I"ll Bet Most Members Think Of Me As A Liberal

I'd say you just watch too much television, Lon, and you believe far too much of what you hear.

 

Where do you get your persistent virtue signaling from, then? Newspapers?

 

You're set pretty well financially, Lon. Why don't you voluntarily pay reparations for the evil deeds done by your ancestors? Maybe you can pay Al Sharpton's taxes for him, or buy Barack another home on the coast. There's no point in virtue-signaling if you're not going to do anything about it.

 

My ancestors were in Sweden.

Which actions are you referring to? Besides the virtue-signaling, that is.

 

I thought that you said that you always use the closed-captioning when you watch television, @Lon Tanner ? Like this picture that you posted in the TV thread you started.

 

Although I sometimes refer to myself as a conservative, that word doesn't mean much of anything anymore, particularly when people like Mitt Romney and John McCain are referred to as conservatives. That's not a camp that I want to be in, so I am more of a constitutionalist. If, as a country, we would follow the constitution, I might not agree with every decision that is made but the country would be okay. I don't know if any of you remember Dennis Kucinich, but he was a liberal Democrat from Ohio who was also a constitutionalist, or at least more so than most people are today. As a liberal, he would support policies that I disagreed with but he would pursue them constitutionally, and that's something that our country can survive.

I didn't vote for Reagan, but neither did I vote for the Democrats who ran against him. I won't go far into my reasons for not voting for Reagan here, but if anyone's interested we can start another thread. In short, he was too much of a contradiction. I lived in California while he was governor, and he signed the first pro-abortion law into effect while he was in office. He was divorced, which doesn't make him an evil person, but he rarely even visited his children from his first marriage and, as far as I know, he rarely attended church. So when we were presented with him as the Republican candidate for president, running on a Christian, family values ticket, there was a disconnect there, and I had the feeling that he had simply reinvented himself for the campaign.

As president, his rhetoric was good, but that's pretty much all there was to him. I think it was Pat Buchanan, who was one of his speechwriters at the time, who said later that Reagan gave the speeches but George H.W. Bush set the policy. I wasn't impressed, and I didn't vote for his reelection either.

For the most part, I hate Republicans, but Democrats are literally the enemy. I didn’t vote for Richard Nixon in 1972. I didn’t vote for Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or Bob Dole, either. I did vote for George W. Bush the first time because Al Gore was certifiably insane, but I didn’t vote for Bush’s reelection. I didn’t vote for John McCain or Mitt Romney, but I did vote for Donald Trump. However, the only Democrat I voted for as a presidential candidate was George McGovern in 1972.

So, when I am paying attention, I will refer to myself as a constitutionalist rather than a conservative, and to make sure this is on-topic, I think of @Lon Tanner as someone who lets the media determine many of his opinions. There's no other reason for virtue-signaling since it's pointless otherwise. I won't say that you're a liberal, Lon, because I don't think you've thought the issues through carefully enough to have arrived at your own positions. That's not uncommon these days. It is the product of several decades of conditioning.