F’k off Democrats
Me: I think I know your dad, great guy.
Customer 1: Thanks
Customer 2 (across the table from customer one): It’s too bad he is a Democrat (in a snotty voice)
Me: What’s wrong with that? (Then I walked away.)
Customer 2 (under her breath): F’ck Off.
Scott L. Ehrisman (c) 1/11/2013
Too many people put too much emphasis on Republican and Democrat. What the politicians really need to do is work together and not bash each other for being either a Republican or a Democrat. If we didn’t have political parties, and just vote for the best person, things might work just a little better.
sheep herder,
It sounds great, but the absences of a “true” two party system will create the ultimate oligarchy over time.
The battle is to challenge the Republicans and Democrats to be what they should be and not allow them to become the emergence of one with each party having a small disenfranchised minority to the right and left of them; which is what I am afraid is beginning to happen or has been happening for far too long.
As far as voting for the best person, the best person is the one who promotes your personal ideology and the ideology of the political party you feel most comfortable with.
If you think your Party’s candidate is lacking, run yourself, help to find a better candidate, or begin to question if you are a member of the right party.
I hope you left a hair in customer 2’s pie.
Maybe we need to have non-partisan primaries (like in California), which tends to moderate political candidates. Also, first-past-the-post voting systems (such as we have in the USA) almost invariably result in two-party systems with little room for third parties. Proportional representation systems (e.g. Sweden and Norway) also tend to have lots of smaller parties.
If you want some interesting reading, check out the wikipedia article on Duverger’s Law.
The California experiment has actually been going on in Louisiana for years, but because California is now doing it, it has to be taken seriously.
Frankly, I believe the “Louisiana” electoral system undermines the two party system making us vulnerable to oligarchical tendencies without achieving the intended moderation; because I can see all different kinds of potential scenarios playing out and with the only guaranteed result being that the two major parties lose their identity.
The two party system we have in the US is a by-product of our presidential system and is essential for it to work.
In actuality, the “Louisiana” system already exists in all the states except that it is found within the two major parties’ primary processes, and that is where it should stay.
As far as the proportional representation systems, they are uniquely designed for parliamentary governments and would raise havoc with a presidential government, (i.e., the TeaParty.)
Straight ticket voters make me laugh. Idiots.
The reality is that it is quite hard for an uninformed voter to vote a straight ticket when politicians from both sides of the aisle make the same claims like, “they are going to protect social security and medicare”, while an informed voter knows damn right some of them have no real intentions of doing so.
To paraphrase VP Biden from the last VP debate …. “Folks who do you really trust to protect your Medicare and Social Security?” The fact that Biden had to make such a simple, but true comment proves how our two major parties have in many ways become intertwined in their messages.
If the two major political parties would quit being apologetic and sheepish towards their core agendas, then straight ticket voting would have a much greater validity to all and the two party system would be healthier, more credible, and more workable.
Take the Tea Party as an example, its successful emergence is primarily the result of opportunist Republicans not expressing a public concern for massive deficits until a Democrat was elected President (Do you remember when Cheney claimed “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,’) and the inability of Democrats to adequately and confidently defend their legislative enactments. The fact that Biden had to remind Obama at the signing of the Affordable Health Care Act, to quote the VP, “This is a Big Fxxxing deal,” demonstrates how to the average voter (the uniformed voter) that the two major parties can appear to be irrelevant and similar and have lost their true political identity, which only makes it easier for the average voter to vote a split ticket.
But frankly, what Republican, in a partisan election, was I suppose to vote for in South Dakota, as a Democrat in recent years, if I am pro-choice, pro-education, opposed to the Bush Wars, and want to save Medicare and Social Security as we know it. There have been times when I really did not want to vote for either major political party candidate because I could not tell a difference due to their intertwined messaging, and I didn’t. But if you are an informed voter, I believe a strong case can be made for supporting a straight ticket as long as the messaging of the races is not too intertwined.
Hey Winston, are you a politician, sure talk like one with all the “big” words and out the side of your mouth!
I’m independent. I voted for Reagan and Obama. The better candidate is my choice. I’d like to be Constitutional party but it’s hardly known and I want to be sure my vote is counted.
Generally, republicans in SD are biggot-like. They vote away their constitutional rights then wonder what happened. Their campaigns are like dumb blond beauty pageants. It’s exciting at first but you really get tired of topics like world piece but let’s kill everybody in the middle east, arrest the middle class, and deny minorities any hope of surviving here or abroad.
Hey, Sheep: Put down your phone and buy a dictionary. Winston expresses himself quite clearly and effectively.
I don’t think Winston uses big words just big paragraphs 🙂
Belly-aching about someone else’s paragraphs. That’s how it’s done here.
Belly-aching. I didn’t know I approved my grandma to comment here.
sheep herder,
I could never be a successful politician because I tell people to often what I think.
I also want to apologize directly to you for my use of the word “sheepish” in the above piece. It was not intended to be directed at you, but rather it speaks to my vocabulary deficit at 4 am.
(Finally some small paragraphs!)
Eric Black at MinnPost had a great series about how our current mess of a political system came about from our imperfect constitution. Specifically, the original founding fathers envisioned a system with no political parties — wishful thinking indeed.
Read it here.
The question I pose is … “Were not the divisions evident from day one to our founding fathers between the Federalists and the Democrat/Republicans, and there inevitable impact?”
I believe the problems lies in the inability of our founding fathers to apparently discuss the evolutionary capability of our republic to eventually empower white man who did not own land, minorities, and women and the political consequences of such realities … not to mention the eventual presences of medias like talk radio and FOX News and their eventual impacts.
I am not advocating censorship, but the mere advocacy of free speech and press invites division and parochialism.
Wait, was customer #2 sarcastically inferring that you would take umbrage at the fact that the dad was a democrat, or was she making a condescending remark of her own about customer #1’s father? And I mean before the part where she says to “F’ck off”.
Go home anom. I can’t even begin to fathom that question.
This exchange highlights exactly what’s wrong with political discussion in this era. Thanks primarily to cable news (and also, obviously, talk radio), most people have complete blind faith in their political party of choice, and anybody with a differing view is evil, anti-American, etc. The vast majority of the public know nothing about the issues other than the talking points they saw that day on their cable news channel of choice, and no actual facts can dissuade them from this view.
caheidelberger – I may be country, but at least when I talk to people, they don’t have to pull out a dictionary(where would they carry one) to know what the heck I was saying. It would be simple and to the point, and you can bet they would understand what I said. And as for being on the phone, I use mine to talk on, not searching for all the other “stuff” that is out there.
scott, have you seen this?
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2013/01/it-is-height-of-idiocy-to-insult-cook.html
Hilarious.