Why Would You Vote For This Man?

[cherom]

There was no one else to vote for really :rolleyes:

 

Now lets move on to Obama's support of a free healthcare system. Have you ever been to Canada? It takes six months or more to get an operation for any kind of non lethal injury. If you break a leg, expect to be in a wheelchair 6 months minimum before your operation. If you think I'm lying, let me explain how it works. Even though the system is called "free" healthcare, all the money has to come from somewhere. To get the money to pay for the healthcare, the government greatly increases taxes. This means that a perfectly healthy poor man will be paying for a sick rich man's healthcare, even though the poor man doesn't need medical care. Does that seem right to you? When the government controls healthcare the doctors will get paid a lot less. That means a lot less people will want to be doctors. When there are less doctors, the wait gets exponentially longer. The lower wages also mean a strong decrease in performance. Doctor's won't be happy with their career if they don't get paid enough. It will be much harder to find a good doctor, not to mention how long it will take to even get an appointment. Now, when I say that in Canada it takes 6 months to get surgery, imagine how bad it will be here. I can guarantee you there are a HELL of a lot more people in the U.S. than in Canada. If we adopted the free healthcare system, I wouldn't be surprised if your father had to wait a few years to get his back fixed. So that means your dad would walk around for years, and have to go to work to feed your family with a bad back.

 

Oh my god, this is so true! My wife is Canadian and I had to live in Toronto for almost a year. I have to say that I'd rather pay than wait for appointment for extremely long time. I am glad i am stationed back in IL now :biggrin:

 

Bush left a lot of crap for Obama's administration to deal with. All i can say is - time will tell.

[Gligamesh]

There was no one else to vote for really :rolleyes:

 

Now lets move on to Obama's support of a free healthcare system. Have you ever been to Canada? It takes six months or more to get an operation for any kind of non lethal injury. If you break a leg, expect to be in a wheelchair 6 months minimum before your operation. If you think I'm lying, let me explain how it works. Even though the system is called "free" healthcare, all the money has to come from somewhere. To get the money to pay for the healthcare, the government greatly increases taxes. This means that a perfectly healthy poor man will be paying for a sick rich man's healthcare, even though the poor man doesn't need medical care. Does that seem right to you? When the government controls healthcare the doctors will get paid a lot less. That means a lot less people will want to be doctors. When there are less doctors, the wait gets exponentially longer. The lower wages also mean a strong decrease in performance. Doctor's won't be happy with their career if they don't get paid enough. It will be much harder to find a good doctor, not to mention how long it will take to even get an appointment. Now, when I say that in Canada it takes 6 months to get surgery, imagine how bad it will be here. I can guarantee you there are a HELL of a lot more people in the U.S. than in Canada. If we adopted the free healthcare system, I wouldn't be surprised if your father had to wait a few years to get his back fixed. So that means your dad would walk around for years, and have to go to work to feed your family with a bad back.

 

Oh my god, this is so true! My wife is Canadian and I had to live in Toronto for almost a year. I have to say that I'd rather pay than wait for appointment for extremely long time. I am glad i am stationed back in IL now :biggrin:

 

Bush left a lot of crap for Obama's administration to deal with. All i can say is - time will tell.

Ugh.

A damn T-Shirt in Germany cost me 60 Euros. Taxation is insane across the pond.

[wasder]

There was no one else to vote for really :rolleyes:

 

Now lets move on to Obama's support of a free healthcare system. Have you ever been to Canada? It takes six months or more to get an operation for any kind of non lethal injury. If you break a leg, expect to be in a wheelchair 6 months minimum before your operation. If you think I'm lying, let me explain how it works. Even though the system is called "free" healthcare, all the money has to come from somewhere. To get the money to pay for the healthcare, the government greatly increases taxes. This means that a perfectly healthy poor man will be paying for a sick rich man's healthcare, even though the poor man doesn't need medical care. Does that seem right to you? When the government controls healthcare the doctors will get paid a lot less. That means a lot less people will want to be doctors. When there are less doctors, the wait gets exponentially longer. The lower wages also mean a strong decrease in performance. Doctor's won't be happy with their career if they don't get paid enough. It will be much harder to find a good doctor, not to mention how long it will take to even get an appointment. Now, when I say that in Canada it takes 6 months to get surgery, imagine how bad it will be here. I can guarantee you there are a HELL of a lot more people in the U.S. than in Canada. If we adopted the free healthcare system, I wouldn't be surprised if your father had to wait a few years to get his back fixed. So that means your dad would walk around for years, and have to go to work to feed your family with a bad back.

 

Oh my god, this is so true! My wife is Canadian and I had to live in Toronto for almost a year. I have to say that I'd rather pay than wait for appointment for extremely long time. I am glad i am stationed back in IL now :biggrin:

 

Bush left a lot of crap for Obama's administration to deal with. All i can say is - time will tell.

I am sure a National Heathcare system can work. It used to work here. Unfortunately, it has been screwed up. I have grown up with a poor NHS but I would still prefer it to how you have it in the US. As far as I see it, the NHS is a right that everyone is entitled to.

[Ethre]

I am sure a National Heathcare system can work. It used to work here. Unfortunately, it has been screwed up. I have grown up with a poor NHS but I would still prefer it to how you have it in the US. As far as I see it, the NHS is a right that everyone is entitled to.

 

Implementation would likely be sticky. Here In the US it tends to take a long time for anything to be done.

 

If they implement one, it will take a while. If they don't, it will take a while for them to decide not to.

[Gligamesh]

I am sure a National Heathcare system can work. It used to work here. Unfortunately, it has been screwed up. I have grown up with a poor NHS but I would still prefer it to how you have it in the US. As far as I see it, the NHS is a right that everyone is entitled to.

 

Implementation would likely be sticky. Here In the US it tends to take a long time for anything to be done.

 

If they implement one, it will take a while. If they don't, it will take a while for them to decide not to.

 

The US is funny. If you're poor, or a crackhead, everything's free.

If you're a hard working tax payer and can't afford healthcare, guess what? Assed out.

So much for free markets.

[Ethre]

The US is funny. If you're poor, or a crackhead, everything's free.

If you're a hard working tax payer and can't afford healthcare, guess what? Assed out.

So much for free markets.

 

Its not a nice boat being poor, or a drug addict.

The goal of most of those programs is to make things a little bit easier - not to create the gap that you are referring to.

 

There are arguments that its not really a free market in the US.

[Gligamesh]

The US is funny. If you're poor, or a crackhead, everything's free.

If you're a hard working tax payer and can't afford healthcare, guess what? Assed out.

So much for free markets.

 

Its not a nice boat being poor, or a drug addict.

The goal of most of those programs is to make things a little bit easier - not to create the gap that you are referring to.

 

There are arguments that its not really a free market in the US.

Yeah, I know.

It's also not a nice boat currently, with the $40,000.00aires subsidizing the billionaires and the poor.

I would agree with most of those those arguments, since there's quite a bit of piecemeal subsidization of many industries and institutions.

 

Edit: I know it's not there to make a gap, but it's an unfortunate side effect. Really, the top 2% of earners pay roughly 50% of America's total tax collection. It just sucks when you're getting by as middle class and subsidizing other people's hospital stays when you're not guaranteed anything but debt for your own. Of course, that could well knock you into the lower class, where everything is free. :P

[Drizzt396]

Senator Obama and his entire liberal campaign represent ignorance...If you truly believe that America is a bad country, then you might as well move to France like all the other pussies...

 

Now I didn't care enough about your essay or the debate itself to read anything past bits and pieces, but I picked out the two quotes that most caught my eye.

 

First an objective critique of the essay itself: Your stated intent was to make those of us who support the President-elect more "open-minded" and "skeptical". Yet your language (and vague use [or lack-thereof] of evidence) accomplishes exactly the opposite--it affirms my belief about how you wingnuts think, and would affirm the beliefs of those that agree with you. Nowhere do you make an attempt at persuasion, only belittling (once again, since I don't care I'm not going to bother counting, but you use the word ignorant a lot...more on that later). It'd be infinitely more effective to show us policy positions that Obama has taken that aren't progressive, ones that don't present a change over the status quo.

 

Now a subjective one: It seems odd to me that the very same people who so loudly linked criticizing the policies of the president with treason, and who blindly ignored the facts and accepted that war with Iraq was needed are now leading the call to be more "skeptical". Now here's the only honest question I'm putting up, and if you could pm the response that'd be great (but you don't have to). Are you sounding this call to skepticism because you feel like you got burned by blindly following G dub? Or is it more because you don't agree with his policy positions and are trying to get people to disagree too?

 

On "...represent ignorance.": There's a brilliant JSM (I really hope you're scratching your head, wondering 'who's JSM' at this point) quote (and yes, I know that ignorance is different than stupid. they're close enough synonyms that I'm going to associate the two) that goes like this: "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."

 

Now to understand this quote, we must understand what the words liberal and conservative really mean. Liberal comes from the latin word 'free', and liberals (throughout the ages) have generally promoted policies that are progressive for their current day. The universal definition for political conservatives (no need to go into latin, we all know what 'conserve' means) is those that support status quo/older policies. There's another fitting quote I read somewhere that I have to inject (if paraphrased): 'All it takes to turn a liberal into a conservative with no change in their opinions is 20 years'.

 

On "If you truly believe...": Oddly enough you talk so much about ignorance and yet here is an example (one of the five sentences I read) of ignorance too. There are 2 ignorant things you put up here: 1) After Bush's (especially second) election, most of those that did not want to live under such a leader moved to Canada. 2) Though America remains more conservative than Europe or our northern neighbors, the powerful mainland countries (France, Germany) as well as Canada all have conservative governments. Irrational hatred of the French is what's truly ignorant.

 

 

But don't worry about my thoughts. You should actually send this essay as a writing sample to the NYT. I hear they're trying to replace a wingnut who shares your god given ability for an ignorance of the facts, Bill Kristol.

[Gligamesh]

it affirms my belief about how you wingnuts think,

er... Obama himself is a wingnut. He wasn't voted "most liberal" for nothing... You sunk your own ship right there, but let's carry on.

 

It'd be infinitely more effective to show us policy positions that Obama has taken that aren't progressive, ones that don't present a change over the status quo.

Show me any policy position he's taken a stance on that he didn't leave room to wiggle out from under if it became inconvenient. Like explaining away inconvienient votes by claiming to have "pushed the wrong button". With laser sharp perception like Obama's, I feel all warm and snuggly. And safe too. :down:

Status quo? He voted the "wingnut" party line religiously. He's a Party man through and through.

 

and who blindly ignored the facts and accepted that war with Iraq

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll...&vote=00237

Plenty of Dems ignored whatever 'facts' you feel existed at the time.

Hell, I assumed the WMD line was BS from the start. Iraq was on lockdown after Pappa Bush's war. Saddam had no chance (or motivation) to rebuild his stockpile. It would have been suicide. But I personally approved (and approve) of the war. Tell me Iraq, her neighbors, and the world are not better off without Mr. Hussein with a straight face. Because it is. There's a big glaring inconvenient fact for you.

I've conversed (and argued) with colonels down to fresh-faced grunts (the only people that matter, as far as US involvement) who swore there were WMDs, but in the end we all agreed that WMD or not, it was something that should be done.

The vast majority of our military men and women think we've changed the world and the course of history for the better.

If you want to blindly ignore that fact, feel free.

 

On "...represent ignorance.": There's a brilliant JSM (I really hope you're scratching your head, wondering 'who's JSM' at this point) quote (and yes, I know that ignorance is different than stupid. they're close enough synonyms that I'm going to associate the two) that goes like this: "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."

 

Now to understand this quote, we must understand what the words liberal and conservative really mean. Liberal comes from the latin word 'free', and liberals (throughout the ages) have generally promoted policies that are progressive for their current day. The universal definition for political conservatives (no need to go into latin, we all know what 'conserve' means) is those that support status quo/older policies. There's another fitting quote I read somewhere that I have to inject (if paraphrased): 'All it takes to turn a liberal into a conservative with no change in their opinions is 20 years'.

Your condescension has you stomping holes in the hull of your sinking ship. Your assumptions are quaint.

First you latinize "liberal" as if being a liberal is a higher plane of existance, whereas there's no need to go into "high" speech when thinking of conservatives. Your psyche betrays you, sir.

Then, you immediately contradict yourself by quoting John Stuart Mill, then stating 'All it takes to turn a liberal into a conservative with no change in their opinions is 20 years'. Newsflash there, bud. JSM died in 1873. 136 years ago. Clinging tightly to his quote (which was a liberal's belief) well over a century later must mean you are a super-conservative? Reconcile that, I implore you.

Another quote from ol' JSM:

"A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration."

Voted on, approved, fought by a volunteer military force, and carried on for an honest purpose (even if it took a little dishonesty to get the ball rolling, name me one honest politician).

Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you:

Operation Iraqi Freedom

 

On "If you truly believe...": Oddly enough you talk so much about ignorance and yet here is an example (one of the five sentences I read) of ignorance too. There are 2 ignorant things you put up here: 1) After Bush's (especially second) election, most of those that did not want to live under such a leader moved to Canada. 2) Though America remains more conservative than Europe or our northern neighbors, the powerful mainland countries (France, Germany) as well as Canada all have conservative governments. Irrational hatred of the French is what's truly ignorant.

EVERYONE is ignorant, just in different areas. You are as guilty as anyone else. Irrational? Life is irrational.

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”

-Bertrand Russell

Your innate (implied) hatred of conservatives is just as irrational as you claim his is of France.

 

 

 

But don't worry about my thoughts.

Trust me, I won't. :)

You should actually send this essay as a writing sample to the NYT.

Yeah, I hear they'll print anything. Just ask Jayson Blair. Or Howell Raines. Or maybe Gerald Boyd...

 

I hear they're trying to replace a wingnut who shares your god given ability for an ignorance of the facts, Bill Kristol.

Cool, both of you can write pro/con editorials on the "important issues" at hand, and the rest of the world can continue not to care...

Each side can call the other ignorant all it wants. They're both right, in that everyone is ignorant.

What I think is ignorant is the notion of two groups of people who both claim to have "The Answer".

Moving back on topic...

 

How this "man" (Obama) is throwing himself a 150 Million dollar party as the country falls apart around him (thanks in large part to the actions of our Democratic Congress) is beyond me.

It's utterly laughable. Or would be, if it weren't so obscene.

"Oh, but it's underwritten by corporations!"

There went that "change" he crowed about.

 

I think I understand his platform now.

"I HOPE I stay employed."

"Hey mister, got any CHANGE? I need bread for my children..."

 

The good news is the Media has lionized and deified him to such a degree that no matter what he does, he will fall short.

He can only blame Bush for so long...

 

The real power is in Congress, where Pelosi and Reid scare the poo out of me. The only person nuttier than either of them is Barney Frank.

 

It's going to be a very long four years...

Especially if they keep interrupting our regularly scheduled programming with such breaking news as "Barack Obama has just boarded a train!"

GEE WIZ! I wonder what fun we'll have when he decides to step into one o' them new-fangled motorcars! :rolleyes:

[Ihoe]

Obama is the american Khatami. A Democratic Charismatic political figure which in my opinion Is "All Flash, no substance".