children to go hungry and with inadequate medical care, housing, and education!
It is pretty obvious that the two right wings that dominate the Republicans do not hang together and, thus, fly their bird in divergent directions. We should be hitting them where it hurts. Do you want morals strictly enforced or do you want government to end restrictions on your liberties? Admittedly the Republican pols have been pretty clever in stringing along these divergent contingents of supporters -- both sides probably assuming that the other cannot possibly enact its threatened policies. But now they are in control and something is bound to give -- not with a whimper, but with a potentially big bang!
We should be hitting them where it hurts. To the baby lovers we should be shouting loud and clear that if they so love the unborn, they had better get ready to ante up their taxes to pay for the kids that they want to bring into the world who need proper food, housing, medical care and education -- at home as well as aboard. And if they oppose taxation to supply such needs they are truly hypocrites of the first order.
To the libertarians we should be pointing out that the more hungry kids that are produced around the world, the more guns will be needed to fend off crime and wars over the ever more limited resources that they will be needing such as oil and drinkable water. So they better get ready to pay more taxes for a greedily enlarging military budget! Terrorists abound!
All this is a bit simple-minded, but it tells it as it is. We had all better get our acts together pronto before it is too late. Tax and spend on the necessities -- or run for cover back into those basement bomb shelters that were so popular back when we anticipated a global nuclear holocaust. 9/11 is but a small sample of worse likely to come unless we stop acting like the biggest bully on the globe!
Let's get 'em with the realities. Faith-based nonsense expired with the Scopes Trial back in 1925!
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm
It occurs to me that we Democrats, rather than trying to 'out moral' or 'out faith' the Republicans, ought to be exploiting the obvious bifurcation in the intellectual mechanisms driving the right wingers of the Republican party: the libertarians who reject state interference with such things as their owning weapons with which they can blow away their neighbors versus the moral absolutists who hate gays and hyperventilate over a conceptus while leaving millions of American children to go hungry and with inadequate medical care, housing, and education!
It is pretty obvious that the two right wings that dominate the Republicans do not hang together and, thus, fly their bird in divergent directions. We should be hitting them where it hurts. Do you want morals strictly enforced or do you want government to end restrictions on your liberties? Admittedly the Republican pols have been pretty clever in stringing along these divergent contingents of supporters -- both sides probably assuming that the other cannot possibly enact its threatened policies. But now they are in control and something is bound to give -- not with a whimper, but with a potentially big bang!
We should be hitting them where it hurts. To the baby lovers we should be shouting loud and clear that if they so love the unborn, they had better get ready to ante up their taxes to pay for the kids that they want to bring into the world who need proper food, housing, medical care and education -- at home as well as aboard. And if they oppose taxation to supply such needs they are truly hypocrites of the first order.
To the libertarians we should be pointing out that the more hungry kids that are produced around the world, the more guns will be needed to fend off crime and wars over the ever more limited resources that they will be needing such as oil and drinkable water. So they better get ready to pay more taxes for a greedily enlarging military budget! Terrorists abound!
All this is a bit simple-minded, but it tells it as it is. We had all better get our acts together pronto before it is too late. Tax and spend on the necessities -- or run for cover back into those basement bomb shelters that were so popular back when we anticipated a global nuclear holocaust. 9/11 is but a small sample of worse likely to come unless we stop acting like the biggest bully on the globe!
Let's get 'em with the realities. Faith-based nonsense expired with the Scopes Trial back in 1925!
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm
posted by Ed Kent at 7:55 AM
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