Ok, let’s take Clinton at her very worst. Then we have two horrible liars – one who has supported illegal war, and one who argues they need to go further and start targeting families; one who claims she treats all Americans as people but doesn’t follow through, and one who brags about his plans to crush down on one minority after another.
And that’s her worst. Can we please stop inventing reasons to pretend they’re the same, or that anyone who is not completely ignorant might be legitimately confused who would want to hurt more people? Especially since polls show that is why the one is so popular?
More generally: besides the dedicated party supporters, there seems to be a faction dedicated to the ideology that they are the same, no matter how one or the other changes over time. The pretense is always that they are not getting dragged into the petty biases they have against one another, which reminds me a lot of this xkcd:
But bias isn’t always such a clear thing. In Galileo’s dialogs he has Salviati to represent his own physics, Simplicio the Aristotelian one, and then Sagredo. Some people have interpreted the third as an impartial intermediary, and others have pointed out he is a terrible one, because he always agrees with Salviati. And since Galileo is writing the whole thing, that’s kind of fair, but in real life what would such a man do? The evidence is all that Salviati is right.
This isn’t nearly such a clean example, because the Democratic party are not really good guys. For instance there is Obama’s drone program mentioned above – not that it was acknowledged that Romney agreed with it, most of his rivals wanted to escalate it, and of course now there is Trump calling to start taking out women and children. But as examples like that show, it’s still a case where there are real distinctions.
As I’ve tried arguing, drawing any equivalence here always depends on erasing the people the policies effect. When you actually consider consequences, you get what Ignatius described so nicely above:
Ignoring all those things, to try to make it seem like supporting one party is like the other no matter what they actually stand for, is its own form of partiality. Some people are taking actions to hurt other people here, and many more are cool with them doing it, and it’s only a lie to pretend there is nothing blameworthy in that.
To go back to your remarks, pixleshifter, up above you talked about how rare it is to see Republicans presented in a positive light. With all their current talk about deporting Mexicans, and banning Muslims, and killing more civilians abroad, and doing more profiling of blacks, and banning marriage for gays, and keeping trans* people out of public bathrooms, and whatever other anti-human crap from their platform I’m forgetting, have you considered there might be some good reason besides our liberal bias?
