Quote:
Originally posted by TimPoet
This noble sounding, "Let's be non-partisan" would be a good thing, except for one problem, the truth: modern day liberals are wrong, they slander honest conservatives (which is mainstream America), they distort the truth and they are fearmongers. The column by Ann Coulter proves how war coverage by honest conservatives is starting to show disturbing results, if you are a liberal. The arguments of the conservatives benefit all of America and as we are seeing, the Iraqi population.
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This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Each side will only look to the most extreme members of the other group, and each will only see the flaws of the other group, never their strengths.
The real thing that frightens me is that, on both ends of the spectrum, people are getting more and more extreme. Moderate liberals and moderate conservatives are both pretty decent, but the ultra-left or ultra-right wings are, quite frankly, each quite scary, and each is growing a little too fast for me to be comfortable. We're really starting to see an "us vs. them" mindset, where each side does nothing but slander the other.
There's a middle ground between the extremes, and people seem to forget that. I tend to be on the conservative side, but I despise the far right as much as the far left, and I recognize that moderate liberals, although I don't always agree with their policies, are usually pretty level-headed and their ideas and their goals are rooted in the same underlying principles as my own. Thus far, in recent history, they tended to both be small and they tended to negate each other out, so neither side really was a big problem. But as more and more people get more and more polarized, this could take a rather disturbing trend. People don't even listen to those whose viewpoints differ from their own, except to attack them later, and the conservatives are no better (nor worse) than the liberals at the mudslinging.
And this isn't just about the war, although the war brought these problems to the light more than before. It's really a growing trend in America, and it's not a good one. Thinking that someone is unpatriotic because they disagree with you is horrible. Most often they disagree because they LOVE their country, not because they hate it. There is more than one viewpoint in America, and much of the time, neither is any more correct than the other.