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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim S who wrote (21289)	6/16/2006 7:30:37 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541375

>> Have you ever left the US? << Yup. Spent almost 20 years of my life outside the US. Then how can you regard Pelosi, for example, as being at the far left of political opinion? Even in the US, she's not. It just comes over as a flip insult. A point I've often made is that all mainstream US politicians would be classed as centre through right-wing in virtually any other Western country, and anyone deriding (say) Kerry as a socialist proves only their own ignorance and parochialism. That's only because I couldn't think of Michael Moore's name as I responded the first time. Or any of the other left-leaning clowns who are so quick to bash those on the right. You apparently didn't read the part in my post about Coulter being a counterpoint to them. I don't read Moore, didn't know he's a columnnist. Dowd and Ivins I read occasionally. One of them (Ivins, I think) is particularly scathing about Texas politicians, about whom I know zip. Otherwise, though, they don't seem to go for the kind of personalised gratuitous abuse that Coulter clearly does (from those excerpts and columns linked recently); they mock and deride ideas and poses, rather than classes of people. And if, as I say, your mindset is that Pelosi is some radical-socialist epitome of leftist politics, then you're in the wrong place here, because you'll agree with and enjoy very few of the posts.

To: Jim S who wrote (21289)	6/17/2006 3:19:57 AM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 541375

Welcome to the thread, Jim. We adhere to the thread header where extremists on both sides are fair game for mocking; on the right that is the liberal bashing Rush-Coulter-Hannity-O'Reilly et al crowd whose answer to everything is to bash the evil lefties. It also excludes the crusading progressives who believe that every conservative and every Republican in the universe is a greedy, baby-killing fascist that enjoys running over poor homeless people in their Escalade and should be lined up against a wall somewhere and shot. Michael Moore, Ivins, Dowd, Air America-Al Franken, most of the progressive blogs, etc. fall in that area. My main beef is people who demonize ideological groups or political parties with blanked condemnations. The only way this thread works as a civil forum is if we cut all that out. Individual politicians are fair game, their policies, statements and actions are fair game, and we try to aim the criticism at both parties. But the fact that Bush is the incumbent means he gets more press. And the Dems are so hapless and disorganized that they don't produce much actual content to talk about. I have not found any consensus about where "the center" is on SI. Rightwingers and leftwingers each think it wraps around them, and anyone who disagrees is an evil, biased partisan. They suffer from the same disease - an ailment that prevents either group from ever attaining a lasting majority among the electorate. Think of this thread as a space where people who stick to the basic rules can debate politicians and policies and maybe start to define a centrist space. Hope that helps.