Posted on 04/12/2007 12:48:48 AM PDT by FairOpinion
Where would “authoritarian” appear on that chart?
Of course, the dots are placed based on the web site’s own interpretation of the votes, and on a strong subset of the votes.
And for people like Rudy, who have never voted on anything, it’s based partly on public statements that could well be things that they never acted on.
When people say horrid things, I personally think it’s better NOT to repeat them in our responses, because then when the moderators remove the statements we perpetuate it.
LOL! I send you a video! I know you will love that! ;-)
I hear Duncan Hunter’s son is going back to Iraq! God Bless him!
That’d be correct. It’s his third tour.
It’ll be interesting to see how he’ll run for office from overseas...
I’m sure his father will help him out on this end. I wish him well!
I don’t see a single thing in the pillar that isn’t supported by other republican candidates. However, the pillar is largely good, and is about the only place where Rudy is a conservative.
He does take the easy shot at Katrina though. Katrina hit our country with a stronger blow than a small nuclear device, and yet the deaths were remarkably few. An entire city of 600,000 people was put under 10 feet of water in 2 days, with relatively small loss of life.
I don’t think everybody truly appreciates the severity of the storm surge that hit Mississippi, or the shear enormity of putting half a city under water for a month.
Certainly we will respond better next time, and we must, but given our history the response to Katrina was not a disaster.
Even the deplorable situation in the superdome was a relatively bad thing, not a truly bad thing. Nobody starved to death, they were only stuck there a few days, they all survived a large hurricane while their homes were destroyed. We simply expect better because it’s the 21st century.
Anyway this wasn’t about Katrina, I know, it just bugs me when history is skewed to one side so bad that you can’t recover it.
That would be "populist" - though it will make one very unpopular to point that out. ;)
His pillars are fine, and we can all support them (and honestly, most of our candidates support that and more, and every candidate on the republican side supports a majority of those items).
He does overstate his acheivements. He only truly cut things a couple of years in the beginning, and that was from a budget that was grossly bloated (like a 300-pound man dropping 10 pounds).
Then he spent like moderate/social liberal would spend. And while he “wiped out” a 2.5 billion deficit, the way he did it was unsustainable, and by 2003 there was a huge deficit again.
Bloomberg, who nobody would pretend was a conservative, actually did a better job of reforming new york government and solving the deficit problem, and he had to do it in a post-9/11 climate. Of course, Bloomberg’s expertise was in executive management, unlike Rudy who was a law enforcement/authoritarian. Being a true liberal, Bloomberg did allow taxes to go up.
But Rudy fought to keep state taxes so money would flow into New York. I credit him for fighting to keep his people’s taxes low, but somewhat he did it at the expense of the federal and state taxpayers. And anyway, if he’s President there’s nobody left to get money from, and the Feds already finance a lot of government by excessive borrowing so he can’t use that trick again.
To the degree that Rudy forces other candidates to address these pillars and adopt them, he will have performed an important task. Much like Perot in 1992, before he got the rediculous notion that a crazy person should be president, and managed to convince a large part of the electorate that crazy people make great leaders.
Different Son.
I know. I’m just pinging Sam to the post.
Politics is the “art of the possible”. It is very likely we will face down the witch in the final election. We need someone who won’t fold like a cheap suit. I think Rudy could be tough in the debates and not take a lot of crap.
The best article I’ve seen on Rudy’s fiscal conservatism:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26604
The city also added approximately 430,000 new jobs during Giuliani’s mayoralty the most dramatic period of job growth in New York’s history. At the same time, Giuliani restored fiscal discipline to the city’s budget, transforming the $2.3 billion annual deficit he inherited in 1993 into the $1 billion surplus he hands over to incoming mayor Michael Bloomberg.
—
Rudy Giuliani: An American Hero
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 3, 2002
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1380
From January 27, 2000
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani today outlined his Financial Plan for Fiscal Years (FY) 2000-2004. The Plan reflects the Administration’s continued fiscal priorities of cutting taxes to stimulate continued record job growth and economic development; increasing spending in targeted areas, reducing City funded spending year-to-year by 1%, while maintaining overall City spending to less than the rate of inflation; and reducing the out-year gaps.
The Plan reflects the Administration’s success in reducing taxes by $2.3 billion since 1994 — more than any administration in the history of the City. Combined with the more than $2 billion in proposed tax cuts, this Plan will bring the total value of the Mayor’s tax reduction program to $4.5 billion annually by 2004. The Plan projects a surplus for FY2000 of $2.2 billion, the largest surplus in the City’s history. This is the fourth year in a row that the New York City four-year Financial Plan contains a surplus of more than $1 billion.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2000a/pr008-00.html
Agreed.
Since when is “populist” “authoritarian”?
When you look at the votes they used to rank Fred Thompson, it’s a little hard to see what pushed him around, although is strong support for CFR hurt him, as well as his opposition early on to the particular version of Tort Reform legislation being voted on.
But since Rudy agrees with Thompson on CFR (while Thompson no longer does) it seems odd that Rudy isn’t pushed in the same direction as Thompson. And if “populist” was really “authoritarian”, I would think a person who wants to take guns away would be more “populist” than a person who doesn’t.
I suspect that the web site owners think that regulating abortion is “authoritarian”, making Rudy a “libertarian” on that regard. But then you’d think Duncan would be more toward the bottom with his strong pro-life stance.
I would love to see a chart comparing Thompson’s and Rudy’s views on the issues that would explain how Rudy (who made rules about where people could stand, kicked people out of theaters simply because he didn’t like them, arrested people for minor offenses, defended police brutality, leaked private information about private citizens, and banned owning Ferrets) can come out closer to “libertarian” than Fred Thompson or Duncan Hunter.
Maybe the site gives a lot of points to people who support “sanctuary cities” for illegals.
BTW, I personally believe that any 2-dimensional chart is wholely inadequate to illustrate a person’s political philosophy. You need at least 3 dimensions just to show the orthogonal relationship between libertarian, conservative, and liberal.
I was pretty sure you did, but others reading might think the question was real.
Name a successful populist movement that hasn't ended up raising a dictator and tossing its opponents into some form of Gulag. I think the chart should say "authoritarian" for the sake of clarity, but in practice they are the same thing.
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