People aren’t running around thinking: who is a liberal and who is a conservative? They’re running around thinking: we have no jobs and no economic security, and thus will punish those in power. As I made explicitly clear in my original post about O’Donnell — and people like this and this should learn to read a little bit better — my objection to his comments was not that the massive loss of Blue Dogs proves that conservative Democrats can’t win. Democrats didn’t lose because they’re “too conservative” any more than because they are “too liberal.” My objection was that he was attempting to derive shallow meaning from the loss of specific liberal candidates — see, voters don’t like liberals! — when that plainly was not what motivated voters; merely to negate his reasoning, I pointed out that if one did want to use O’Donnell’s fundamentally flawed method (i.e., look at which candidates lost and that’s how you know which ideology voters rejected), then one could far more easily make the case that they were rejecting conservative Democrats, since Blue Dogs are who bore the brunt of the bloodbath.
Actually, it’s the ****s in the Republican Party and the far right wing evangi-politicans who repeatedly use the word “liberal” as an slur to the point that most voters won’t self identify as such in public, because they don’t want to get beaten up next by the assorted goon squads they employ. To whit: the local jacka$$ in the paper who said he’d fire any employees with liberal bumper stickers he didn’t like and looked at the cars in his parking lot. ( I pointed out he probably had no trouble taking their liberal money, so maybe customers would want to take their business elsewhere. I know there’s a couple of businesses I just don’t do any more once I saw how deeply and fervently they supported the craziest of the crazies, you know, the newsletters where they want to stock ammo for the Second Coming.) These Republicans like to portray themselves as conservative but they are just good old fashioned fascists crossed with American Calvinism.
But no matter what, that doesn’t make O Donnell a self described
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(same kid a few years later)
… more leftist socialist than thou.
And gets into a pissing match w/ Glenn Greenwald on it
Actually, it’s the ****s in the Republican Party and the far right wing evangi-politicans who repeatedly use the word “liberal” as an slur to the point that most voters won’t self identify as such in public, because they don’t want to get beaten up next by the assorted goon squads they employ. To whit: the local jacka$$ in the paper who said he’d fire any employees with liberal bumper stickers he didn’t like and looked at the cars in his parking lot. ( I pointed out he probably had no trouble taking their liberal money, so maybe customers would want to take their business elsewhere. I know there’s a couple of businesses I just don’t do any more once I saw how deeply and fervently they supported the craziest of the crazies, you know, the newsletters where they want to stock ammo for the Second Coming.) These Republicans like to portray themselves as conservative but they are just good old fashioned fascists crossed with American Calvinism.
But no matter what, that doesn’t make O Donnell a self described
“socialist”.