What should he get?

magerette said:

"...I used to be Republican, then I went to college and read a book. There is no liberal media bias, there is objective reality; and then there is bizarro Republican world where man rode the dinosaurs, Sarah Palin is smart, and the fundamentals of the economy are strong

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Good quote, I still like something PJ said on here, something like "Reality has a well know liberal bias"

magerette said:

Edit: @ dte: I hope nothing I said in my post about the KKK and so forth was offensive to you. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the subject and I'm quite willing to hear your side of the debate anytime. I think it's something we all need to air out, to examine and to evaluate.

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Like I've told you before, it's gotta get pretty darn ugly before I even feel a scratch. No worries. I've got no direct experiences in that arena (good nor bad) so it's pretty easy to stay clinical.

Not really sure I want to go too far with that particular discussion, though. It's a very fine line between arguing about racial hypocrisy and being a real honest-to-goodness racist. I'm comfortable with where I'm at, but it would be pretty easy in a heated discussion to fall off that cliff. I've earned enough labels--I don't want to give someone the opportunity to slap "racist" on there, too.

Been there. Done that. Got the infraction.

Any subjects dealing with race are hard to discuss without being labeled a racist. I've been called a racist for saying I'm entirely against illegal immigration - despite the fact I'm part Mexican.

dteowner said:

Like I've told you before, it's gotta get pretty darn ugly before I even feel a scratch. No worries. I've got no direct experiences in that arena (good nor bad) so it's pretty easy to stay clinical.

Not really sure I want to go too far with that particular discussion, though. It's a very fine line between arguing about racial hypocrisy and being a real honest-to-goodness racist. I'm comfortable with where I'm at, but it would be pretty easy in a heated discussion to fall off that cliff. I've earned enough labels--I don't want to give someone the opportunity to slap "racist" on there, too.

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If you're happy I'm happy. Even if I suspect that one of those labels is that the ""d" in dte may stand for 'darth'... (I'm going to exlore this idea of labeling a bit further below in my response to rith's post, though, because I think it's where a lot of our current polarization problems in this country come from.)

Rithrandil said:

Any subjects dealing with race are hard to discuss without being labeled a racist. I've been called a racist for saying I'm entirely against illegal immigration - despite the fact I'm part Mexican.

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It's a sad comment when people have to use such an extremely negative stereotype about anyone simply because they disagree about a vaguely related political stance--immigration is one thing, illegal anything is another.

I've mentioned the phrase being averse to the "hard thinking" before, and while I'm not any better than the next person when it comes to taking mental shortcuts, I'm starting to see a real trend over the last few years in avoiding anything that resembles that (hard thinking) in our public discourse.

Disagree with someone? Call them a racist (liberal babykiller, conservative wingnut, etc.) Everything about you and them is then summed up nicely in one morally superior judgment. (Yes, I've been known to do this;sometimes it's just fun.)

V7 has a thread going about (at least this is what I got out of it) how much easier it is for people to regurgitate a talking point they've identified with than to examine the point on their own because it's too complex to deal in nuances, and not "snappy" enough. Therefor everything gets boiled down to labels, or as I've also heard it called "bumper sticker" philosophies; something you can sum up in a few words that have a nice ring to them.

Soundbytes instead of sound arguments are what we expect from the media, but too often we get it from everyone around us because they just don't have the time, interest and energy (or sometimes the smarts, of course)to think things out for themselves.

The end result seems to be that our political and social dialog resembles two grumpy old men screaming insults at each other over who ate the other's peas or something.

The NY Times designated conservative, David Brooks, had a column on Sotomayor today. He doesn't much like her speechifying, but finds little to criticize in her judicial opinions.

David Brooks said:

In these speeches, race and gender take center stage. It’s not only the one comment about a wise Latina making better decisions than a white male; it’s the whole litany. If you just read these speeches you might come away with the impression that she was a racial activist who is just using the judicial system as a vehicle for her social crusade.

And yet her history and conversations with her colleagues suggest this is not the main story. If you look at the whole record, you come away with the impression that Sotomayor is a hard-working, careful-though-unspectacular jurist whose primary commitment is to the law.

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[ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion ]

He's also, rather amusingly for a conservative, making a case that Sotomayor is nothing more than a product of her environment -- fundamentally sound but a bit damaged by exposure to the academic milieu of the 1970's.

Brooks is the conservative voice that PBS tapped during the election, and he's obviously hugely nostalgic for that time before the far right got a death grip on his party. He's one of the more moderate, even intellectual voices out there, able to see both sides of the story, usually, which is why Limbaugh et all are usually disowning him.