Obama is a socialist.
Colin Powell endorses Obama.
Ergo…
Any questions.
Some people think the US already is a communist country…
Not yet, but we have adopted several of Marx’s 10 goals (e.g. graduated income tax, government schools–off the top of my head). But glad to see your heart’s in the right place.
OK, snap it up. I got a bet going on how quick someone’s gonna call me a racist for saying anything negative about either one of 'em.
No, just sadly ignorant. Obama isn’t a socialist, you see. But hey, rock out with your ideas. Doesn’t mean it makes any sense, but that is your right.
I wouldn’t read it as an endorsement of capitalism as much as an endorsement for the case that Bush is a moron. People endorse candidates for different reasons, you know. They may like some stances and not others. I don’t think anyone likes everything about the candidates. Maybe if Powell said he endorsed Obama because he liked his economic policies you might have something, but I don’t know if he ever said that and even if he did say that, I think Powell is just disgruntled about his last job and wants to stick it to his old boss.
Anyone going to see the movie W?
You could have a point, but you could also have pointed out that Bush and McCain are socialists lite as well. Obama’s biggest vote getting position is his spread the wealth big government socialism which he actively pursues, though avoiding the label like the plague. Ergo, Powell had to know that, unless he disavowed Obama’s socialism, he would necessarily be seen as endorsing it. Silence is consent.
I’m depressed enough already.
I’m just waiting to hear all the Democrats come out and talk about what a wise, forward-thinking intelligent guy Powell is, and talk about how the Republican party needs more like him- that way I can compare those statements to when they were all saying the exact same thing about McCain a year or two ago.
Yeah, the press especially. McCain was their darling until he became the front runner.
Ehh, maybe. His spread the wealth thing has come into attention a lot recently, but before that most of what got him attention was his ripping on Bush. His base was formed entirely on hate for Bush. The socialism thing may be what has made him get the lead over McCain, but I tend to think that it’s the financial crisis that has given him the lead. Bush and McCain are associated with the crisis because the republicans are the ones in power. Wall Street collapsed under their watch. Whether it is their own doing that caused the collapse is the question that people don’t know or want to know.
I tried my best to ignore this, and I’m still to dumbfounded to respond, so I thought I’d just hang it out all dripping and naked for everybody to review.
It was less a year-or-two ago. McCain was more of a maverick (a legitimate maverick) pre-2004. But after he flirted with a VP spot on the Kerry ticket, he was put in his place by the machinery in his political party. That is, of course, part of the point of that machinery! When someone strays too far from the party line, they need to be adjusted. Same thing happened with Lieberman when he lost the Democratic Primary. That is one of the saddest things about this election and McCain. He has sacrificed a lot of his integrity to get where he is. Part of that is just politics, but what can you do? Powell’s associations with the pragmatists in the Republican Party have been well known for some time, so his problems with the Neo-Cons have likewise been aired and discussed for some time. It just so happens that many members of the pragmatic wing of the party (Powell, Susan Eisenhower, Jim Leach, Christopher Buckley, and so on) are hoping over to the Obama side of the aisle.
I’m not saying that one ought join them, but when making a statement like “Obama is a socialist”, don’t you think you ought consider for a moment that arch-Republicans like those wouldn’t be endorsing him if he were?
Are you calling affirmative action, pragmatism? That’s why he broke with the Bush administration. So the primary reason he endorsed Obama is almost certainly race. For me, as much as I dislike affirmative action, I don’t see it as the real danger at this point. Obama’s socialism is much more dangerous, the most important part of Obama’s positions, thus the most important (albeit implied) facet of Powell’s endorsement.
Colin Powell’s endorsement has more to do with foreign policy than domestic. Powell is a pragmatist. Among Republicans there is a rift between pragmatists like Powell and the neoconservatives. The pragmatists now view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake. The neocons advocated the Iraq war in the first place and still support it as well as other preemptive interventions in the Middle East
Powell has been critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war and is unhappy that McCain has surrounded himself with neocon foreign policy advisors.
PT,
Your comments suggest you didn’t even listen to Powell’s explanation of his endorsement. His concern was that the republican party had “narrowed” -ie- was no longer representing the American people. I won’t wade through the rest of it, but the bottom line was that he was concerned that McCain would bring more devisiveness at a time where it couldn’t be tolerated.
You might want to listen to the whole interview, but I doubt that you will. You already know how everything is.
Oh my nothingness! You have bought into that whole Limbaugh line that it has to do with race? Come now, we certainly don’t see eye-to-eye on politics, but you are much smarter than that. If he wanted to endorse Obama because of race, why wouldn’t have have endorsed him from the get-go? Did Obama become blacker as the race went on? Did I miss something? And if racial solidarity is the deciding factor, where is Condi Rice?
Surely you’ve read about Powell’s vocal criticisms of the Neo-Cons while he was in the Bush government? This isn’t anything new, though his breaking from the party line is indeed newsworthy. Likewise, his presence on the pragmatic wing of the Republican party has long been known and recognized. Look back to the McCain VP discussion and when his name came up, it is precisely his affiliation with the pragmatics in the GOP that was discussed!
Socialism is like sugar. Everyone has a different taste for what is
too much and not enough. To some Obama is socialist, to others not socialist enough.
Socialism is a quality. The degree to which you lean on that quality to make judgments is what decides whether you’re a socialist. Who you hang out with determines whether socialism is a good word or a bad one.
Ultimately what you are saying is socialism is bad and since Obama is socialist he is bad, but it just isn’t that simple. Every candidate must have socialist and non-socialist leanings. If you lean to much towards individualism (Bush) you will be crushed just as leaning too close to socialism will.
If you really want to make a case for why Obama is “bad” then you need to do more than give him a label like “socialist”, which maybe in your circle is a bad word but to most it is pretty meaningless. You need to get to what exactly you think is wrong with they guy in specifics. Why is redistributing money bad? Is it always bad? Are there cases when it is good? Would you redistribute the wealth of a terrorist or a criminal or would you allow them to keep their money? etc.
What is it about politics that brings out the moron in intelligent people?
How an endorsement of a person can ever be an endorsement of a complex ideology with a multitude of meanings to different groups throughout history and throughout the world today is beyond my ability to understand.
And this is the thing. The American right wants to mean something by the word socialism that nobody else in the world seems to want to mean by it.
I’m British: in our country, when we say somebody is a Socialist, here is a taste of what that might mean. A tax rate of around 80% on the highest earners, a completely nationalised health-service, railways, power operators. The complete removal of fee-paying schools for our children. Private enterprise only being tolerated to the extent that it furthers the general good of the entire population.
You get the idea. What the rabid right doesn’t seem to have noticed is that, by and large, they have won. Every mainstream politician seems to accept laissez-faire economics (at least, maybe, until this year!). What you have is a guy, Obama, who maybe thinks that the market should maybe think a bit more about the interests of the general populace than it currently does, who thinks that health care should be slightly more easily available than it is, who in essence thinks we need to have policies a little bit more geared towards increasing the lot of the general population. This, somehow, gets called ‘socialism’ when all you’ve got is an acceptance of liberal (in the proper sense of the word) economics coupled with a desire to see the profits slightly more evenly spread.
Of course, the left isn’t really any better. One of the great lies, of course, is that the classical liberal doesn’t care about the general good. The classical liberal just thinks the general good is obtained in a rather different way than those on the left would think.
Basically all you’ve got is 2 candidates who accept the same general economic structure with a bit of a difference in emphasis. How this gets pitched as a clash of ideologies is a joke.
Crazily, of course, the real difference between McCain (or, rather, the party he represents) and Obama is on social policy. The real clash is between the socially permissive and the socially conservative. The war between capitalism and socialism has already been fought, and we all know who won.
Oh, yeah, finally: you’re a partisan moron. People like you are the reason why political debate is conducted at such a shockingly low level. You don’t even have the excuse of being unintelligent. You want to portray it as a battle between 2 people holding utterly opposing ideologies.
A change in tax policy is not socialism. And Obama wants to raise the taxes on those at very top by a few points. How does that translate to him being a socialist? Last time I looked, the term meant state ownership of industry. Which, these days, would make the whole lot of them in Washington D.C. socialists, including McCain.
Of course, things got to the point of bailout as the result of about 8 years of failed policy. Which was, boiled down, based on about 2 decades of making economic policy according to an economic theory (heck of a job, Greenspan!) that doesn’t pan out.
I’d say that Obama’s plan to cut taxes for those earning less than $250K is really much more about capitalism in a consumer economy like the United States. Because almost nobody believes in trickle-down economics anymore. The economy is driven by the rest of us having enough spendable income. And Bush’s balleyhooed stimulus package reduced taxes for the richest, but left that very same rest of us with a national debt about double what Bush inherited from Clinton.