I actually agree that most of the work defending perry is a waste of time. Frankly, the candidate needs to defend themselves. If they do it well, they’ll survive, if not, they won’t.
Nothing we do here will make a bit of difference. However, I do find input from other conservatives useful (or I used to when conservatives actually voiced considered judgements, now it’s more like campaign central, which is useless. In the former case, arguing with people is a good way to determine truth, or understand the issues better. For example, I actually am much more supportive of giving children of illegals in-state tuition in a situation like that in Texas than I was before I started arguing. Not that I’m going to push for it in my state.
Anyway, someone here mentioned they thought I did a better job of defending Perry than he did. I don’t know if that’s true, but if so, Perry is in trouble, because he needs to defend himself. I’ve been told he’s won 3 elections. I know he had these SAME issues against him in those elections, so I have to presume he CAN defend himself. It’s almost like he thought he wouldn’t have to. Anyway, that will settle itself.
But having discussed this over the past couple of days, I’ll likely stop wasting my time in the attack-Perry threads. I can answer the charges, and ignore the vitriol and childishness, but I don’t see the point.
And I’ve made my arguments against Cain. I don’t want to promote my arguments to their own threads of a blog, because I don’t want them to become fodder for attacks. So I’ll probably be done with those threads as well.
I have a profound fear that if I can see these facts about Cain, so can many people. But the media is not covering it. I expect them to, the question is when. I hope our candidates go after Cain for his lack of real experience — because if he can survive it, it will innoculate him, and if not we’ll have saved conservatism from disaster.
And the nice thing about that will be it won’t matter what I think or you think — either Cain will come out stronger, or will fail, on his own.
Can’t promise I’ll shut down. I do enjoy the arguments. But I’ll most likely be scarce in attack threads for a while. Maybe after the next debate. In any case, we’ve got our final push here in Virginia to try to take back our senate.
Yes.
I come here for discussion that is useful, ultimately. That means discussion that helps to clarify issues and contributes information that people may want to consider.
Sometimes I post to people simply because I know many people are reading the thread, and perhaps these other people are interested in the counterarguments that might be made. IOW, sometimes it’s obvious the person I’m posting to has no interest in an honest or open debate; at the same time, their points help me make my points to anyone reading the thread, so I go for it.
That said, I’m going to be ignoring a lot more of the clearly ridiculous posts (unless, in the great FR tradition, there’s an opportunity for some wholesome humor involved).
I don’t agree that things that happen here have no influence. I think FR is read or at least perused by many pundits. I have seen things show up in widely published pieces that I know had their origin in discussions on FR. However, in general, you’re right: the process is what it is and where go where it goes. It all depends on the candidates.
I think you know the difference between making a substantive point and simply attacking/defending a candidate. So I hope you’ll continue on with that. The problem is that not all posters do understand how to make a substantive argument — they think, for example, that simply whining “why don’t y’all like Perry?,” or unloading a list of conclusory statements about the candidate’s record, or claiming that the reason people don’t agree with them is that they are “uninformed” (or worse), will be engaged in the same way as constructive criticism or praise of policy position. Those, I am going to ignore.