PeterS

A reminder of just how far removed from the party of Lincoln that today's republican party really is. You cons should hate her because she sure as hell has your number...

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

AOC is dumber than a mud fence. AOConomics is an unparalleled disaster. Her take on climate change is Looney Tunes on steroids. And, she is a full blown racist. She hates white MEN and Israel. Her approval rating in her own NY district is down to 13%. The only number she has that is valid is two tits and ten fingers. That's a bartender's dozen. If you want to kiss her skinny ass, be our guest.

proud republican Loc: RED CALIFORNIA

proud republican Loc: RED CALIFORNIA

That sniveling little witch has our number???..The question is does she know her own number???

JW

Pete, I became a Democrat right out of high school because I believed what John Kennedy said and in what he stood for. I supported Jimmy Carter and actively campaigned for George McGovern because Nixon was an obvious criminal. I could not in good conscience support Carter the second time nor could I support Reagan so I am one of the two people in the country who voted for John Anderson. I returned to the Democrat fold after Anderson and even voted for Bill Clinton... the first time. Bubba made a Conservative out of me with his "co-Presidency" BS and his greater wisdom of spending my money than he credited me with. Since then, I have not found a single Democrat candidate for the presidency even marginally acceptable. I have not been all that thrilled with the Republican offerings either but at least they demonstrate a measure of sanity.

I gave up on the Democrats because the Democrats transmuted from the party of conscience into the party of do-it-my-way-or-you're-just-another-Hitler.

Today, that organization that calls itself the Democrat Party has gone waaaaay beyond that and can only be characterized as escapees from some looney-bin. They have no solid grip on reality and have openly committed themselves to the destruction of everything that was once considered fine, upstanding and decent. They have no cultural, legal or moral center and are incapable of seeing the folly of their ways... even in San Francisco and L A... even while dodging the openly discarded needles, the human feces on the sidewalks, the rats and the scourge of medieval diseases that they are reintroducing into American society... or Chicago or Baltimore, while trying to get out of the way of stray bullets and gang violence.

If they were just bent on their own suicide, they would engender my pity and my sorrow. Unfortunately, they clearly intend to drag all of the rest of us into that dead abyss that they are rushing headlong towards. I am sorry that the Democrats are no longer even able to recognize the shadow of their past. It is a past I remain proud of.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

No, she doesn't.

This is a pretty clear picture of AOC: From the Maine Wire.

The belligerent ignorance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Oh, Alexandria.

Ever since she won a stunning upset victory over her democrat primary rival, incumbent New York Representative Joe Crowley, self-described “democratic socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become the far left’s new “it” girl, appearing in a nauseating number of puff media appearances, showing up in hyper-liberal candidate fundraising appeals, and generally just being everywhere.

Including Maine. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Of course, her rising media star hasn’t actually been a good thing for her. The candidates she has endorsed have been almost universally trounced. She made an abject fool out of herself when trying to fake her way through a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, short circuiting when her interviewer asked for follow up after she called Israeli settlements an “occupation.” And she has repeatedly been reduced to babbling incoherence when asked simple questions like, “would you support Nancy Pelosi for Speaker?” and “how do you pay for your ideas?”

This is enough to make anyone wince, especially if you consider that she holds — wait for it — a degree in economics and international relations from Boston University.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Her belligerent ignorance is always on display, nowhere more acutely than on Twitter. This was shown as recently as last weekend, when she decided to come to Maine and visit, and just couldn’t resist the uncontrollable urge to flaunt her cluelessness.

After visiting Acadia National Park, she tweeted the following:

@AOC
Back home after a lovely few days off enjoying US examples of Democratic Socialism, like:
- Acadia National Park
- Café Co-ops (Def Top 5 best breakfast sandwiches I’ve ever had)

Ugh.

It can be difficult to know where to begin with this, but let’s start here: Ocasio-Cortez is making a very typical, if very wrong, surface level argument that socialism — “democratic” or otherwise — equates to “any involvement by the government at all, for any reason, and in any way.”

This, of course, is not what socialism actually is. Taxation is not socialism. Government spending is not socialism. These things have literally existed in every nation in world history, in both socialistic and laissez-faire capitalistic societies, since the dawn of human civilization.

The ideology that Ocasio-Cortez continually claims to advocate is actually very different. At its core, socialism is about social ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialists want to institute supposed “democratic management” of the various economic institutions created under their utopian vision. The bedrock American concepts of private property, and private ownership of business are typically things that a democratic socialist would seek to eliminate. They often claim to the contrary, but taking “social ownership” of the means of production typically means using centralized state authority to claim that ownership for “the people” before that same central authority then disburses it.

There is a reason that I need to explain Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s own ideology to her. The reality is, she is — like so many people crying out for socialism today — responding to a form of trendy political hipsterism. The need to signal her own virtue as a radical, counter-culture, ahead of her time, rebelliously egalitarian icon is powerful, and adopting a once scorned label and trying to make it cool is a great way to do that.

She doesn’t have to actually understand socialism at all, she can just make up whatever she wants and call it socialism. Indeed, she can position herself as mainstream and her opposition as extremist by suggesting that any and all government action, tax collection or spending is an example of socialism. “What, do you hate road, highways and schools, you troglodyte?”

To Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and their ilk, positioning themselves in this way allows them to ridicule actual opponents of socialism as little more than anti-government anarchists who believe the government should never do anything, anywhere, for any reason. This is, perhaps, the king of all strawmen.

Which means, ultimately, that Ocasio-Cortez is not even a socialist, no matter how much she might want to call herself that. She is a big government statist who believes in little more than confiscatory taxes, bloated spending, and a government program for every problem in America.

Ironically, this makes her that which she least wants to be: a boring, fairly typical liberal, the likes of which we have seen in this country for a hundred years. Not new. Not trendy. Not fresh. She is essentially a 28 year old Walter Mondale.

Yes, I understand why Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s philosophy can be mistaken for actual socialism. They both have in common their fetishization of big, powerful government. They both have a slavish devotion to the state. They both require restrictions of personal freedom. The both worship at the alter of egalitarianism. There’s no doubt, they do share a lot in common, and I don’t think there is any question that Ocasio-Cortez’s actual philosophy paves the road for her stated philosophy.

But it is important to say without equivocation that actual socialism is, in fact worse than the agenda of the typical American liberal, and I think we need to start making that plainly clear, so that we don’t ever open the door to socialism — real socialism — being implemented in this country.

One of the reasons that socialism has been such a miserable failure — worldwide — over the course of the last hundred years, is because it inevitably takes a very strong, centralized government command economy that restricts civil, political and economic freedom to force society to behave in the way that socialism demands. This isn’t FDR or Barack Obama’s big government, we are talking about. This is Venezuela’s big government.

There actually aren’t very many countries left that practice true socialism. Those that do, (like the aforementioned Venezuela) are rife with political corruption — which flows inexorably from a powerful central authority — as well as economic instability, languished growth, and virtually non-existent personal freedom.

But to socialists, Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union and every other failed state that practices socialism is not “real” socialism. No, they are fake socialism. They were just doing it wrong.

Fake socialists and real socialists alike will tell you that today there are in fact socialist success stories, like the Scandinavian countries, which are constantly held up as shining “see, I told you so!” examples of socialism in action.

This, predictably, is a faleshood.

Countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark are not socialistic. As the Foundation for Economic Education pointed out two years ago, in Scandinavia (like virtually all wealthy, economically developed western countries) the means of production is mostly owned by private individuals. It is not owned by the government, or the local community.

More importantly, resources are not allocated by central government planning, but rather by various capitalistic markets. Scandinavians operate under a privately owned, market economy.

People think that the Scandinavians — and the rest of Europe, while we’re at it — are socialist because they have a very extensive social safety net, and heavy government spending. Conservatives have historically reinforced this perception, using the term “socialist” to describe them because they associate high taxes, profligate spending, and big government with socialism.

But once again, government programs and the welfare state — whatever your opinion on their wisdom — are not examples of socialism. The Nordic model so frequently cited as a success is really just the European concept of “social democracy,” which ultimately boils down to public welfare mixed with a capitalistic economy.

The Scandinavians themselves reject the socialist label. Speaking in a lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government during the last presidential election, Prime Minister of Denmark Lars Løkke Rasmussen didn’t mince words.

“I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” Rasmussen said.

“The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish,” he added.

But let’s get back to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, and her tweet while visiting Maine.

Just to drive home the point about her own incoherence about the term socialism, let’s start with her contention that Acadia National Park is an example of “democratic socialism.”

Neither Acadia itself, nor the national park system, is “socialist” in any way. It is a mix of public goods and government maintenance of park land. There is nothing about Acadia that interferes with private property rights or private economic activity in the least bit.

Indeed, if she knew the history of Acadia National Park — which she clearly doesn’t — it actually is a tremendous example of private philanthropy by the evil wealthy business owners she reviles so much. The park was born of the mind of Charles Eliot, a landscape architect, and its original establishment came from the donation of privately held land voluntarily given by George Dorr and Charles Eliot’s father.

More importantly, though, the utility of the park was driven principally by John D. Rockefeller, who is responsible for funding, designing and ultimately building the network of carriage trails that run throughout the park. The stones along the pathways that run through the park to this day — the ones that Ocasio-Cortez undoubtedly walked next to and perhaps even sat on — are known as “Rockefeller’s Teeth.”

Yes, the government is involved in the maintenance and operation of the park, but once again, that is a government program that supports land that was ultimately donated by wealthy private property owners, for the enjoyment of the public.

Ocasio-Cortez also cited co-ops in her tweet, and yes, there is a somewhat reasonable argument that such co-ops may be somewhat socialistic. However, I still dispute the notions because there is no state mandate involved, or any community or local government involvement at all. Cooperatives are created and owned by the employees of the company, who all enter into the arrangement voluntarily, the property is still held privately, and they are still participating in a capitalistic market economy. It is, in short, an expression of economic and political freedom.

And Planned Parenthood, as opposed as I am to what they represent, certainly is no example of socialism.

Planned Parenthood is a 501(c)(3) corporation which receives a government subsidy to underwrite its operation. A subsidy they operated perfectly fine without for the first 54 years of its existence, but a subsidy none the less. Using tax money to give funding to a group or corporation is not socialism, it is welfare, in this case, corporate welfare. You might also call it crony capitalism.

So, as usual, she showed her complete and total ignorance about her own beliefs. But it does make you wonder how this keeps happening to her.

The thing is, she — and millions of people like her — have not arrived at democratic socialism based on a thorough understanding of the ideology, or a well-reasoned belief in it as a solution to the country’s problems. They arrived at democratic socialism for one reason: it is the most popular vehicle for their contempt.

People like Ocasio-Cortez are mad, and want to “get back” at certain groups of people, most often identified as the wealthy, big businesses, and evil conservatives. They hear similar rage channeled by people like Bernie Sanders, people who call themselves democratic socialists, and they become elated. They hear the most superficial sales pitch — phrases like “fair share” and “tax the rich” and “redistribute wealth” — and they see it as a way to stick it to those they hold in such contempt.

They don’t have to understand what true democratic socialism is. To them, this is all a game. A game that has tribes. Our tribe and their tribe. And in our tribe, we love the government, we hate the rich, and we think corporations are the focus of all evil in the world. The rest doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately for people like Ocasio-Cortez, when they decide they want to run for political office, people are going to actually ask them some questions and are curious to find out what their actual core beliefs are. What motivates them. Where are they coming from.

But when your philosophy isn’t a philosophy at all, as is the case here, the general public starts to find out that there isn’t a lot of there, there.

PeterS

How funny you people are. As dumb as she may be she has Trump and you conservatives figured out to a tee. Think about that the next time you try spitting into the wind...

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

You are hilarious. Seriously hilarious. That ignorant little twit certainly has your number.

proud republican Loc: RED CALIFORNIA

Oh pleeeaseeee..This little bitch doesnt know her head from her ass....

PeterS

My number? You are the ones who fly off the handle every time she opens her mouth. It just so happens that this time I agree with her and she sized you people up like none before.

PeterS

"He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached or voted out by 2020.

But Removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the on-line radicalization that drummed up his army; nor the racism that he amplified and reanimated." (AOC)

What she is saying is simple--the problem doesn't lie with Trump but his followers. There is not a conservative follower in this country who thinks that he is racist because he how he speaks and what he says is just like what they think and what they say.

And if what AOC has to say isn't enough here are some words by President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and a message for people who are excusing President Trump's racism:

"I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it. I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame former vice president Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.

But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s 'The Cross and the Lynching Tree' off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency.

Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga., in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner. Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was 'stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.'

God help us.

It is hard to write the words.

This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.

When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020. It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal — the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child. And all of this is being done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist reviving racist tropes for political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is ripping open.

Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in a series of Republican errors. Racism is not just another wrong. The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some causes, it magnifies some crimes.

What does all this mean politically? It means that Trump’s divisiveness is getting worse, not better. He makes racist comments, appeals to racist sentiments and inflames racist passions. The rationalization that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless. Trump’s continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses are enablers.

Some political choices are not just stupid or crude.

They represent the return of our country’s cruelest, most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us." — Michael Gerson

When this country elected Barack Obama I honestly thought we had put our most racist days behind us. But I was wrong and by a long shot. Obama wasn't in office two weeks when McConnell was vowing to make him a one-term president. To do that it would mean he would have to do everything possible to scuttle Obama's policies in the hope that economic ruin would take Obama down. Well, that would be fine if Obama were the only person in the country but what McConnell was saying is that he was willing to screw an entire nation, just so one person didn't see another term.

And then come's birtherism--no racism there (wink wink)--and that's what Trump honed in on and fed on his way to becoming president of the United States. If racism was new in this country that would be one thing, and while both sides were guilty of racism during the Civil War, it was the Democrats who eventually drug themselves out of the muck that hatred for a man's skin color was in this country.

I take no pride that the Democratic party was so dominated by Southerners but then I had to ask myself how much had those southern's changed over the centuries. Well from the sound of Dixicrats, when it comes to the Blackman, not a whole hell of a lot.

The resurgence in racism in this party isn't coming from the Democrat party but from your party and is being spoon-fed to you by Donald J Trump. When he screams there is a Brown invasion, someone listened, and it only took one to listen to see the danger in the words that DJT uses. But hey, he thinks like you think right? And he speaks like you speak right? And you're not a racist are you? So by default DJT couldn't be a racist--unless of course--you were too...

This one is getting long so I will create a new post because I am going to trace the history of the Democrat Party and the Republican party just so you could see which one you would identify with today.

Lonewolf

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Tug484

She's a word salad and thinks at 29, she's the smartest person in the room.
The media eats her up and always give her softball questions.

Tug484

Another post turtle.
She didn't get there by herself.
Someone had to place her there and I don't mean just her dumb voters.

America 1 Loc: South Miami

How surprising, you agree with anything stupid.