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Comment by covzzire | Hacker News Reader

Ars has been playing on the 'Republicans are against it so it must be good' emotion card for awhile now. That's almost all I see on this issue in the tech media. What's been happening is that all objections are being dismissed as "Republicans lol" and "Fox News reporting so must be wrong". Our national discussion is literally at the level of Jon Stewart's mockery of things that warrant serious discussion.

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When was the last time you heard a Republican politician on the national stage raise an issue that was not obviously directed at their base, or donors?

A comment that plainly stated a fact in a noninflammatory way?

Or proposed a course of action that was not designed to be punitive to some group, or alternately, designed to disproportionately benefit the powerful?

Republicans inhabit a carefully-crafted parallel reality that is at the breaking point of divergence from American and global first-world society.

Personally, I'll take them seriously when they change their methods and rhetoric, which is probably never.

Their current attitude and language indicates they are not interested in either my vote, or my problems.

> When was the last time you heard a Republican politician on the national stage raise an issue that was not obviously directed at their base, or donors?

Do you seriously believe that it's only Republicans that pander to their base?

It's certainly not only Republicans. But neither are they pandering to their "base" in any traditional sense; rather, they are pandering to a few dozen specific people, the extreme concentration of whose wealth generates gravitational fields that that propagate through today's medium more freely than in any time in recent memory.

To be fair, Republicans are way better at pandering to their base. Democrats tend to flake out and betray their base at the drop of a hat.

> When was the last time you heard a Republican politician on the national stage raise an issue that was not obviously directed at their base, or donors?

What would you expect a politician to do—raise an issue his supporters don't care about? That doesn't even begin to make sense.

All of your points apply to every politician, and to every talking head.

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