I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

Yes, it did.

This simply did not happen. I basically got taken for a session in “The Argument Clinic.”

But one thing is very clear: there is no longer any point in discussing it.

Anyone so in favor of pre-emptive wars should have to truck with that policy, right? For those who advocate for total war and the merciless killing of Iraqi children you have awfully thin skins.

As it stands, I’ve spent way too much of my own time already listing sourced examples of Bush’s right-wing policies and have yet to see anyone argue that any of those policies are moderate, or even provide any counter-examples. Quite the contrary, there has been nothing but insult and digression directed towards me.

For example, Synova focused on the comment of a judge about Social Security. But Bush’s plan was to privatize Social Security. What, short of abolishing it altogether, is to the right of that?

Even having this conversation makes me feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass.

As for your “longer term impression that the political center may be shifting appears to leave them deeply unsettled,” until I see evidence to the contrary I’ll have to asssume that is yet another example of your own magical thinking.

First, you gotta give UB some credit for at least trying to pursue a rational argument here, instead of resorting to his old trollish ways of two-bit snark and insult. But, on that level, he’s just chased him from the field by Synova, on a field of his own choosing (see this comment), and maybe he should consider it a hint that his general position, as quoted above, is untenable. Maybe, in fact, it’s UB and his lib-left allies that have “very little to do with the center of political spectrum”, hm? They can (and do) take what comfort they can from Bush’s poll numbers now, and the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections, but the longer term impression that the political center may be shifting appears to leave them deeply unsettled — perhaps going a long way toward explaining where all the vitriol on the left is coming from.

I submit that they would not. Am I being unreasonable?

Well, not unreasonable, necessarily. You’re just asking the wrong question.

See, the problem is that most Americans who won’t be 67 for a long long time (that is, young’uns such as myself who won’t be able to collect Social Security even by alphie’s projected failure date of 2048) would agree that old people are “cannibalizing” their future. The young raging liberals are mad that mostly it’s just conservatives in Congress who are acknowledging this, and they certainly have different ideas about what to do about it than young raging conservatives, who may have different opinions than young moderates, but across the board I have been hard pressed to find anyone under the age of 30 anywhere along the political spectrum who wouldn’t agree that Social Security is broken and that we will never see the mounds of money we’re so diligently paying in again.

So maybe “moderate people” of a certain age wouldn’t agree with stumbley, and you are being reasonable. And we all disagree on how to solve the problem; that’s clear. But saying the problem doesn’t exist–don’t expect us to thank you for that.

It wasn’t a *far* right-wing solution either.

Does anyone else have a solution they are offering? It has to be radical enough to actually work, whatever it is. What is the liberal solution so I can compare?

As I said, trusting people with their own money does seem to be a right-wing thing.