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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (678632)	10/12/2012 2:03:34 PM
From: i-node	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572988

I just don't agree with you. While the 47% remark was politically damaging, it made an important and correct point that needs to be understood. The Left has arranged its constituencies in such a way as to insure a substantial portion of the vote -- not because it is the best thing for the country, but because it is a vote for what they can get. It is a perverse recharacterization of JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country", to just the reverse. We have something around 47% of the country who are voting based on the freebies they get. It can be easily demagogued, which is the reason it is politically damaging -- and the reason Romney can correctly argue it came out wrong. But it was a factual comment. The Dems have created a classic, but perverse, incentive trap, in which the good of the whole is sacrificed for the benefits individuals crave. And by promising those benefits, undue power is given to elected officials. So, we have Sandra Fluke getting "free" birth control (at everyone else's expense), we have people living for YEARS on unemployment benefits, we now have 16 million more people heading for Medicaid (and no state I know of can afford to pay it; hell, Medicaid has gone bankrupt in some states already) and we have ever-increasing demands for more taxes on the wealthy, which are NOT about raising revenue (you could confiscate the wealth of every billionaire in the country and fund our deficits for less than a year) but are instead about punishing success. As to changing positions on abortion, Romney has explained it in, what was to me, the same way many others have changed their views on the same subject, so I can't really criticize him for it. You seem just fine with the idea that obama "evolved" on his "deeply held" view on gay marriage -- over the course of 3.5 days, start to finish. That's not evolution, that's flip flopping to get a key constituency back in line. There is no other way to call it. Romney did NOT do that. It really is worse than a mere double standard. You are blindly ignoring more egregious positions taken by the president while criticizing Romney for his lesser indiscretion.