Question of the day: What do hardcore Republicans you know say about Iraq?
In my life they fall into three categories:
First, there are the deniers who insist things are actually going peachy keen in Iraq and that it’s the damned liberal media that’s making everything look so bad;
Second up are the Rumsfeld haters — people (often current or former military) who realize Iraq’s a disaster, but who can’t bring themselves to blame Bush or the GOP in general, so they’ve declared Donald Rumsfeld to be the personification of all evil; and
Third, are the growing ranks of the realists who recognize Bush & Co. screwed up horribly and just want the US to get the hell out as soon as possible.
So what do the hardcore Republicans you know say about Iraq?
October 26th, 2006 at 12:12 am
In Indiana, hardcore Republicans have lost the ability to think rationally and objectively. They vote Republican because they are wealthy and greedy, or their grandpa voted Republican, and By God, they will vote Republican until the day they die!!! Most of them are in denial and think Bush is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The rich ones love the fact that they have gotten richer under Bush.(Like Larry Glasscock. Honest, that IS his name.) They dont give a rat’s ass about the suffering in Iraq. If Bush is abandoning his “Stay the course” rhetoric, he will confuse the hardcore Republicans in this state, because they have latched onto that trite phrase for all its worth. That, and “The Dems want to cut and run.” This state’s Democratic Party didnt even put up an opponent to Richard Lugar for Senator. That is how backward Indiana is politically and socially. It’s real pretty in Brown County this time of year, though, when the frost is on the punkins. I no longer discuss politics with our hardcore Republican friends. They also leave me alone, because they know they will get a lecture about tolerance, compassion, and balance of power.
October 26th, 2006 at 3:00 am
Hmm, how can a “hardcore Republican” be among “the growing ranks of the realists”? Once you recognize that Bush & Co. screwed up horribly, I guess you can’t be a “hardcore” Republican anymore. Maybe just a “softcore” Republican, like an X-rated movie that doesn’t show any “money shots”!
October 26th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
I have family members who voted for shrub in 2000, whom I now don’t know if they have since had any second thoughts about him, or if they voted for him in 2004, or what they now think of the Iraq war. They and I have avoided talking politics recently; they and I both know doing so might be divisive.
I have one brother-in-law whom I am close to (closer to him than I am to my sister whom he married) who is an evangelical Christian, and who voted for shrub in 2000. He and I are sometimes able to talk about politics. He accepts that I do not go along with his religious beliefs, and he has admitted that he is not necessarily thrilled with shrub.
However one thing that he has always said, and has said even recently, is that he does not care to hear bashing of any party or administration, and that we shouldn’t be judging people; we all fall short.
In other words, even though he is an otherwise savvy and smart person, he seems to just not get it, even after shrub being office in almost 6 years, that shrub is doing some really bad things that we need to be alarmed about.
I am going to want to confront him about that, and let him know that shrub is really doing some very bad things. He does not seem to be a “hard core” Republican, and I am hoping I am right about that.
I ended a 30 year friendship last year because my friend voted for shrub a second time, and felt that our actions in Iraq were the right thing for us to do. It particularly bothered me that he felt it was OK that we did not find weapons of mass destruction, because intelligence is not an exact science.
I wonder if he still feels the same way. In particular I wonder if my letting him know that I was bothered enough that I needed to consider ending the friendship has caused him to do any serious rethinking. I don’t think I have any way of knowing at the present time. We parted on good terms; my friend did not want to maintain a friendship which was subject to reevaluation based on politics or religion.
Larkrise, I remember very fondly a couple of summer vacations with my family in Brown County State Park, one when I was almost 10, and the other when I was almost 15 (in 1960 and 1965). I remember taking hikes on 7 different hiking trails (ranging from easy to rugged), and I remember climbing up the fire tower. It was a very pretty area.
October 27th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
My Repub friends and family members don’t talk about politics with me anymore. Sometimes they’ll try to bait me into a “conversation,” but it doesn’t really work anymore.
I don’t know what they were/are thinking. Their (utter lack of) rationale was completely alien to me to begin with, so I really have no idea how they rationalize anything anymore.
However, back when discussions did take a political bent, it always seemed to boil down to a lot of the irrational alpha tough-guy “please god don’t let anyone think I have a small penis” mentality. We can’t “cut & run,” real men vote Republican, it’s Clinton’s fault, Hillary is a dyke, 2nd Amendment, Freedom ™, patriotism, etc, etc.
Back in 2002/2003, I remember my good friend Buck using the analogy, “If somebody punches you and knocks you down, do you let them keep punching you or do you get up and punch back?” Or something like that. He seemed to miss the fact that we as a nation were punching back at the wrong person, you know? Ugh. I dunno, it’s all just so divisive and wasteful and sad.
They were/are all just so easily fooled and taken advantage of, taken for suckers. It’s really depressing, actually. These are, for the most part, smart, decent, “normal” people (and Christian, of course). They just allowed their fears and their “patriotism” to supercede their rationality.
I don’t really know what any of them would say about Iraq now. Some would fall into column two, maybe a few into column three. Most of them though, just keep quiet now, and don’t really offer much input at all. No defending Bush Co’s actions, no arguments, just silence. I think deep down most of them know they’ve been suckered and lied to and that they made bad decisons themselves in 2000 and 2004. It’s the kind of thing most of them would never, ever admit to though. And that worries me about what they’ll do on Nov 7. To vote for *gasp!* a democrat… that would be admitting everything they knew, everything they stand for, everything their fathers beat into them… is actually wrong. Plus the whole tiny penis thing…
I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think about what they think anymore.
October 28th, 2006 at 6:41 am
iowametal76
sounds like a total loss of communication - that’s how to kill a system, because each and every system depends on information processing (communication)
and it sounds like divide et impera. If your enemies are too strong, just divide them into isolated groups and let them beat themselves…
If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier… [Bush chuckles, audience laughs] …just so long as I’m the dictator
the people of a democracy are the native enemy of each and every dictator/Aristocrat. Alas, until now, no democracy was strong enough to survive its own rise in wealth and power because of the seduction of the deciders, so that they got so used to their rights, that they forgot their duties….
seems to work until now…
My recurrent initial impression when returning to the US for a visit in the last five years is that the place has gone insane while I wasn’t looking…
That, again, is a conflict mentality at work.
This is what wars do: they push people into mental corners, where us-and-them thinking works in two pernicious ways: it makes people unwilling to accept other points of view, and utterly blinkers them to facts that do not fit the prevailing group-think. The result is that the very ability to reason gets squeezed, sometimes until it disappears entirely.
The war in American hearts and minds by Andrew Stroehlein, an American-born journalist who has worked in war zones around the world