On Tuesday, February 14, 2017 at 11:39:35 AM UTC-6, Razzmatazz wrote:
On Tuesday, February 14, 2017 at 10:43:30 AM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:
On Monday, February 13, 2017 at 5:18:36 PM UTC-7, Razzmatazz wrote:

You would be amazed how angry people are. My district has always had a
Republican rep in congress. It's a very conservative district which had a very
sensible GOP rep for almost 17 years, but then the local T-Party primaried him
and we ended up with a far right zealot who wants to eliminate Medicare, Social
Security and Medicaid for disabled and poor.

In just two years, then, I would expect people to be angry enough to get out and
bring the former Representative back or vote a Democrat in if they have to.

It is a problem that people with more extreme views, like the Tea Party, are
more inclined to vote and be active politically, so they have an influence out
of proportion to their numbers, but it's not insuperable.

John Savard

It's the result of intellectual laziness of the majority of our nation. The ultra-right has tremendous tools and money to shape the national narrative (and Canada is not immune to this). One tool is to change the meaning of words, to demonize things that normally would be considered good in any society.

Here is a quote by Sorensen:

"The term “political correctness” has been the cornerstone of conservative efforts to transform the ideas of civil rights and equality into something frivolous and stupid. The right loves plucking silly examples from obscure, powerless people and blowing them up into huge “culture war” issues that supposedly threaten the nation. “PC” is an insult that plays into their hands.

Along these same lines, “liberal elites” — long a Fox News favorite — is designed to shift attention away from the actual economic elites hoovering up the world’s wealth and resources, such as the Koch Brothers or Trump, and instead make one think of poodle-owning urbanites supposedly looking down their noses at everyone (while in reality voting to raise the minimum wage). It’s a frame, not a fact, and hides a deep anti-intellectual agenda. By definition, I would say a liberal is someone who cares about the less fortunate. So a liberal “elite” would be a liberal with power. However, the term is thrown around as a pejorative to smear just about anyone — feminists, college student activists, etc. — rendering it meaningless, and an effective right-wing language hack that divides the left."

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
-- Theodore Roosevelt