Trigger (heh) warning: This is a political post from a conservative point of view. This is not my normal recovery/cycling/fitness post. If you can’t stand the truth, and if you’re a Liberal, I digress… don’t bother reading further. I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings. I won’t change your mind with this post and you won’t change mine in the comments section. This is the conclusion of my Trigger (heh) warning.
Iowa kicked Hillary Clinton’s butt last night, where avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders, virtually unelectable in the general election, all but tied her in the Caucuses. Democrats, according to their standards, are obviously sexist. They can’t bear to give a woman the top job. Must be.
That out of the way, it is increasingly important to remember that when a Liberal chastises you, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or Conservative, for a Misunderstood Mind Misdemeanor, when they spot it, they got it. This is the second time in a row that an upstart in a field of candidates who had no chance against Hillary Clinton, in this case who had no money or political ground game as of nine months ago gave her fits in the Iowa Caucuses.
When a Liberal accuses you of a mind crime, they’re almost always projecting their own feelings onto you.
Don’t feed the animals, just roll your eyes, shake your head and walk away.
Also telling, after the New York Times’s endorsement of the most liberal Republican in the field but not the most conservative Liberal, Ted Cruz took Iowa over The Donald. That surprised me as the polls were flipped for the two and the press was way off on Marco Rubio who came in a close third.
Finally, one more thing to take away from the Iowa Primary results: The polls were, across the board, wrong. Everything we’ve heard over the last month about how candidates were polling, was off*.
* In Mrs. Clinton’s case, the polling isn’t necessarily the fault of misreading, poor weighting or misrepresentation as it usually is. The fact that she had almost 40 pages of emails on her server (that she’d thought was wiped [with a towel?]) were so Top Secret they can’t even be released in redacted form, is going to have a negative effect.
Now, if you think this is only about Hillary’s email server as Secretary of State, you’re mistaken. When she was running in 2008, she excoriated George W. Bush for having a private email address in addition to his government address. She claimed this was to “avoid transparency”… Ironic, that.
Oh, and while I’m at it, one tidbit on Chris Christie, and his major miscalculation… His mantra, for years, has been that Americans want politicians to “get things done”. Chris, with all due respect, much of the country is fatigued. Almost across the board, with the exception of the far left wing, we’re quite tired of politicians getting certain things done and not others. It’s become quite clear that politicians cannot, indeed, chew gum and talk at the same time, as is witnessed by our ridiculous budget deficit. Many Americans see politicians “getting things done” as a very bad thing. I like to say this, “I’ll tell you what, you balance your checkbook first, then talk to me about ‘getting (other) things done'”.
Just sayin’.
Some other prominent Socialists: Bonito Mussolini, Hitler, Hugo Chavez, Karl Marx (scientific socialism)… Wonderful company.
Fit Recovery 
I have been avoiding the Presidential race like the plague up until this point…all the lies and hate gets to me after awhile. I burned myself out last election cycle so I having been taking it easy with regard to this never-ending race but now I am starting to poke around a bit and figure out what is going on. Gotta be prepared for the NY state primaries!
Can you imagine if the government actually focused on the balancing the budget? That might make politics less depressing for once…
Yep. Imagine if the press actually held them to it. 😉
I wish we were more like Canada in that regard. My friend Sue says a political season lasts four months.
Four months would be amazing…we could actually put the focus on the budget instead of spending all our time reading about the various candidates squabbling.
Yep… better, we could go about our lives.
Interesting that the polls were all wrong – they were also all entirely wrong in our general election last year. I think some changes in the way pollsters do polls may need to happen!! (P.s. As I’m sure you are aware I think if I was in the U.S I would be on the complete opposite side to the political spectrum from you 🙂 but this post was mainly fact I thought?! So thank you for the warning at the beginning but I enjoyed reading it and learnt a bit 😀 )
Everything in this post was fact, yes. Our libs over here don’t like fact, unless they’re their make and model of fact – to the extent that they get very angry when you point facts out that make their favorite lib look bad… thus the trigger warning. You might surprise yourself once you got over here. Our brand of Liberal tends to carry the torch no matter how bad their policies are or how much fact says, “Don’t go in there”. I get the impression that you are a bit more realistic across the pond. I would be interested in seeing how you did with the predisposition to a ruling class… We don’t do that here, as I’m sure you’re aware. My buddy,
I wrote a whole long reply to this but didn’t have Internet good enough to post so managed to lose it – Argh! But the gist was that yes, I think our politics are less polarised than yours, but we run the danger of having all political parties saying the same thing – it’s always good to have some voices saying new things rather than just group-think!
This is true, and the gridlock doesn’t hurt either. I always laugh when politicians say they are sent to Washington to get stuff done. I vote for the person who will gum up the works. Less done means less harm. 😉
Sorry you lost your comment, that sucks.
Oh, my manners! Thank you for the kind words. 😀
And yet, you can equally validly call Mussolini and Hitler conservatives in as many ways as they were socialist, along with such delightful characters as McCarthy, Le Pen, Farage…
You can, just like you can equally say that Mother Teresa was a sinner… You’d be correct, but silly.
Well that’s pretty much how I felt about the famous fascists being in your list of socialists – defensible, but silly. While their actions included some that can be interpreted as socialism, they also explicitly rejected other socialist acts (for example, Hitler’s Mein Kampf contains “…the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.”)
And all that’s without getting into the big question of whether what you call “a conservative point of view” is actually what the rest of us call “conservative” or “neoliberal”!
Actually it would be closer to call me a paleodemocrat. Liberals wrecked the word and switched to Progressives… Or did you miss the memo? Someone who believes what was created in the USA is special and is to be shared and protected. Meaning, ask not what your country can do for you… You should remember the rest. I believe the State running everything, as Socialists believe, is colossally ignorant – as do all conservatives in the US. The evidence is insurmountable.
And we remain two peoples divided by a common language 🙂 What you’re calling socialism seems to be what I know as communism, while I think our liberals might be what you’d know as laissez-faire centrists, the successors of the Whigs here… meanwhile, the US Whigs became part of the Republican Party, didn’t they?
In other words, to me, you’re not a socialist or communist, but sound more like a liberal than a conservative 🙂
Yes but… and I hate to be a pain in the ass with this, the only difference between a socialist and a communist is who runs everything. With communism, the party rules. With socialism, the state rules everything. In other words, it’s all bad where freedom is concerned. There is truth to the idea that our liberals and conservatives differ a bit from yours. It definitely cannot be said that I’m a liberal, in our terms, here. Over there, that may be different.
Whereas from where we sit, with communism, the state rules (and just happens to be the one party in every implementation that I can recall), whereas with socialism, it can just as easily be the customers, the workers, the citizens or whatever, not necessarily with any more state involvement than there is in capitalism by its legal construction of markets.
Yeah, tell that to the hundred million people who had to be killed because they didn’t like the socialists. Seems to me, no matter how you try the old moral equivalency justification, you can’t get by that. Now, next you’re going to quote the whole Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but that won’t work either because you know better and I’m not some dip who will sit still for it… This is the State killing 100,000,000 of it’s citizens. The fun fact is that while all of those citizens are being exterminated, the Socialists are whining about how they’re the cause of Socialism’s failure – all the while missing the obvious fact that Socialism sucks and doesn’t work. Of course, while all of that whining is going on, the ruler’s only answer is more of the bullshit that doesn’t work. Meanwhile normal folks can’t even buy toilet paper anymore. See Venezuela.
You really do seem to be talking about what is known outside the US as Communism. Socialism hasn’t failed and socialist parties often form part of the government in many countries except the USA. One snapshot map of socialist-run countries was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_governed_by_SI_parties.png
Oh and didn’t you notice that the Venezuelan socialists lost the last election and aren’t in government there now?
It is impossible that you’re this naive, MJ. Maduro is Chavez’s protégé. Not surprisingly, we didn’t miss that here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Socialist_Party_of_Venezuela
I am talking about socialism, you’re failing to grasp that the Socialism that’s done all of that bad is the same as the Socialism light that you’re used to – the only difference are the restraints that hold it back from doing its worst in other countries. You’re also failing to grasp, blame it on your classic education, that communism and socialism are each other’s ugly, kissing cousins.
Come on MJ, you guys had Margaret Thatcher for God’s sake, “the trouble with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money”… Ring a bell?
Socialism, wherever it’s allowed to take hold, is a catastrophe. It sucks, it’s ignorance masquerading as conscientious intelligence, in its purest form, Socialism is laziness and evil having sex on a bed of idiocy.
The funny thing is Communism is just a little worse.
Yes, we had Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher. She was a strange sort of capitalist who sold off public assets cheaply in what looked like an attempt to buy votes, but her downfall was to try to hit the poor harder by replacing property taxes with a poll tax.
Also, I don’t see why I would “quote the whole Iraq and Afghanistan wars” – as far as we Brits are concerned, it was our socialist leader Tony Blair who got us involved in the most recent iterations of those messes.
As for naive, it seems strange that you’re so naive as to see no difference between socialists and communists, but major differences between liberals and conservatives. The US is an eagle doomed to fly in circles for now because it only has a right wing. 😉
Not true at all brother. We have a left wing over here, they’re just looked down on because of their lousy policy ideas so they have to lie and act like they’re something they’re not. I understand perfectly the difference between Socialists and Communists. The Commies were pissed because the Socialists weren’t quite as hardcore, so they (the Commies) upped the ante. Funny how that worked, eh? Your left wing and our right wing get our countries into the wars… I’d be willing to bet my lunch your right wing blasted Blair for it too, just like our left wing blasted Bush. Now that’s comical right there.
I could care less about what happens with Bernie or Billary. I find the showing by Rubio encouraging because it shows that conservatives are not totally getting fooled by the BS that Trump and Cruz are slinging.
Cruz is a tough one. I’ve been waiting for a contender who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind since Reagan… Unfortunately, let’s just say Trump isn’t as polished. Chuckle. Either of the Big Three is better than Mad Dog Sanders or Hillary.
I definitely agree about anything being better than Sanders or Clinton. Cruz just does not strike me as true presidential material, especially since he is not someone who plays well with others. I like that he is open about his faith, but I think his faith is a crutch and takes away from his ability to lead.