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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (3273)	1/18/2001 2:48:45 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 6089

Daniel, I think you have to make a distinction between the support base and the leadership. The leadership is ALWAYS controlled by the money in either party. This is a fact of life, just like gravity. However, to maintain their position, the leadership lays the planks of the platform that will gather the votes. When Republicans are talking about "character" they aren't talking about taking bribes from arms dealers, arms-for-hostages, or plausible deniability, they are taking a swing at Clinton's libertine tendencies and Gore's tendency to exaggerate. These are smoke screen non-issues that allow criticism of the opposition. If Gore tells a bit of a whopper now and again, does that really mean he'd be a bad President? I doubt it - most of us tell half-truths when it suits us. Nixon was a racist bigot and mean-spirited person but he also was a consummate statesman of vision and had many other fine attributes. Among my favorite quotes are by ones by him ( I paraphrase: "People wouldn't like the attributes in their children that made them a good politician") and Kissinger ("Trust but verify"). However, on balace, I'm not a Republican. The Republicans have alienated large portions of the electorate by refusing to add planks to their platform that support those people's needs. Yes, they are about money, but there aren't enough rich people's votes to get you elected. So, in their power base, they add a heavy-handed religious agenda and promote a "states-rights" agenda that will let some states become pretty crappy places for some people to live. They'd have you believe stand for individual rights (like the unlimited right to own guns) and then thwart individual rights (like abortion and gay unions and freedom from gunshot wounds). They'd have you believe they want tax cuts, but those almost always disproportiately help the people who least need the help. They want vouchers which would kill public schools by taking the best students out of the system - so much for family values like education. No politician (except maybe Ralph Nader) has been untainted by the system of money politics in this country. It's like arguing the quality of the peanuts at the bottom of the monkey cage. All the peanuts have been on the bottom of the monkey cage, so their cleanliness is only a matter of degree. cos