Let's start this season off right

[fajwat]

Very satisfying survey results from an NPR survey:

this survey was conducted only in the 50 most hotly contested congressional districts....

People are angry. More than 60 percent of the voters in the NPR survey believe that the country is "pretty seriously" on the wrong track, while only 31 percent believe it is on the right track. Of those who feel that we're on the wrong track, almost two-thirds blame the war in Iraq or the economy. Another 16 percent blame "Bush in general," and only 6 percent blame illegal immigration.

People are especially angry at the president. Of the 50 districts surveyed by NPR, nine are represented by Democrats and one by an independent; the remaining 40 are represented by Republicans. But Bush's approval rating in these overwhelmingly GOP-held districts is a dismal 42 percent.

People want change. Fewer than three in 10 of the voters in these competitive districts say they are likely to vote for the incumbent. Nearly half say they are likely to vote for "someone else."...

People reject the "moral values" demagoguery. Most voters in the contested districts say that they trust Democrats, not Republicans, on such issues as stem cell research,  flag burning and gay rights....

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/07/28/dems_2006/

[Cassander]

Sounds like the DNC is starting to get the gears working on their own political machine.  Too bad NPR  (and salon.com)  is already preaching to the choir.

we'll see though. 

[Matt]

I love how immigration has been such a failed Republican attempt to create an issue to distract from the failure in Iraq, and how it has come back to bite them in the ass by costing them Hispanic support (that Bush tried to win with amnesty back in the 2004 election). It's nice to see that most Americans aren't really taken in by all the media hype and spin.

But really, the "religious right" has lasted for nearly thirty years. That's pretty impressive, all things consider, to keeping a movement alive.

[fajwat]

like... the perennial flag burning!
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20060730

[Reginald McGraw]

It's nice to see that most Americans aren't really taken in by all the media hype and spin.

Are you kidding me?

The ONLY spin I have seen lately is...WAR BAD, BUSH BAD, EVERYONE MAD AT BUSH, EVERYONE HATE BUSH.

Which seems like what most people are picking up and running with according to various surveys and doo-dads.

I'm not saying people don't feel this way, but certainly that is the "you should believe this if not you're a moron" vibe put out there by most media.  And that does affect people who don't think about things, but instead turn on the TV and find out what to believe (which is a large number).

[Matt]

War is bad.

Bush has been bad for the nation and our constitution.

Everyone outside the United States is mad at Bush, and thanks to our idiotic war plan dreamed up by Rumsfeld and the fracturing of our government (Pentagon and State Department). We fucked up Iraq and now the dog is out of the cage. Bush and especially his cabinet have proved to be amazingly ineffective at handling military affairs, yet amazingly effective at stripping our civil liberties.

I was mostly referring to all the pulpit-pounding about immigration and how Congress and seemingly everyone in the news media said "immigration is a big issue!" when most Americans didn't care one way or another where Jose Hispanic was from Mexico or Cuba or El Salvador or Indiana.

[Tatertots]

Matt's right, that's where the spin is: Congress can push something as "critical to our people" and the newspapers swallow the whole thing without questioning it. "Fair and balanced" means quoting a Democrat, a Republican, and some conservative whackjob.

[Reginald McGraw]

I guess I haven't seen anything on immigration in spin-world in a long time.

[Matt]

Exactly - because no one really cared about it and it was just a distraction from how badly Iraq has been fucked up.

[Reginald McGraw]

And by that you mean no one in the liberal media* really cared about it!?!

Let's face it...it's been a slow news summer.  People dying is the only thing out there.  When the media constantly pumps out one thing, people get sick of it and hate it.  I'm certainly sick of hearing about Iraq and about Bush being an idiot.  So much so, that I have started to hate the Iraqi people and actual shrubs.

*Fox excluded, they are the conservative media.

[Matt]

Oh come off your "liberal media bias! THE LIBERALS WANT US TO FAIL!" bullshit. You can get sick of the truth all you want but it doesn't change what is. I could argue up and down with you, but you're not interested in that. You'd rather keep living in this world where Bush is doing it all for the best of his country, that Islamic terrorists hate America for its freedoms and that all the Arabs are out to get us, that the politicians genuinely care, deeply, about you and I. They want to protect us. They're the fathers we never had, because Daddy was drinking bourbon and hitting Mommy. 

So go on, keep tending your lawn, driving your car and raising your children to stay away from the homosexuals. Pablo down the street has to go because he has five children and for some goddamn reason he is digging holes in the neighbors lawn - for only five dollars an hour! But the TV's on and Desperate Housewives is revving up for a 7th season. Who cares that you can't walk down the street without noticing the second bulb in every street lamp watching you? Who cares that we just eliminated the section of the IRS responsible for auditing the richest people in America? We're going to save thousands of dollars by eliminating that bureacracy! Who cares? Not I. And you know, I would read the New York Times, but they're liberal. They told the terrorists all our secrets. And there was that book by Dan Brown I was meaning to read.

[Reginald McGraw]

Yeah...the lmb part was intended as a funny; sorry about that.  And sorry to go point by point here...but I feel that I need to.

Come on, if we agreed more, then I wouldn't believe that Bush is doing it all for the best of his country and then we couldn't argue about it.

That's what I want to believe about him, true, and that's probably stupid of me.  Stupid to hold on to some shred of a belief that there are politicians that act in accordance with their principles.  I don't think that about 99% of politicians; reps, dems or otherwise.  It also has not been disproved that that is what he is doing.

Why do you think Islamic terrorists hate America?

I love homosexuals, Arabs, Jews, and illegal immigrants.  Although I have generalized philosophical disagreements with all of them.

I hate tending my lawn.

I don't watch TV.

I don't like the IRS, but let's eliminate a lot of other pieces of the government too!

I don't like street lamps watching me.

The street lamp in front of my house now works for the first time in 3 years that I have lived here.

Probably because they installed a camera.

I enjoyed all of Dan Brown's books.

I would read the New York Times...but...who reads newspapers these days?!?  Certainly not unenlightened fellows like myself.

[Matt]

Politicians don't have that many principles, and that's the key difference between you and I. Time and time again, politicians show that they have none - every presidential race, we see that. I was out with friends a few nights ago and someone was arguing that we don't need term limits, because if we had them the politicians in power would be inexperienced and would still be stooges for whoever pays them off. Well, we've gone for awhile without term limits and I don't see it working.

I think Islamic terrorists hate America because it's easy and it gives them power, just like portraying a faceless, shifting enemy who strikes through terror gives our politicians power. It all comes down to power and who has it. I think "the terrorists won" the day we signed the Patriot Act into law. Osama bin Laden didn't wake up one morning and hate America for its freedom. That's a ridiculous notion. It's the kind of notion that grew in strength when the people that asked, "Why did this happen?" were shouted down as unpatriotic charlatans.

[Matt]

and ironically, http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/# <-- nailed it on the head.

[fajwat]

Why do you think Islamic terrorists hate America?

People dying is the only thing out there.

if it bleeds, it leads.  And America has been directly and indirectly killing people globally for decades.  Specifically for the Arab world: 1) Supporting, politically and materially, Israel's persecution of Arabs. 2) a decade of baby killing sanctions in Iraq, after bombing their infrastructure. 3) interfering in local and regional politics, e.g. installing and supporting several leaders who ruined their people's lives (Saddam, that Iranian guy, probably Egypt) 4) in the face of billions given to Israel for weapons, our humanitarian and intellectual aid to Arab countries has been shamefully low.  Particularly germane is Afghanistan's situation -- we helped Osama and the locals defeat the Soviets for us, then utterly abandoned the war torn, poverty ridden nation.  5) I'm leaving out a lot in the interest of finishing up some work and going home on time.  From memory, those are the biggies.

Our hedonistic freewheeling lifestyle ("whee look at us!") might be salt in the wounds, but salt ain't no thing without the open cuts.

But don't argue with me over whether these things are enough to kill us over.  Everyone likes to argue with "those misguided liberals" about how we've not really mistreated them at all, or how they started it/deserved it/etc.  Don't argue with me -- we need to start convincing them.  It's not me who needs convincing.  Besides, I don't believe in violence of any kind, and certainly not killing anyone.