Originally Posted by Jason Marcel

I look at all decisions one at a time. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II. Take away everything they say, and simply look at what they do and judge if that's a good thing to be doing. I agree with all of them some of time, disagree with them some of the time as well.

In the case of Bush II, he has hardly made any decisions that are actually any good. Tearing up the ABM treaty and taking the inspectors out of North Korea were two of the decisions he made early on in his presidency, and they were both decisions that set us back. It didn't matter to me that is was Bush doing it, it could have been anyone, and I would have disagreed with that.

On foreign policy, I've contended for ages that it's the policies by Washington leaders that have caused the blowback against us, not the Dems or the Republicans, but both, equally. What amazes me is how partisans choose to dig in and convince themselves that it's obviously the other side that is keeping us less safe, when in fact it's both sides.

What amazes me even more is that people begin to simply repeat what one side says as if that's the truth, like in offshore drilling, or any issue meant to cause a wedge between us that is false.

It's really sad to me that the extremes on both sides are convinced that the other is wanting to make the nation worse. What makes the nation worse off is by denying the truth instead of correcting the mistakes.

I agree that most partisans just look at the news, they believe what they hear, and they close their minds to anything different. However, I disagree with the assessment that a Rep voter or a Dem voter can't defend why they continuously vote that way. Rep voters I talk to will usually defer to abortion and gay marriage and social values while Dem voters will defer to the economy and jobs and healthcare. And I don't even disagree that all those values are important, it's just that the way those sides try to solve those problems are always by doing the stupidest things. Abortion won't ever stop because some stupid laws were passed, but education will decrease those numbers. And on the economy, no amount of laws or taxes or penalties will stop Americans from selling other Americans down the river in order to go from being multi-millionaires to multi-billonaires. On that matter, values mean everything. The left says that if we tax corporations more, we can use that money to invest in job creation in other areas, and the right says that if you cut their taxes more, that will give them the incentive to invest more in the American worker. But both of those ideas are fucking retarded, since you can't legislate how one American will decide to treat another American. In the olden days, if you worked for a company and the company did very well, they'd give you a bonus and better benefits as an incentive to keep producing and to produce even more, but nowadays, if you work hard for a company and they make record profits, there's no guarantee that your job won't get eliminated and sent to some developing or communist nation where the job can be done by someone who will get paid a fraction of the amount without any benefits. And since partisan hacks can't see that basic shift in values in America, there is no saving them.