"Dinesh D'Souza's 2016 is must viewing"

They do an excellent job of laying out how this whole thing is a scam and how both “parties” advance the same agenda.

All you have to do is compare the two parties’ platforms to see that do not have the same agenda.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/how-are-christian-values-faring-in-go…

cf….

http://sharperiron.org/filings/8-13-12/23952

their platforms. Politicians and political parties do lie you know. Ask any liberal who thought that they were getting an anti-war, pro-civil liberties, anti-big banks and big business candidate when they voted for Obama. Or any social conservative who voted for Reagan only to have him put two pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage judges (O’Connor, Kennedy) on the Supreme Court.

Now would be a good time to write that review of Republocrat and submit it to Aaron.

We have a group from our church (sizable percentage of adult members) traveling 90+ miles tomorrow night to see it. (It’s not being shown at the one theater in our town/area)

Republocrat isn’t a very good book. Carl Truman, though a genius most of the time, is an outsider who proved he doesn’t understand American politics.

I rarely disagree with Shane, but i will here. I thought Trueman’s book was very good.I didn’t agree with all of it, but it was very helpful.

So maybe the outsiders have a better view than the insiders do. Case in point: it is difficult to say which group has gotten less in return for their party loyalty the last 30+ years: blacks or evangelicals/fundamentalists. Maybe an outsider is more capable of seeing that the politicians and parties tell us what we want to hear while doing something completely different because he has less emotion and experience personally invested.

The business of developing public policy has never fit, and will never fit, all or nothing thinking. The beliefs, values and interests of the nation are more complex and diverse than ever, but even in the late 18th century people rarely got more than half of what they wanted from a representative or president, etc. (And the struggle to gain office was messy and often ugly)

It simply doesn’t follow that if both parties have some crooks and cheats, some self-serving parrots, some arrogant fools, that therefore both parties are 100% worthless, nothing can be accomplished through either of them, and nothing can be done to improve either of them and they’re just the same.

In reality, there are some good, good people involved in trying do what God expects leaders of nations to do: uphold good and punish evil. I hate to say it, but there are a fair number of these in both parties. The trouble is that many of them are not well informed in the history of western civilization or in economics or are deeply misinformed. Of the latter, the vast majority are Democrats.

I’ve got a copy of Republocrat coming in the mail. Trueman is often insightful and I want to see if he has any idea what he’s talking about in this case. The title suggests he does not. Though you can go back a few decades and find a time when the Democratic party had many constituents who had agrarian-conservative sensibilities and some good instincts for curbing the abuses of industrialism, that time is long past. Philosophically, the Democratic vision of humanity and the country is thoroughly infused with the thought of the French radicals, sentimental egalitarianism and economic fantasy.

But rather every available evidence points to neither party representing what they claim to represent. Honestly, the only evidence that they do is their claiming to do so. If you go by their actions, the policies that they implement, all available evidence is that they do not believe what they claim to believe. And this becomes even more so when both parties work together to implement and continue the same policies that one or both claims to oppose on the campaign trail.

I’m having a hard time following. A “party” is a bunch of individuals. Sometimes the party​ acts; quite often individuals who are members of it act. There are varying amounts of coordination and agreement among those individual members from day to day and from one piece of legislation to another.

What you appear to be doing is looking at the worst things individuals in each party do and seeing this as the actions of “the party.” But evidence abounds that “the parties” (in the sense of “most of the leaders who comprise them”) are profoundly different in what they’re actively trying to accomplish.

For a quick survey of evidence…

Conservatives (nearly all of which are Republicans, though not all Republicans are conservatives) have tightened restrictions on abortion in multiple states and reduced the number of murders of the unborn. In addition, they were instrumental in major reforms to the welfare system during the 90s, have helped increase affordability of educational choices in multiple states (which also helps improve the nation’s education as a whole because of the competition factor), have often achieved tax policies that better encourage individual work/productivity incentive, have even more often slowed or prevented productivity-discouraging tax policies, have protected funding for national defense, have strengthened the ability of law-abiding people to defend themselves and their families through conceal-carry laws, have opposed the redefining of “marriage.”

Meanwhile, Liberals (the vast majority of whom are Democrats) have labored—and too often succeeded—in doing the opposite on nearly every one of these points.

That there is a real difference here between these ideologies and what they’re trying to do is almost impossible to not see.

Saw 2016 last night and thought it was very good. At the theater we attended, and at the local one which I didn’t know was showing the movie, every seating was entirely sold out. Haven’t heard any news about it nationwide, but I’ll bet it’s the top grossing movie of the weekend.

A friend of mine directed me to this Weekly Standard article critiquing D’Souza’s work. It was refreshingly sane:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/roots-lunacy_508809.html?nopager…

Nearly everything that Obama has done as president, including the policies that D’Souza cites as proof of his inherited anticolonial ideology, would have been as eagerly pursued by President John Edwards or President John Kerry. And the points where they might differ—in the escalation of troops in Afghanistan, for example, or energetic education reform, or the push for nuclear power—mark Obama as more moderate than either of them. Come to that, many of the policies that D’Souza identifies as anticolonial were advanced by George W. Bush, who doesn’t (I’m guessing) have an anti-
colonialist bone in his body. Bush began the auto bailout, approved TARP, vastly increased federal spending, expanded entitlements, pushed through a large and probably unnecessary fiscal stimulus of his own, and often chided Americans for their “addiction” to foreign oil.

Ferguson may have a point that Obama is not more anti-colonial than the most of his presidential-level fellow Dems. What this shows, though, is how far left the entire party has become. But Ferguson should also know better than to pull a few select items out of a body of evidence and point out that “the other guys do this too” as an argument against the entire body of evidence. One can always select a criterion and find that it’s not unique. (Look, they all wear socks, too!) But if there’s a kernel of truth in D’Souza’s thesis it’s that Obama’s background suggests he is more deeply and truly influenced by the radicals than his sometimes-superficially-similar fellow politicians.