re: #196 klys (maker of Silmarils)

I’m really not sure what the point of your question was. Most immigration activists - the people you wanted to select the “least bad” option in the question you posed - aren’t going to vote in the Republican primary anyway. Why should they? As a whole the party is anti-immigrant. The activists’ time and effort are better spent working with politicians who are actually going to care about what they have to say, as opposed to only caring about them for their vote but being willing to drop them like a hot potato if necessary to cater to the crazies, who matter an awful lot in the primaries.

Which was EPR’s point. Sure, say Jeb isn’t as extreme on immigration as, say, Steve King. But if Steve King (and people like him) are the ones writing the immigration portion of the GOP party platform, I’m not sure what difference Jeb’s so-called moderation makes. On the flip side, casting him a “moderate” in the sense that he is more “centrist” (hahahahaha, oh man) distracts the conversation from the fact that the Republican party has moved so far to the right that they’re off in the fucking weeds. That’s the issue I think EPR was getting at.

That is precisely my point. There really is no such thing as a moderate GOPer, for any definition of ‘moderate’ that is not made relative to the batshit GOP norm.

Since most people don’t realize that this peculiar usage is the only meaningful definition of ‘moderate GOPer’, it is basically deceptive to use the term at all. More specifically, mention of a ‘GOP moderate’ by the mainstream media conjures up a false image of someone who might be a pragmatic deal maker as opposed to the reality of a blinkered zealot or someone so beholden to blinkered zealots that there is no real distinction to be made.

Of course, such deception is intentional on the part of the GOP establishment and its media lapdogs, since they can pretend to be ‘the adults in the room’.