The World According to Nick |
My take on Software, Technology, Politics, and anything else I feel like talking about. |
Thursday, February 03, 2005
We Vote for People - Not PositionsAnn Althouse has an interesting excerpt from Hardball last night:
She has more of the exchange than I've included, but you get the idea. Positions are great. You have to have them. But you also have to have someone who leads, and executes plans to follow through on those positions. It's easy to have positions... especially when those positions are always against what everyone else suggests. It's much harder to have positions that back a plan, and then have a leader who executes that plan. That's the Democrat's problem. They only seem to say that the decision you're making is wrong... without offering up much of an alternative. So if you don't offer up an alternative, and everything we do is wrong, then everything going on right now must be fine? I find myself continually reminded of my high school government teacher Mr. Helmenstein. We called him Helmy for short, which he absolutely hated. He was as liberal as they came, and I was a young conservative loud mouth on the debate team. He swore, he insulted people, he threw erasers at us. Hell, he actually made a girl cry the first day of class. Personally I had fun... where else can you insult your teacher to his face daily and get away with it? Anyway, I keep thinking back to how he described Conservatives and Liberals. It was very broad and generic, but has stuck with me all these years. Of course it's been a long time since he said this, so it's obviously not an exact quote, but it was along the lines of:
This is not an uncommon view of the two halves of politics. After all, it was Winston Churchill who said:
The implication being that young idealistic people want to change the world... and the older you get the more you realize that you can't. But is this true any more? Think of the major issues that are facing this nation today. Who's on the side of change and who's on the side of the status quo? Liberals don't want to go into foreign countries and help free people, many Conservatives do. Liberals want to keep Social Security as is, while Conservatives want to radically change it. Sorry Helmy... but your labels just don't seem to stick any more.
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Name: Nick Home: Wauwatosa, WI, United States I'm a Software Consultant in the Milwaukee area. Among various geeky pursuits, I'm also an amateur triathlete, and enjoy rock climbing. I also like to think I'm a political pundit. View My Profile Archives
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