Ditto.FiremanBob wrote:It would be helpful if you did not make assumptions about my motives.
Ditto.FiremanBob wrote:And I'm tired of the personal sniping on this board.
Ditto.FiremanBob wrote:Your accusations demean you, not me.
Ditto.FiremanBob wrote:I'm tired of people regurgitating the parties' talking points, or making broad statements containing controversial premises as assumptions that I have to take as "package deals".
There have been some attempts on here at that, notably and surprisingly by folks like Mindflayer and Kruetz and CowboyT and others that are immediately dismissed as useless, or even worse, as liberals. I don't see any point in trying to reform the Republican party to be conservatives, and I don't see any point in trying to argue that everybody is wrong if they are not a conservative in agreement with you. The mostly likely future may well be a multi-party system that has to form coalitions to govern. Real conservatives get to be one of those parties....how do they need to frame themselves so as to encourage coalitions? Certainly not by driving away anyone who disagrees with them, but rather by finding the common ground. Hey, everyone wants freedom (from regulation, to do what they want, whatever), but they clearly define it differently.FiremanBob wrote:As I said in my original post on this topic, the "establishment" Republicans are as bad as the Democrats. The Republicans who would nominate Bob Dole and GW Bush are not my Republicans. My alliances are with the genuinely conservative wing of the party, which is attempting to rescue it rather than going nuclear with a third party formation. A thread on what it takes to pull that off would be interesting.
While we are at it, I do not understand the attitude on this forum that says everyone who is a democrat and/or lives in a city is a "taker" and is mooching off the real Americans. That's not just wrong, it drives people away.
You and Shotgunblast both argue eloquently and intelligently, even though you have different value systems. CoyboyT is another who speaks clearly and from his heart, but the responses to him are childish. There are others that I enjoy reading -- Mamabear, Mindflayer, a few others -- because they are people who speak with passion but are clearly listening and thinking at the same time. That is the ingredient for useful discourse.
But there are others on here who are so far over the top that they have become almost scary in their inability to put cogent thoughts together, so they turn to ranting, denigrating, quoting irrelevant scripture, highly inflammatory statements, things that were they in a bar would cause me to walk out of the room for fear of a fistfight breaking out. Schoolboy stuff. Pompous. They are going to Pi$$ all over me for saying this....it's gonna be fun to watch. But they'll make my point for me.
I'm probably older than most of the folks on this board, and I've NEVER seen such attitudes. Yes, I worry about this country, but it is because of the bias and invective and disrespect toward people not like them that I worry.
