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Right Wing Blogs in Massive Fail Mode

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Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All9/14/2009 11:19:43 pm PDT

(I apologize in advance for the long comment)

Thinking on the topic at hand, I’ve thought for a while that the definition of what is left and right has steadily crept to the right over the last 25 years+. I keep looking at Reagan, his willingness to extend amnesty to Illegal Immigrants, He willingly let the Department of education continue and expand after being created by Carter. He cut taxes, but increased spending (which certainly doesn’t shrink government). was a mixed bag on the second amendment restrictions imposed I could go on but those examples are at least a start. Certainly he did a number of things that would be considered conservative, but a lot of his big actions would be considered liberal now.

Obama is increasing our ground force in Afghanistan, has resisted efforts to look into the allegations of torture. He’s effectively told the Military and the CIA that he’s got their back. We can argue if his response to the Iranian thugs is strong enough, and we can argue that there are other issues that he’s dead wrong on (Honduras comes to mind). But if we’re going to argue that the US Government has more information than we do on things, then perhaps there’s more that’s going on in Honduras than we realize. After all if getting a lot of the big picture right with Afghanistan, with the CIA, and with some of the apparent policy shifts (not going to talk to the Iranian Thugs), maybe he knows something we don’t.

Anyway the point of this rather lengthy post is that Obama is still a fairly centrist president, particularly in the foreign policy arena. Economically, he’s to the left with the expansion of government. I’m a libertarian, however, when you look at the economic system as it was in late 2008, and the near economic collapse that seems to have been averted for now, I realize that maybe the government *had* to step in and do something, and really, we were left with trying to pick out the best of a set of bad options. Same concept with the Auto industry, perhaps it’d be more libertarian to let the auto industry collapse, but I don’t think libertarian purity is justification enough for the economic and financial suffering that the country would endure if the entire system collapsed.

However the people who’ve allied themselves with Beck, the Birthers, view Obama as just left of Mao Hitler and Stalin, and is probably the long lost brother of Trotsky. It all comes down to purity. If you can’t support *everything* they come up with, then you’re a flaming libtard who wears a che shirt and prays towards mecca. That is unless you’re a dirty illegal who wants to steal all the jobs and make America speak spanish, and eat tacos. They’ve made a decision that the only way to win is to become more and more pure. so all the RINOs and all the people who aren’t pure, suddenly are defined as leftist. It’s the ultimate in moving the goalposts to define who’s with you and who’s not.

As an aside, i suspect some of this comes from the efforts of the “right” wing blogs to win tactical news cycles. The efforts to win tactical skirmishes has been a staple of the Republican party during the Rove era, and was a success until both the electorate as a majority became sick of the news cycle, and the Democrats picked a candidate who could effectively play the long game. Even now, you can see the Republicans still trying to win news cycles (just read memeorandum.com and see how the news cycles are being driven) rather than give substantial policies and counter proposals to the Democrats in general and Obama in specific. unless there is a total economic collapse and a total failure in Afghanistan and a serious war/terrorist attack, the Republican party won’t regain the white house and will find themselves further marginalized by their own purifications efforts and the long game of Obama.

And at the rate the Republicans are going, they’re going to define themselves out of existence and with some luck, we’ll see a rational center right party form that can serve as an effective counter balance to the Democrats.