re: #6 makeitstop

The thing that astounds me about these stories - I posted the TPM story about Paul’s Iowa chair and the death penalty for gays on my Facebook page yesterday, and a few of my friends seem to be dismissing this stuff as your usual campaign rhetoric.

Among my friends at least, there seems to be an attitude that ‘you can find something wrong with any candidate,’ and Paul’s past (and present) associations are some kind of ‘gotcha’ game.

It’s really bothering me, because the people saying these things are otherwise pretty smart people and I don’t know how to make clear to them that this isn’t just politics as usual and the guy’s got some really bad friends.

Same problem here. With one or two exceptions, most of my friends and family are relatively apathetic politically. While that cuts down on things like 9/11 troofers and Fox News groupies, it has the negative effect of what you describe above.

Perry’s supposed newfound “make them wimmen have the babies regardless” approach to abortion is another example. Most people I know just dismiss it as “Oh, those nuts”, instead of being even remotely horrified by such an attitude.