Right Wing Cartoonist vs Reality

Hi Coyote,That's not "Leftie" logic. It's an innate human cognitive flaw. It's the same reason people come up with and believe stereotypes like "Asians can't drive and are good at math," or "Southerners are a bunch of inbred hicks." As human beings on every part of the political spectrum, we all tend to overgeneralize and tribalize. It's just one of the things we, as a species, tend to be rather bad about, and it's almost impossible to avoid completely even with effort.The irony, of course, is that your criticism of "Leftie" overgeneralization is itself an overgeneralization of liberals.There is no such thing as a homogeneous group of human beings, whether we're referring to political alignment, religious beliefs, race, nationality, culture, or whatever.Coyote, I've noticed that you really seem to have an intense dislike of whatever you perceive to be "liberal," yet I've rarely noticed much in terms of specific arguments regarding specific policies that you disagree with. Granted, I could just be failing to recall places where you've been more descriptive and not just hating the "other team," but I'm curious: what specific "conservative" beliefs and policies do you support, and what specific "liberal" beliefs and policies do you not support?I ask because I don't want to classify you, an individual, according to my general perception of self-identified conservatives, any more than I'd like you to assume that my political views are identical to your general perception of liberals.

It's that last constraint you added, Taz, that's the problem.Broad generalizations are particularly susceptible to things like confirmation bias. If you generalize that "Asians tend to be bad drivers," you'll notice the bad drivers that you observe are Asian, and file it away in your head as confirmation of your pre-existing generalization. You'll fail to notice the Asian drivers who don't piss you off, and you won't accurately tally the bad drivers of other races for comparison. Generalizations based on personal anecdotes are almost never accurate in representing the group as a whole.When we're talking about political persuasions, where people can get very emotionally heated and there can be a harsh tribalistic division, an "us vs. them" mentality, the problem can be made worse.Generalization involves taking limited information and applying it to an entire group. We observe racists and Islamophobes in the Tea Party, and we generalize that the whole thing must be a racist and Islamaphobic organization, or that most Tea Partiers are racist and hate Muslims. Every time we see a sign or three at a Tea Party rally that expresses fear of Muslims or mentions race, we say "aha! See? They're all racist douchebags." We take limited information from a small subset of the overall group and use them as our representatives, not because we actually performed some experiment or survey and determined what most of those people actually think and feel, but rather because we noticed something distasteful, established a hypothesis, and sought to confirm it rather than test it.Coyote does the same thing with "the Left."So do Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity and several other talking heads who claim to represent American conservatives. Depending on which one of those guys you listen to, "the Left" is a bunch of idiots who think communism is a good idea, want to ban Christianity but are sympathetic to Muslims, want to turn your kid gay, want to raise your taxes so they can waste your money on welfare queens, want to drive all businesses into the ground, possibly want to euthanize your grandma, and would rather save a tree than an unborn child. I believe Michael Savage was fond of the term "red diaper doper babies," which was his way of saying "you're all a bunch of whiny commie drug addicts."But we all know full well that political opinions are much more nuanced than a binary "Right vs Left" dichotomy. It's not even just shades of gray - there are all manner of points where subgroups of each overlap, and where members of the same "leaning" will vehemently disagree with each other. Greenpeace and PETA, for example, are often-used symbols of the American "Left," and I consider both groups to be largely idiotic and sometimes harmful (going by the stated goals of the organizations, not just the actions of several members). The Log Cabin Republicans are staunch supporters of gay rights while being members of a party whose active politicians tend to support legislation that restricts those very rights - but remain a part of the Republican Party because of their other conservative views.So yes, Taz, you can use accurate generalizations to predict the most likely attributes of a member of a group. But developing an accurate generalization of a large group isn't something the average person, including you or I, can just do by observing a few (or even many) anecdotes. We can rely mostly on the self-stated goals of a group (ie, members of PETA support animal rights and are unlikely to wear fur), but we can't rely on anecdotal evidence to support broad, general conclusions ("conservatives are all a bunch of racists" or "Muslims all want to cut off our heads"). That's where you fall into the trap of cognitive bias.

Exactly why generalization is dangerous. Even when the so-called "moderates" of whatever "side" are talking, they're certainly less exciting, less frightening, less ridiculous, and overall less notable than the fringe folks. People are far more likely to notice and remember things that have an emotional impact or confirm a pre-existing belief, regardless of that actual comments and positions in real life.A person could say a hundred perfectly normal and ordinary things, express dozens of perfectly acceptable positions...but if that person then says just one comment that we consider strange or objectionable or extreme, like "It's okay to keep the Gitmo detainees imprisoned indefinitely without charge, trial, or even any presented evidence of any crime, because they're terrorists." Internally, we'd all be marking whether this person is now on our "side" or their "side," and every reasonable comment the person has ever made is forgotten. Our impression of that person is now based on our generalization of the "side" we've placed him/her on. and not any of their own statements...and the outrageous statement by the one person is tallied as another drop of evidence supporting our pre-existing generalization for that "side," regardless of actual accuracy.Polarization is literally built-in to the human brain. Continually escalating tribalism is the natural state of affairs; it takes active effort in the form of education (and sometimes the cognitive pressure point of social pressure to combat an unacceptable result, like how racism is now socially unacceptable in the West) or a greater external enemy to bring disparate groups together.Human psychology makes politics (and sales/marketing, and religion...) downright frightening.

..."you guys?" WHo are you lumping me in with? The irony, it burns.For that matter, how have I committed the GOlden Mean fallacy? I haven't commented on which positions are right, I never once said that moderates have the best ideas, or that the correct course of action lies between the "left" and "right."All of my posts have been about the risks of overgeneralization, because an individual can almost never establish an accurate representative of a group sufficient to predict the beliefs of a self-identified member of that group. The hell you have - and I say that as a pretty hardcore liberal. I think that many of the positions supported by the official Republican Party are at best misguided or ignorant or stupid and at worst totally unethical. Attempting to restrict abortion, to deny gays the right to marry according to their own wishes, to cut social programs that keep Americans alive instead of cutting the gargantuan military budget...I could go on, and I certainly oppose strongly those positions. Some I would even identify as "evil."But we all know that American voters are very, very often single-issue idiots. There are self-identified conservatives who vote Republican solely for gun rights, but oppose their party on gay rights or the treatment of the Gitmo detainees and who hated Bush the Lesser, for example.Just like how I'm a self-identified liberal, I tend to vote Democrat, and yet by and large I really dislike Obama and the party I vote for because they really don't accurately represent my interests and views - they just do better than the Republicans, and there unfortunately aren't any other viable choices.You can't just sweepingly generalize that "American conservatives are evil." They aren't a single unified group. Oh come on. American conservatives in general did not put Boehner into the HOuse - the 8th District of Ohio did. Are you now going to lump in self-identified conservatives from everywhere else in the country with that one district in that one state? How do conservatives from other districts, who had no ability to cast a vote on the matter, bear responsibility for Boehner?Not to mention that we all know American politics is very rarely about choosing someone you want to vote for, and more about keeping the worst guy out of office.Taz, you're very clearly just running with your initial hypothesis that "conservatives are evil" and specifically looking for confirmation of your established belief rather than trying to test it. You see Boehner, you see Bush (come on, somebody finish that joke...), and you see confirmation that conservatives are evil.So how can we test your hypothesis, Taz, rather than looking for more confirmations? You're a scientist, you work in a lab, what evidence would potentially falsify (or at least add weight to alternatives) your generalization that "conservatives are evil?" I didn't claim any such thing - and besides that, most Americans don't even vote. In the 2008 election, the highest turnout since the 60s, we had only a 56.8% voter turnout! Midterm elections typically have voter turnouts in the mid-30% range! We know why voters are apathetic - there are very, very rarely any good choices, the average person's view of even the politician they would vote for is often poor, it feels like a chore rather than self-governance... With such a low voter turnout, how can you honestly say that voting results are indicative of the majorty of a subgroup of Americans? Are the self-identified conservatives who don;t vote now just as responsible for electing specific representatives as those who did vote? I can agree that apathy and failing to vote does affect election results, certainly, but you can't hold the guy who didn't vote equally as responsible for electing (Congressional Bastard) as the guy who actually did vote for him, and you certainly can't say that the apathetic non-voter supported (Congressional Bastard)! Taz, I see you making sweeping judgments on a very large, varied group of people based on a tiny amount of information. I see you very obviously falling for the traps of confirmation bias.I'm willing to believe that "all conservative Americans are evil" if sufficient evidence is provided, but you've in absolutely no way shifted that probability by using the election of Boehner by a single district in a single state as indicative of all American conservatives, nor have you proven that Boehner is exceptionally evil amongst his peers. He handed out bribes for tobacco companies? Sure, that's bad. But my understanding is that bribery (whether directly or in the form of influential lobbyists "gifts" and such) is rather the normal state of affairs in Washington. Are so-called liberal Congresscritters actually less guilty of the same evil? Did you even check? Or did you just see "oh, there's a Republican who did something evil, that confirms my hypothesis that he's exceptionally evil and therefore supprots my broader hypothesis that all conservatives are evil, never mind if there are liberals that do the same thing, that would significantly lower the weight of the evidence I prefer so I'm not going to bother looking." If your hypothesis is that conservative politicians like Boehner are more corrupt than liberal politicians, you need to check whether conservative corruption significantly deviates from the rate of corruption among all politicians. If it's close, then observing that Boehner is corrupt is rather like observing that he's in Congress.Let's try this: Obama is a self-identified liberal. He's supported a few traditionally liberal goals, like healthcare, even if he did so rather weakly and I think fudged the job. But he's also not a good guy. His administration defended DOMA for years. His adminsitration made only a halfhearted attempt to close Gitmo, and now is proceeding with military show-trials, and still has taken no steps to grant the detainees basic legal rights like habeas corpus or the right to a lawyer in violation of the Constitution and international law. He's worked hard to retain basically all of the power Bush the Lesser grabbed, including the disgusting PATRIOT Act.Does Obama represent you, as an American liberal? He certainly doesn't represent me. And yet I'm almost certain to vote for him again, simply because the alternatives will represent me less. Is President Obama evil? Am I evil for voting for him, even if I don't support many of his policies? Am I significantly different from a self-identified conservative who had similar feelings about Bush?

I was referring to the fact that a known-corrupt politician shouldn;t be in Congress at all, let alone the Speaker, and that his presence in the body is the sole responsibility of the district that elected him.His position as Speaker, I concede is the responsibility of the majority in the House. I'll do that. I like to look at data instead of outraged references to data not provided. I'm not going to go over all of what you mention, because I don't have the time, but I'll hit a few, especially ones I care about. In the Senate, it was a full split - all Democrats voted for, all Republicans against.In the House, it was a little different. All Republicans against, but 34 Democrats voted against as well. In the House, 224 Republicans for, 1 against.
But there were also 118 Democrats for, and only 65 against.In the Senate, 14 Democrats voted against. All Republicans and 32 Democrats voted for it.And then Clinton signed it.I don't think you can entirely put that one on the Republicans. As unpleasant a thought as it is, I think the American public in general was too anti-gay at the time DOMA was passed. Yes, all of the Republicans except for one in the House voted for it, but so did an overwhelming majority of Democrats. This one's tough to look up quickly, and it's complicated. For those who don't want to Google, this is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which has been proposed in every Congress since 1994. It's taken several forms, sometimes including transgendered individuals in its protections and sometimes not (for some reason, many people who support gays do not support the rights of transgenders, as if gender identity is somehow more of a "choice" than sexual orientation, and as if anyone would ever "choose" to go through years of hormone treatments and eventual surgery along with a social stigma that even gays don't deal with).H.R. 2015, a 2007 version that included gender identity protection, died in committee.H.R. 3685 was then introduced without gender identity protections, and it passed the House. Among Republicans, 159 voted against, 35 for. Among Democrats, 25 voted against, 195 for.Certainly a correlation according to party, but not exactly the goose-stepping party-line voting your outrage suggests. Even most Democrats won;t support equal protections for transgender individuals. And while we had overwhelming majorities along party lines, there were enough dissenters on each side that I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable labeling the Republicans the "bad guys" and the Democrats the "good guys," even if there are more "good guys" among the Democrats. As RAZD is so fond of reminding us, not all A are also B. In the Senate only Feingold, a Democrat, voted against it. Every other Senator, with a single absentee, voted for it, whether Republican or Democrat.In the House, there were 211 Republican Yeas to 3 Nays, and 145 Democrat Yeas to 62 Nays.Absolutely overwhelming support from both parties, even if there were more Democrat dissenters than Republican. Again, I can;t see this as evidence of Republican "evil," I see it as evidence of the shortsightedness, apathy, and general amorality of American politicians in general. In the House, there were 215 Republicans for the war and 6 against. Among Democrats, 82 voted Yea and 126 Nay.In the Senate, Republicans were for it 48 to 1, while Democrats were split 29 Yea and 21 Nay.Again, when both parties vote for something, it seems more to be the will of the American people rather than a specific Republican/Democrat issue. I think the American public in general supported the war initially, and that this is not an issue where you can directly call out the Republicans. If you toss a coin 100 times, and only record the results that come up Heads, what happens?That's confirmation bias. You're pointing out data that you've chosen because it confirms your existing belief - have you ever thought to specifically look for data that would falsify your belief? By nature, human beings will notice and remember information that confirms what they already know and disregard, doubt, or discredit information that would force us to actually change our minds. To counter that bias, we need to look for uncomfortable information, data that would negatively affect our existing beliefs. We should be skeptical even of that which we think we know, because when we're so sure of something that we don't think about it any more, that subject becomes an intellectual blind spot.In the examples above, you did in fact mention several votes where the Republicans voted largely together - but not always. In some of those votes there were a significant number of dissenters. But worse, in some of those votes (the USA PATRIOT Act for one) all of Congress voted as a virtual block! You can't blame the Republicans when the Democrats were just as bad - then you have to blame the American people, or at the very least our politicians' perception of us.Can you call Republicans "evil" becasue they tend to vote against obvious civil rights like the right to marry or equal protection for gays and transgender people? Because they vote for obvious travesties of justice like the USA PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war?Maybe. But in many cases the Republicans are not exceptionally evil, their positions match the majority of everyone else as well. You didn't have to be exceptionally evil to be a racist two hundred years ago, everyone was racist - those who managed to rise above racism at the time were exceptionally good. Today, where race equality is largely accepted, racists are exceptionally evil, while those who discount racism are not exceptionally good.Likewise with many of the issues you mentioned. The Republicans were not exceptionally evil when they voted to go to war in Iraq, or when they voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, or when they voted for DOMA. Those very few Republicans and Democrats who voted the other way were simply exceptionally good.Look, a lot of Republican positions are unethical, stupid, or both. "Supply side economics" was introduced by Reagan, and despite early derision even from his own party, lowering taxes on the rich and corporations to supposedly allow them to create more investment and more jobs has become a Republican mainstay. It's also completely counter to any reasonable measure of fairness, and it doesn't even work. As time has passed, supporting LBGT issues has gained more ground among Democrats than Republicans, to the point where the majority of Democrats would likely no longer pass DOMA if it were brought before Congress today rather than in the 90s, while the majority of Republicans would likely still vote for it.But lets be careful not to step into the trap of over-generalization. Not all Republicans support their representatives, they just like their representatives better than the other guy who was running. What's happening in this thread is that we're taking the extremely complex issue of American politics and trying to boil it down into which sides represent the "good guys" and the "bad guys," but it's just not a binary choice at all. When I vote for a representative, it's frequently not because I support the way that representative will vote, but rather because I think my alternatives are worse. If my choices are a guy who hates gays and another guy who wants to institutionalize Christianity, or a guy who supports the Iraq war and a guy who supports the USA PATRIOT Act, how do I choose? If I don't vote, or if I vote for an untenable third party, it really just helps the guy I like least because that's one more vote he doesn't need to overcome.I vote almost exclusively Democrat, because they more closely represent my views than the Republicans. But even though the Democrats let provisions to protect transgendered individuals die in a committee, I don't accept responsibility for their actions. If I had been in Congress, I would have been right there with Barney Frank supporting the civil rights of all Americans; but most Democrats don't represent me very well either, and so we have the USA PATRIOT Act, Obama-care is so watered down that I even barely support it, and bills to give transgender individuals equal protections at work die in committee.I just don't think that any American political party substantially represents those who vote for them. Single hot-button issues tend to funnel people into one party or the other as a determination of the lesser of two evils rather than true representation.

I said they weren't exceptionally evil. A Republican voting for the Iraq war was not exceptional, he was average. He wasn't any more evil than his contemporaries, including the Democrats, who largely voted for the war as well, even if their support quickly waned.When the vast majority of a society believes something wicked, an individual who also believes that wicked thing is not exceptional - he's average. He cannot be exceptionally evil; rather, the people in the minority, the small number of people who do not believe the wicked thing, are the exceptions, and they are exceptionally good.In the aftermath of 9/11, our entire nation went crazy. It's gotten a little better (a little, mind), but the public overwhelmingly supported both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Republicans aren't the only ones who believed Bush's lies. The Republicans aren't the only ones who knew or should have known that the "intelligence" was a crock. We know that the UN weapons inspectors were in Iraq doing their jobs at the same point in time that Bush was making a speech claiming they were being barred from inspection, and that information was readily available in 2003 as well.Voting to go to war in Iraq was wrong. Even without the benefit of hindsight and with better knowledge of the level of lying, incompetence, and general asshattery involved from the Bush administration, our representatives should still have known that they were making the wrong decision. It was an evil act. I'm not disputing that at all.But read what I've been saying. An individual who performs an evil act when everyone else is also doing the same is not exceptionally evil, he's just average. That doesn't make him less evil, it just means he (or whatever group he's part of) doesn't bear disproportionate responsibility for the evil act compared to others who did the same.If fans of Team A and Team B both riot in the streets after a game of soccer, you can;t look at Team B and say "hey, those guys are evil." It wasn't just Team B. You can't arbitrarily subdivide a group of people who performed an evil act and say that the arbitrarily defined group is evil. It's a mis-attribution of responsibility. In the soccer hooligan example, it was not Team B who was evil - it was all the soccer hooligans, including those among Team A. Team B was not exceptionally evil, they were doing the same thing the other team was doing, and pointing at just one team when both were responsible is a blatant example of confirmation bias, paying attention only to the data that allows you to continue to support your pre-existing position while dismissing the data that would cause you to modify it.So I'll say it again, very plainly: Congress performed an evil act when they voted for war with Iraq. It was reprehensible. They shouldn't have done it, they're responsible for massive unnecessary loss of life as well as the lesser concerns of stretching our military too thin, nearly bankrupting the country, and so on.But the Republicans were not any more guilty of that crime than the rest of Congress. Those few who voted against war were exceptionally good, being different from the norm; but those who voted for war, including both Republicans and Democrats, were not exceptional in any way - most of the country was supporting that evil vote at the time, no matter how much we'd like to forget.That doesn't excuse anything. It doesn't make voting for war any less bad, any more than the fact that slavery was the norm in the 1700s somehow makes a given slave-owner somehow less evil for considering other human beings to be property.Hating Jews was pretty normal in the 1930s. Antisemitism was rampant. Hitler was not notable for hating Jews - the reason he was able to so effectively use them as a scapegoat was because most people at the time readily agreed. Even among Allied nations antisemitism was disgustingly strong. There was nothing exceptional about horrible antisemitism at the time - you can't say a belief was exceptional when it was basically mainstream. You can't look at the Nazis and say "the Nazis were responsible for antisemitism," because they weren't exceptional for just hating Jews. Where they were exceptional was the "final solution;" most people who hated Jews didn't want to actually shove them into ovens or gas them!This means you can't lay the blame on the Republicans and say they were the evil ones, when most other people, including non-Republicans, agreed with them and so also bear responsibility. The Bush Administration, who happened to be Republican, pushed an agenda based on a bunch of lies and half-truths and fact manipulation, and most people, not only Republicans, bought it - because they didn't scrutinize the information from the administration, because the Bush agenda fit perfectly with preconceptions about Saddam Hussein, because 9/11 happened and a halfhearted attempt at a connection to Al Qaeda, even if it was a totally obvious fabrication to the few people who were using their brains, was enough to stir people into a frenzy for blood..and it wasn't just the Republicans.Am I getting through here?Will it make you feel better if I say that the Republicans do appear to be exceptionally evil with regard to the union-breaking debacle in WI? In their single-minded determination to prevent even the halfassed healthcare act from taking effect? Our politicians in general are all pretty evil from the perspective of being mouthpieces of the wealthy and large corporations, and I can't lay the blame for that on the Republicans, but those two immediately come to mind as recent exclusively Republican bullshit.

NO.You aren't understanding, and the bolded part is the reason.I'm not arguing at all about the degree of wrongness involved. I'm talking about the responsibility borne for an evil act.Let's imagine a nation where blue-eyed people are considered to be inferior, and are forced into labor camps where they live brutal lives before being executed by the state when they're no longer able to work. Sounds like a pretty nightmarish society to me, and I think you and I would completely agree that such a society would be unspeakably evil.Now, say that roughly 92% of the citizens of that nation think that the blue-eye policy is completely right and just. The camps have overwhelming support on the national level.Johnny Citizen is among the 92%. He thinks that blue-eyed people are subhuman, not deserving of any rights. If he caught a blue-eyed person who had escaped the camps, he'd at minimum report him to the police, but would also be immediately willing to join in a lynch mob is enough other people were present.I think Johhny is an immoral asshole. I think his beliefs are reprehensible.But I do not think that he is exceptional. I think his whole society is like that. I think he's average, not at all unusual for his culture, which is still unspeakably evil,.Now let's add to the mix. There are two major political parties in our imaginary nation, we'll just call them the 49ers and the Raiders, just because I feel like messing with football fans. Every few years, there's an amount of legislation proposed by one party or the other regarding the blue-eyed slaves. The death-camps were set up just four years ago. According to a vote, 100% of the Raiders and 90% of the 49ers voted for the camps. Johnny happens to be a Raider, though he's voted for a few 49ers in the past.Are the Raiders especially evil? Or is the whole society just as evil, in general? The overwhelming majority of both major political parties and the overwhelming majority of the general population support the death camps - is it accurate to say that the Raiders are worse than the 49ers? Can we really get into a "these are the bad guys" argument in such a situation? I think that neither the Raiders nor the 49ers are exceptionally evil - neither is an exception to the national norm, and so I can't say that one party bears more responsibility than the other for the perpetration of the specific evil we're talking about. Instead, I would say that each individual that voted to put human beings into work/death camps is evil. It's not being a member of a specific party that makes one evil, but the evil decisions one makes.Notice that at no point whatsoever am I saying that the oppression of people with blue eyes is somehow less bad or more okay just because everyone else is doing it. I'm simply saying that we can;t point at one arbitrary subgroup, note that they were overwhelmingly in support of the death camps, and say that their group is evil. We'd be able to do that with literally any subgroup of people in our imaginary dystopia, because the overwhelming majority of the population as a whole is the same.A person who agreed with the national death camp policy would not be exceptionally evil among his countrymen. He'd be average. The few individuals who disagree, the exceptions to the norm, would be exceptionally good. That's what the word "exceptional" means.Let's go back to the Iraq war. I'm going to pull up what I said earlier:

quote:

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In the House, there were 215 Republicans for the war and 6 against. Among Democrats, 82 voted Yea and 126 Nay.

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In the Senate, Republicans were for it 48 to 1, while Democrats were split 29 Yea and 21 Nay.

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Again, when both parties vote for something, it seems more to be the will of the American people rather than a specific Republican/Democrat issue. I think the American public in general supported the war initially, and that this is not an issue where you can directly call out the Republicans.

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And now let's look at Wiki's info on public support for the invasion in January of '03: The significant majority of Americans supported the invasion at this point, with only 27% being opposed to military force (though teh numbers differed if you also asked whether that military action should come with or regardless of UN support).In the House, the Republicans were overwhelmingly in support of going to war, while there were only 6 exceptions. The Democrats were less unified, with 82 voting Yea and 126 Nay - not nearly so close, but still with a clear majority not supporting the war.In the Senate however, while only 1 Republican exception voted against the war, the Democrats were a near 50/50 split.My impression of the Republicans differs according to who we compare them to. If we take Republican congresscritters as a subset of the entire American public, they don;t seem to be exceptionally evil - the majority of the whole damned nation was just as bad, and it wouldn't be rational to place the blame on one arbitrary subgroup when I could take a sampling of other arbitrary subgroups, like say "people with blue eyes" or "49ers fans" and also find that a majority would vote for the war.If we compare them only to Democrats in Congress...well, the House Republicans were definitely overwhelmingly more in support of the war than the Democrats. I could agree that the House Republicans were on the average more in support of an evil action than the House Democrats.In teh Senate, if only the Democrats had been allowed to vote, the measure would still have passed. I find it difficult to say that the Senate Republicans were evil for voting to go to war in Iraq, because their "opposition" didn't really oppose them and would have made the same choice, if in different proportions of dissent. I'd say that the Senate was evil, rather than arbitrarily choosing to only pay attention to the evil of the Republicans while ignoring the other relevant group in the decision-making process.It's a matter of perspective, and perhaps also the difference between a Republican on the street and a career Republican politician.At no point do I suggest that going to war in Iraq based on obvious lies and distortions was morally justified. Everyone knew or should have known going in that the end result of armed conflict would be dead Iraquis, most of them civilian, and that the "justifications" used wouldn't have justified the war even if they were true.

The entire "right" vs "left" comparison is subjective from the start - I don't think you can find an objective basis for such assessments. How does one even determine whether an issue is "right" or "left" in the first place? Majority support from Republicans or Democrats, respectively? I can really only point to a few hot-button issues like abortion where the contrast would be clear. Rrhain would likely bring up things like the USA PATRIOT Act, but the fact is that abominable set of legislation works counter to the traditional conservative value of "small government." The values trumpeted in front of the media are frequently not at all the reality behind legislation.