But Buck hauled “communism” into the conversation, essentially shoehorning anyone who was concerned about a government that was too powerful and had too little effective opposition into an anticommunist lunatic.

Go look at the thread again. The original article never even mentions “communism.”

It’s difficult to deal with this since they’ve effectively shredded every political term that can be used in this context, and I’m usually reduced to spelling out the charactistics in a long description.

It’s as though the word “elephant” was forbidden, and I have to keep saying “very large, gray, land-going, vegetarian mammal with a trunk, tusks, and big ears.”

This has evolved to the point where good liberals believe there is no such thing as communists any more. Just a lot of people who think that a nation run the same basic way as Cuba would be a great idea.

Just as an aside: If the Republicans got that much control of a state or country, totally veto-proof and filibuster-proof majorities across the board, every liberal here would be screaming about the Fall of Civilization. Note: I wouldn’t think much of it either.

Hell, the Republicans had a maximum 55-seat majority in the Senate during the entire Bush administration, and Bowser thinks that was a dictatorship. It was 59 seats in favor of the Democrats after the 2008 elections, and liberals I knew back then universally believed that finally this country would be run right without having to deal with that crappy opposition party.

Yeah I can be an asshole but I’m not nuts.

No way can I out-rant you.

But when you actually do bring up a fact in these discussions, flag it in the header for me. Maybe like an “(F)” at the end of the text or something.

You come here to make people believe you and only you have solutions for the world’s problems, none of which, by the way, you would have us believe your partisans contributed to even in the slightest. Your mission and your tone is propagandistic, arrogant, insulting and evasive. And you seem outraged when those who are convinced you are mistaken have the audacity to question you.

But you keep comning back, why? You’re a political anomalist, TB, your politics are about Atlantis and Bigfoot and UFOs, and your zeal and arrogance are right out of the same playbook.
It’s always about a big conspiracy, blue helmets, black helicopters, and Marxists in the woodwork.

You don’t want reasoned discussions, you want reassurance that your crackpot religion is true, you seek validation of the plausibility of your voodoo superstitions, because you don’t fully believe them yourself. If that weren’t the case you wouldn’t keep coming back here and getting abused and ridiculed by those who not only reject your philosophy, but are profoundly offended by the way you treat them, and take the time to let you know how they feel about it.

There is nothing new and novel about your politics. Its as old as Babylon and as evil as hell. You favor those policies under which you believe you would prosper, and you don’t care about any one elses problems or priorities or ideas. There’s nothing new about that. In that way, you are no different than any other political thug.

If the job creators were actually doing their job instead of smugly telling the people they won’t hire they are lazy, stupid, or communists, maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

This isn’t happening anywhere outside your head.

Neither are your conservative “victims” who are obsessed with blaming poor people for our problems. If you look at the 2010 Tea Party movement’s agenda, distilled here, there’s nothing at all about the poor, welfare, or even immigrants.

There are a lot of things about a government that has far outrun its original functions.

You can’t have a reasoned discussion about things that only exist in your head. Too many people here don’t know this.

Sorry about “hijacking” a thread with real-world information. At the current trend, average monthly deficits will have to stay below 70 billion for the rest of the years to avoid cracking a trillion dollar annual deficit for the fifth straight year.

The people who are in charge of the economy are either screwing it up, or are running it for their benefit and no one elses. And who “runs” the economy in a capitalist system? Who profits from it? Are they doing all right? Aren’t they doing better every day? Aren’t corporate profits going up, isn’t the stock market booming, isn’t worker productivity going through the roof? Aren’t unions being gutted and real salaries dropping for all workers? What more do you people want? Don’t blame us for the state of the economy. I think the real problem is on the supply side.

As for my sociological and anthropological observations, which is what my post is really about, and about which you seem to be taking so much umbrage, I stand by them. I know the economy is in trouble, and how it got that way. The why is the historical circumstances I mention, I’m not the one blaming someone else for why WE have screwed up collectively. as a nation. Don’t hijack the thread and bury me in true, but irrelevant statistics. I’m not discussing what is going on, I’m talking about how the victims of the deterioration (at least the ones in your party) are deluding themselves into finding someone to blame. I think I’m a pretty fair judge of character, as well as a student of history. I think it would be pretty obvious to you too if you weren’t already ideologically committed to a convenient set of ready-made villains.

After all, Tom. You’ve never been one to be shy about telling people why they think what they do, and why they are too foolish or cowardly to believe exactly as you do.

You’re just going to have to come to terms with the possibility that there are some people in the world who are informed, thoughtful, successful and well adjusted to their environment who just happen to believe you are full of shit.

“…a paranoid fantasy planet of Communists and spoiled, brutish poor people who are out to loot their stuff.”

107 million Americans right now live in a home where someone is on some form of means-tested benefit, not counting SS or Medicare. (corrected)

This is up from 97 million in 2009, and still rising.

If you include Medicare (which is not means-tested–yet) and subtract the overlap, the number goes up to 143 million.

These are not “brutish poor people” (if your straw men were clay, you could bury a Chinese emperor with them). They are people we know. My parents, for example. But they are not mythical, either, and there are only 300 million people in this country, of which 143 million are employed out of a labor force of 155 million.

How much of a country’s population can live off the rest of it?

We have clocked in the first two months of fiscal year 2013. Total 2013 accumulated deficit so far for October and November: $292 billion. The government is borrowing almost half of every dollar it spends.

Obama is apparently going to fix this by raising taxes $80 billion a year. No liberal on this board cares.

He sincerely believes that a national health plan or social security program or a safety net will inevitably lead to the Gulag; that the poor are that way through choice (even though many of them hold two or three jobs and are still drowning), and that a brutal elite of intellectuals has allied themselves with the great unwashed just to plunder his hard-earned stuff.

I’m getting very tired of you lying about what I believe. My views are on record, in often-boring detail, over years and hundreds of posts.

There is a considerable amount of distance between national economic collapse and Gulags. But I don’t define collapse without Gulags as a benign outcome. I also note that no nation in history that eventually ended up with Gulags did not start with some form of collapse.

No one here has ever said that the poor are that way by choice. That’s one of your boogeymen.

“Stuff?” You are welcome to list the signature domestic positions and programs of Obama and the Democrats that do NOT involve handing out goodies or someone else’s wealth to favored constituencies. Think before you respond.