"Tinkerntom" wrote in message
...
No commentary necessary.
--riverman

Hi riverman, or is it now aknowledged that you are SuperGuru, glad to
see you hanging in there with all my posting snafus, etc.

Sorry about wasting the band width!

Ah, no worries; everyone screws up in the early days, even conservative
neocons who think they own the world. There are several Usenet protocol faqs
out there....you shoud read up on them.

You demonstrated with your response, the very point of the article I
posted though. You had been asking me to provide some support for my
position, I posted, you responded with a cursory "nice", made no other
comment about my position, and laid your egg on me. Now if I play the
game, it is my turn to lay another egg, and then it is your turn.....

Egg? I don't think so....I was showing you an article that supported another
(and not diametrically opposed) point of view. Now we get to discuss what
the articles said. Yours said that the dems are suffering an identity crisis
and need to reorganize if they want to play ball. No argument there...but
then that's not your point. Your point is that the sweeping success of Bush
and the republicans demonstrates a huge shift in the countries morals and
values to the right (or at least, a clear demonstration of the stance that
had already existed). My point is that this is not so, and that you are
being far too smug about the election results. The shift was actually closer
to 3% to the right, which closely matched the increase in the fundamentalist
vote.

I spent 4 years in Israel, and their political system has some interesting
aspects which were suddenly mirrored by our last election. The Knesset, the
Israeli house of congress, is composed of representatives of all the major
political parties, with seats allocated by percent of the popular vote.
Whichever party is in control of the Prime Ministership has to scab together
enough support from the Knesset seats to hold greater than 50%
support...that's what they refer to as 'forming a government'. Inevitably,
however, the major players end up splitting the seats with their traditional
allies until there is a 49-49 split. Then, this small ultraconservative
minority party who holds out until the end, and that holds 3 little seats,
finds themselves in an incredibly powerful position....whichever side they
choose to go with ends up with the majority. They know exactly where they
stand, and it is very influential, and they use it incessantly.

Although they represent only a 3% slice of the population, they are very
outspoken about how Israel is an ultraconservative country, because their
ultraconservative agenda comes to play in practically all the major
issues. Of course, absolutely everybody on both sides is learning to despise
them, because they insist on pushing their agenda over the interests of the
other 98%, but you have to admit that they have clout, as irritating as it
is invalid.

Yes, your Bush won the election. Yes, the Conservative Right has found
itself influential because of various reasons. Yes the Democrats are finding
themselves disenfranchised and unorganized. No, the US has not suddenly
shifted far to the right, and to claim that these election results reflects
the opinions and morals of the majority of America is quite self-serving and
inaccurate. And with that in mind, the Republicans are quite well-warned to
consider their Liberal Democratic countrymen, as there are quite a few of
us....practically the same amount, by last count, and we are finding the
republicans smug alienation of us and our issues very disenfranchising. And
as the Senate Majority leader of Tennessee (R) said: you pass the same
people going down as you did coming up.

And what does any of this have to do with Bush's horrific environmental
policy?

--riverman