turbo-1 said:
Nebula, your straw-man arguments, mis-direction, and putting words in my mouth make it impossible to make a reasonable response.
You claimed in a previous post that vouchers are nothing but an excuse for "neocons" to create segregation, and you are accusing me of a strawman?
Do you know anything about the history of the Civil Rights movement? When integration was on a roll, Southern bigots hid behind their churches. They created "Christian academies" that could only be attended by the children of church members. Church members = all-white = Christian academies = all white. When I took consulting contracts in the deep south over 2 decades later, I naively thought that such segregation would have softened. I was very wrong.
The "Southern strategy" of the GOP played on bigotry, and captured the South from the Democrats.
A lot of the pro-Confederate, racist Southern Democrats transferred over to the Republican party during the 1960s and 1970s when the Democrat party began becoming much more socially-liberal. Like I said, you cannot generalize a party.
Southerners had been strongly pro-Democratic since Reconstruction, but revolted at the Democratic support for Civil Rights.
Yes.
Neo-cons have since taken over the GOP and have purged most true conservatives from their ranks, and they continue to go to the "voucher" well over and over, knowing that it plays well to parents of kids in segregation academies.
What is a "true conservative?"
Once again, the neoconservatives are completely different from the racist ultra-right that one can find in the South.
Your neoconservatives are much more your professional, East Coast, country-club, big business types. These are a whole different breed of conservative from the ones you tend to find in the South.
Not all the Southern conservatives, BTW, are the racist variety. But one complaint of conservatives in the South is how the establishment neoconservatives are embarassed to be in the same party as them.
You have standard Reagan conservatives, which you can find in the South and everywhere else, who are pro-free market, strong on national defense, limited government, socially conservative, etc...
You have the ultra-right, who are a combination of libertarian and conservative. They have racists in their ranks, hate the Fed, are pro-Confederate leaning, etc...
You have neoconservatives, whose only real uniting aspect is being very strong on national security. Otherwise, there are neoconservatives who are pro-life, some who are pro-choice. Some are for limited government, some are for big government. George W. Bush was a big government neoconservative.
Neoconservatism arose partially as a reaction to Nazi Germany in World War II and then the rise of the Soviet Union.
The GOP neo-cons shed crocodile tears for the fate of poor inner-city children and claim that their insistence on vouchers is for the sake of such poor minority children. They lie.
Says who? And how is this not a strawman argument?
They know that there is insufficient capacity and flexibility in inner-city schools to allow wholesale movements of students from failing schools to better schools, and NO mandate to pay for the transfers and transportation of such students.
No they don't. It is issues such as these which is why it is good to debate something like vouchers.
These are cold, hard truths, and unpopular. That doesn't make them less true. Never attribute altruism and purity of intent to ANY political party. You will lose every time.
This is another strawman. They are cold, hard truths only for a select group of people within the parties perhaps. It is a cold, hard truth that certain Democrats only favor big government to gain control and buy votes. But many favor it because they believe wholeheartedly in it as well.