Randal's a friend of mine, a sweet soul and a sharp intellect. I think he's doing his best to walk the talk as an advocate for peace and understanding. It just makes for kind of limp reading. Randal: Ron Barnes hoed this row for years and look where it got him. Free your inner activist.
Read it all here.
For readers of the Daily Courier in Prescott, Arizona. Comment and discuss. Be nice, now.
Muggs archive
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Monday, April 2, 2007
6 comments:
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ReplyDeleteI have to applaud the idea of trying to reconcile red and blue states of thought. I did feel a little . . . soooo your point is? But maybe I'm the choir in this. Certainly, if he had pointed breath-takeningly new takes on how the one on the left is now the one on the right I might have been more impressed by the whole exercise.
ReplyDeleteI think the point Randal's trying to make is recasting "conservative" as, you know, conservative with things like money and resources and our environment and foreign adventurism and like that. That's all good, I'm down with that. My point is that he doesn't have to be quite so mellow about making that point. I think the public is much more ready to hear this message than we've grown accustomed to since, say, 1980. And we could use more momentum on that message to carry us through clearing up the mess.
ReplyDeleteI think that the main message was sound but comparing corporate welfare to programs designed to help people on the bottom rungs of our national economy. One is an investment in our Nation , one is helping the already rich to become richer
ReplyDeleteI get what you're saying, but I don't think Randal meant to say that there's no difference between corporate and social welfare. He wrote:
ReplyDelete"... both camps practice forms of welfare, with only the directionality in dispute. While popular perception sees liberals as redistributing wealth from the top down, it sometimes sees conservatives as doing so from the bottom up in the form of corporate subsidies."
Randal uses "welfare" as shorthand for "wealth redistribution," and while I agree that's a bit facile, I don't think it's much out of step with how it's used on the street. He's clearly not assigning value to either here, except by implication, which is quite different from saying that they're equivalent. Am I right in understanding that you'd rather he did make a clearer value choice? If so, we're on the same page.
yup gotta make that value choice clear...
ReplyDelete