Gatorade Frost

Today I finally came to the conclusion why I didn’t enjoy politics on the TFP. Not particularly that it’s extremely partisan, but because it’s based around he-said she-said of politicians and the like.

To me that’s relatively worthless. Instead of discussing in depth the actual issue, the ‘debates’ become fights about “Well Bush said this, therefore he’s a liar” or “Kennedy’s a drunken nut job” and the like. Does it really matter? What matters is how they vote, not what they say.

If you can talk about minimum wage in the sense that it deals whether minimum wage is important or not, or if it’s useful or harmful to the economy, you’re on the right track, but throwing out that it’s just a ploy to take people’s eyes off of what’s going on in Iraq is stupid.

The same goes with the flag burning amendment. What should have been a conversation about whether it should be illegal quickly turned into this:

“It's a Red Herring the GOP know will never get through, but it will take the press coverage and the heat from the scandals away, at least for awhile. Let's get some radical "patriots" all up in arms and pissed about flag burning and have them bitch and moan about that so people and the press will focus on that, until we can find another hotpoint to divide the people...... that way they don't focus on the scandals, on living wages, on the war, on the deficit, on the trade imbalances, on whatever.

In the end, we'll hear more about this for a week or 2 than we will about illegal immigration or liveable wages or whatever.

Politics at it's finest.”

How exactly does this help the discussion aside from tossing out a highly partisan opinion based around conspiracy theories that the GOP is using different amendments as distractions? Frankly, it doesn’t.

It’s important that it wasn’t passed by 1 vote. If 66 senators voted in favor of it, 11 over the number of Republicans in Senate, obviously people have strong feelings about it, enough to warrant it being noticed. If it was that close, it seems clear to me that it’s not a red herring that won’t get passed. It nearly was today. This is an amendment, 2/3rds majority. That was nearly achieved today, and what would have been said if it had passed in the senate? That it was a right wing conspiracy still? That’s 12+ Democrats/Independents voting in favor of the amendment, enough to make it not an entirely partisan issue.

These are issues that should be looked at not for their political value but for their value in importance to the American people, to its application with the bill of rights and the constitution, not looked at as left and right wing conspiracies.

Livable wages are important to be thought about and how it can be dealt with, but throwing out tons of quotes and news paper articles to try to prove that politicians suck doesn’t get anyone anywhere. People aren’t going to change their opinions in the face of unreasonable partisanship; it has to be done by dealing specifically with the issues and coming to working conclusions as to how to fix the problem.

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I got in a fight one time with a really big guy, and he said, "I'm going to mop the floor with your face." I said, "You'll be sorry." He said, "Oh, yeah? Why?" I said, "Well, you won't be able to get into the corners very well."
Emo Philips