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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (17252)	4/22/2010 7:51:05 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Some of the resistance was principled resistance to the proposal. I think most of it was. And much of what was left was partisan or unprincipled political opposition that wasn't directly personal (opposing this is good for my party, or good for my reelection chances or campaign contribututions so I'll oppose it, not "Obama is a <bleep> so I'll oppose it". My beef is with the rhetoric that was overtly directed at trashing the proponents. That's a reasonable beef, but some of this sort of thing is unavoidable. You have millions of opinions, and hundreds of relatively prominent ones, all spouting off on the issue. Some of its going to be personal attack. Apparently I don't think as much of it was as you do. ---- A side note, principled opposition and personal attack can go hand in hand. The first is more the motive for the opposition, the later is the tactic. Your distinction between attacking the person and attacking the policy (both tactics) is a better one, and I agree with you that the policy should be the focus of the attacks, or at least the collection of policies cumming from the person. ("This policy is unconstitutional" - attacking the policy, "Obama's policies are bankrupting the nation"/"Bush is getting is to unnecessary and harmful wars" - attacking the collection of policies, "Obama is a socialist traitor"/"Bush is an idiotic fascist" - Attaching the person)

To: Lane3 who wrote (17252)	4/22/2010 8:01:39 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Obstructionist is obstructing for the sake of obstructing What exactly does "obstructing for the sake of obstructing mean". It could literally mean obstructing for its own sake, but no sane person would try to obstruct everything, or everything coming from outside of themselves, or even everything from outside groups they are tightly affiliated with. It could mean saying no to whatever the other party does, even if you would actually like the policy to pass, which would be obstructing for the sake of perceived partisan advantage, or obstructing because of dislike of who you where obstructing, which while not exactly "obstructing for the sake of obstructing" is close enough that I wouldn't really object to that term, and probably not to the use of the word "obstructionist". But I don't see much of that happening. It plays some role in all of these recent controversial debates, but not I think a very large one. It could mean obstructing even though you know you can't win for some reason of principle. But that IMO would be very far from "obstructing for the sake of obstructing", and would not be IMO a bad thing. Or it could mean obstructing a good idea, but that's begging the question as to what is a good idea. Generally I don't like the word obstructionist much, because nay definition I can think of would either, be a rather unusual event (which would be fine if the word was then used very very rarely, but it gets used for more than just the rare things in the first couple of definitions), or involve actions that are perfectly ok, and don't fit in with the connotations of the word obstructionist. In practice I think "obstructionist" is effectively too often used to mean "someone who opposes what I want to do".