My rant: conservative voters just don't get it

When trying to rationalize with Conservatives on the economy, military spending and the exploding deficit and the Bush tax cuts on the top 2% , one needs to come to the realization that two distinct Americas do exist. and the every-day street Conservative who works Monday thru Friday is too stupid to realize it. They don't get it.

The Republicans represent one of those Americas, the ultra rich and the corporations that bought these political whores decades ago.

When you hear them talk of the economy being good, you have to realize they are not talking about the economy WE deal with every day. They are referring to the economy that enabled the ultra-rich to become richer as we became destitute. Yes! Their economy is great and getting better.

Cutting taxes on the ultra rich did not work… for us. The rich sure loved it and got a whole lot richer while Republicans kicked people off of welfare, cut public service funding and exploded the deficit with insane military spending while accusing people of driving to the welfare office in Cadillac’s.

They accused people of panhandling on the street then getting into fancy cars and driving off into the suburbs. (Yea, those gotcha videos were not staged) The GOP came up with Willie Horton, decapitated bodies in the Arizona desert and homosexuals wanting to destroy the sanctity of marriage. (while Republican office holders and candidates are Gay, Been thrice divorced or "hiking the Appalachians or on a whores client list. Conservative family-values Christians.

Republicans installed former industry insiders at the helm of corporate oversight, and the gutting of regulations brought us deadly mining and drilling disasters of biblical proportions and the republicans APOLOGIZED to the Corporation, not the families of the dead.

Understand, please that when you talk to these conservative idiots, they actually believe Limbaugh, Beck and the Sarah Palin’s out there would speak to them as if they traveled in the same social circles!

These developmentally delayed conservatives actually think the Bush tax cuts might some day be beneficial to them, as if they may actually become a 2 per-center working at Sears, Chevron, Safeway etc….

We do not exist to conservative America except as a cheap labor pool. If that labor is not cheap enough, Corporate CEO’s will kill your job and outsource it to a foreign country. As millions more Americans are unemployed, as American factories lay dying, the rich and the corporations just get richer. Gawd Bless Amurika!

Their America is trying to crush us. Remember that and know they have the power, money, influence and an army of Republican Whores bought and paid for who will do their Master's bidding.

This is what you need to remember when dealing with a conservative, these people do not know. They are blissfully ignorant of the facts because they need to be afraid of the Mexican! The president isn’t a citizen! Poor BP has a boot heel against it’s throat. Drill, baby drill. A Mosque at Ground Zero!!!! Oh my GAWD.

We need to stop the GOP until whatever SANE group of patriotic Republicans re-takes control of their party and rips it from the strangle-hold of the alleged Christian Reich, the Corporate masters and the Tea Bagging morons who couldn’t spell hypocrite let alone define it.

I had a chance encounter with a world war II vet the other day. 89 years old, shrapnel still in his head from combat... He DEFENDED America and look what we are letting her become.

Too many Conservatives who only read Glenn Beck's lips will vote in EVERY election that comes along.
Doesn't the threat of John Boehner becoming Speaker of the House scare the crap out of you?

Progressives outnumber these people by enormous margins. VOTE! Do it at all elections.

Make a difference.

this has been the case going back to Ronald Reagan. Average working class people somehow became convinced that their best interests were the same as the best interests of the corporations and the very wealthy.

I honestly think that underlying this is that the vast majority truly believe that they will someday be wealthy. Maybe they'll win the lottery, or somehow by magic they'll wind up in a job that pays several million dollars a year, or their kid will hit the pro-athlete jackpot. But they do not understand that the reality is that they will live the rest of their lives in the working class, which anymore is the lower to lower middle class. They just don't get it. And instead of blaming the corporations and the rich for this, they blame the Progressives and the Democrats and the Unions, and all those who actually care about them.

which is part of why they don't knock the fat cats. And that's how the right-wing won (so to speak) the law & order issue, afterall its difficult to be critical of the police when you consider that's who's people will call if they're in trouble.

In addition, I suspect that most of these people think in "zero-sum" terms; they believe helping African-Americans, Latinos, gay, or any group not like them will hurt them (since they see this help as coming at their expense.)

And a lot of them have persecution complexes and the conservative movement is quite good at supplying scapegoats.

income breakdown by quintiles (the usual way to do it) they just don't get it that they are somewhere in the two or three lowest of them.

I think the problem arises from movies and TV. For one thing, they will show someone living in a far nice home than that person could realistically afford. Several years ago, an acquaintance of mine who was a book editor in NYC mentioned attending a screening of a movie (Sliver) which was ostensibly about a book editor who lived in a particular high-rent apartment in NYC. The editor, who attended the screening with other editors, said the audience laughed out loud when the character gave her job/career as editor. They knew perfectly well that the character could not possibly afford the apartment in the movie.

And so on and so forth. Characters in TV or movies, who might otherwise be reasonably realistic, live in circumstances far beyond what their purported jobs could possibly afford. And so the average person thinks either: Of course I can afford that, or What's wrong that I'm not living that way.

Either one is poisonous to understanding the reality of the world we actually live in.

In 2004 I ran for the Kansas State House. I lost, but going door to door was immensely instructive. Even then I found that an astonishing number of people thought that inheritance taxes (Death Taxes, as they preferred to call them) were terrible and should be eliminated. This in a largely upper class middle neighborhood that still would not be the kind of people who actually needed to be concerned with inheritance taxes.

If in one small district in Kansas I ran into that attitude, just multiply it across the country to understand how disconnected from reality people were. So now, fast forard to 2010, when we are in the midst of what is probably the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Those people who used to think (wrong as they were ) that they needed to worry about estate taxes, are now underwater with their houses. Maybe they've lost their jobs, and have almost no prospect of ever earning as good a salary as they did two or three years ago. They are frightened, angry, don't understand what's really going on. All they really hear is the crap from Fox News. They have become convinced that Barack Obama is probably not really a citizen, his election was somehow fraudulent, and the only way to regain this country as they know it is to vote for Republicans in the next election.

God help us all.

that's something I hadn't thought of ...

have some ignorance involved. Inheritance taxes are portrayed as making people lose the family farm and nobody points out that a trip to a lawyer could prevent all that. There are all sorts of ways to pass on that family farm without the horrendous inheritance taxes that they fear. You can bet your last dollar that rich people go to the lawyer and protect all the family money from the tax man.

that careful research had been done and whoever did it could not find a single case of a family farm being lost to estate taxes. But of course that doesn't get publicized.

I think one of the reasons I'm so sensitive to the TV/movies thing is that I no longer have a TV (just over two years now) and when I still had one, I actually watched relatively few of the popular shows. For instance, I never saw Friends. Saw maybe a total of 10 episodes of Seinfeld. And so on. This means I'm totally out of touch with such shows as the Real Housewives genre. Therefore I seem to notice more readily how many people define themselves through what the see on the screen at home.

I do watch a reasonable number of movies, but my friends can tell you how often I come out of the theater complaining bitterly about huge plot flaws and situations that are totally unbelievable and unrealistic.

Oh, and yes, anyone with very much money, even as much as $250,000, let alone millions, is fairly likely to have the appropriate legal paperwork set up in advance to minimize taxes. On the other hand, there are those that don't, and I happen to be aware of a couple of those. Even among the hoi-poloi who will have nothing more to pass on that maybe a house and a car and various personal possessions are reluctant to make out a will, refusing to acknowledge that just like everyone else they will die, and it really ought to be up to them to decide ahead of time who gets what.

I tell them that the very rich republicans are in a club and they won't let "you" in, and then I add that they don't want me either. But, I point out, they gladly take your vote to get themselves bigger tax cuts and more wealth than you will EVER have. The difference between us, I say to them, is that I have caught on to their game and you haven't, so don't be such a sucker...

I don't care if they don't like to hear it. It's the truth...

at all except as the "help".

They truly do not care whether we die tomorrow or live long enough for them to strip away our retirement simply because they can.

Ihave one conservative friend who says she made "poor choices" in men (divorced 3 times). The father of her 3 kids (2nd marriage) died because he lacked sufficient health care coverage to pay for a drug he desperately needed (it was too expensive!). Her kids got SSI but aged out of that program. She has been on food stamps AND she works full time. But she really rants against "the illegals." It drives her liberal co-workers crazy. Oh, and she hates Obama, too...not surprising...

living on two different universes..

"We are soooo sorry that more Americans won't suck up the total bullshit we put out about More Tax Cuts for Republicon Fat Cats, and the 'need' to drill, baby, drill. Smirk."

- Republicon Homelanders

Their part will be known as Dumbfuckistan. The far right is getting nuttier by the day and even if we vote in large majorities that actually act like Democrats, the wingnuts are always there like rabid rodents who will never give the country a moment's peace. Let them all live together without their taxes and accompanying services and we'll create our civilized and compassionate world. Of course, we'll need to put up a fence to keep them out since they will only be able to last a couple of weeks without - as Alan Simpson would say - the American tit.

A stranger cannot drive (or walk) through the town of Medina, a Seattle suburb, without being constantly on video and the police contacting you at some point. "What you doin' in these parts boy? You don't live around here."

There are people we work with who make the same or less than we do...some make maybe 100,000.00 a year and they think they are on the same plane as those who tell the GOP how high to jump.

These goobers actually now equate the Muslim religion as a terrorist organization yet cannot make an identical completely insane leap if you suggest due to the abortion clinic bombings and abortion provider murders, the Christian religion is a terrorist organization.

The GOP has pointed out to them that it is the Mexicans fault Boeing shipped jobs overseas. It is the Mexicans fault automakers are shutting down American factories. You know, the Mexicans we see standing outside Home Depots across America did this to us! The Illegal Aliens enticed to this country by ads placed there by the CEO's of American corporations who want CHEAPER labor than what American citizens are willing to settle for.

We can't raise the taxes on the rich, we can't cut the military budget behemoth, we have to cut education funding, cut oil and mining and automobile manufacturing oversight, we have to cut funding for battered women and children and the homeless.



This country is already divided. it is as plain as the black text on the white background of this posting.

What makes you say that?

Obama's victory was a landslide. Enough progressives voted to blow out the conservative Base.Obama was pronounced the winner minutes after polls closed on the West Coast.

Because I think it was a much lower percent than you seem to think.

larger numbers than the GOP base could overcome or supress.

Registered Republicans are something like 25%. It's been roughly at those levels since the Depression.

The rest are "Independents" or "No party affiliation". Those were who came out in unprecedented numbers in 08.

a survey is done assessing attitudes of various social issues, the "progressive" positions almost always are held by large majorities.

I know any number of good, thoughtful reasons why this is wrong.

- Rich people don't hire employees. Companies do. And making CEO's a whole lot richer doesn't get more people hired.

- If the poor or middle class get more money, they spend it, creating more jobs. If they rich get more money, they save it or look for places to invest it -- creating bubbles, toxic financial instruments, and unproductive get-rich-quick ventures.

- To the extent that corporations are already recovering economically, they're looking to put those profits into offshoring or productivity-increasing machinery. In short, they'll do almost anything *but* hire more Americans.

- As the Republicans are fond of telling us, throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it. And throwing money at the rich with no idea of how that money is going to translate into jobs is not a solution.

So the arguments are there. But how do you compress all that into a sound-bite response as snappy and seemingly common-sense as the original question?

I'm toying with, "A rich man never gives anything away unless he sees profit in it. And right now, they don't see profit in hiring more Americans." But that's still too long and too subtle.

Any ideas?

voted GOP all his life... bought a franchise then opened five more. as soon as he could he bought into a very wealthy suburb.
His new neighbor took a dislike to him as "uppity" then proceeded to "invest" with him. BAD DEAL my friend was systematically robbed and taken down.

he still owns one restaurant but is under heavy debt. his 5million dollar house just sold to the neighbor for 1.1million. we went up there to be sure it was cleaned out. the neighbor has already parked a bulldozer in the driveway...(making he chore that much more difficult) as the neighbor is planning to level the house but keep the stable and guest house. to install a horse racetrack. to train thoroughbreds for his daughter. the fence between the two properties is already gone.


It really made me sick to see that neighborhood... All the properties had signs out front. either "for sale" or for some republican candidate.

It really IS a class war. Fucking Oligarchs.

ours. We pay our taxes, they must pay theirs. We fight and die for America, their sons and daughters must do the same thing..Sorry Glenn, Rush, Cheny, O'Reilley, that is the way it must be to have a UNITED States of America.

Long time lurker, second time poster. I asked this question yesterday but did not really get a response. Is there a glossary on this site? I dont mean for all the acronyms, I mean for words like "lower class", middle class", "wealthy".

This is not flame bait it is an honest question as I see those words and others thrown around here all the time and there is no definition anywhere to be found.

Thanks

I do not know if there is a glossary, if there was, I sure would make good use of it.

It is hard to chose the right word because someone's definition may not be the same as mine.
Like my "progressive" response that drew a challenge. apparently, I do not know what a progressive is.

Perhaps the word I chose wrong. That is what can make discussion here so entertaining at times.

Does anyone out there have a glossary for our new-comer?

Well it would seem to me that if people are going to throw those words around as much as they do here there would be some definition for what they are. I mean we are all poor compared to Buffet. I am poor compared to most athletes but a guy living on the street is poor compared to me. Drawing clear lines with clear definitions seems to me to be a smart strategy to help get elected. Just saying "this will help the poor" doesnt tell me any thing. Saying "This will help every person in this country who makes 20k or less" would open some eyes.

It's hard to define but we know it when we see it.

We know rich and we know poor. For some folks, anyone in the top 5% would be "rich". Others say those in the top 2% are rich. Either way, those that have more than 95-98% of the rest of us are rich.

Also, we don't necessarily have definitions for "socialist", communist, fascist, or right-wing tea-bagger, but we know them when we see them.

All I can say is stay a while and study hard.

it with ad buys for the Congressfolk they want to keep on. Why don't they believe us? Because they see these elitist Limousine "liberals" representing Wall Street over them.