La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for October 10, 2014

Different strokes for different folks…

I dunno, but apparently all those “Republicans” they got for the video were all just stock photos.

I’m officially a Republican and I’m a person. QED. On the other hand, I do want all Leftists to die. (Just kidding. Or AM I?)

Vote Democratic. We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.

Now THAT’S funny!

If you have to make ads to say that you’re human, you’ve obviously messed up womewhere. you can’t reach out to Republicans because you’ll pull back a bloody stump. They hate gays, women, minorities, the poor, the middle class, students, workers…unless you’re rich and white you are nothing to them. I’d say Lalo hit the elephant in the nads with this one.

You are right, he keeps pulling back a bloody stump every time he reaches out…… So I guess the video is just one more Republican lie…… I don’t know if republicans are even able to tell the truth, they have told so many lies, it’s all they know.

A common complaint is that the Republicans don’t get along with the Democrats.How does this type of divisiveness help that?Lalo doesn’t seem interested in trying to reach out to the other side, unless it’s to make things worse.

Ask all the Democrats, including Obama and those in Congress who tried for years to get to bipartisan compromises, how that worked out for them. (Hint: It didn’t.) The Republican Party has lurched hard to the right during the last decade, and the current batch of candidates is promising to take it farther right, and more uncompromising. Even a relative moderate (emphasis on “relative”) like Marco Rubio is now calling on Boehner to foment another government shutdown after the elections. In the face of this, Republicans are getting called out more and more on their shenanigans. And when they cry about it, the best response is: Truth hurts, don’t it?

(remember, Obama campaigned on the basis that he could get the parties to work together – regardless what you think about the GOP, Obama has not accomplished that promise)

Yup. He failed because he didn’t anticipate Republicans’ determination to ensure that he’d fail. A lot of folks, myself included, felt from the start that he’d gone too far with his efforts to compromise and reconcile with the obstructionists. That he should have, for instance, pushed hard and early for a national single-payer health plan or at least a public option. It took him way too long to realize that Republicans would never settle for compromise, and to start calling them out on it. The country would be a lot better off if he’d recognized that earlier. There’s only so many times a person can come up and punch you in the nose before you determine they don’t like you. For some reason, and to all our detriment, it took Obama quite a bit longer than a whole lot of other folks.

If the Republicans are so totally bad and the Democrats can’t find a solution, perhaps we should all remember this come 2016, and hear the lies from the candidates on both sides.

There’s an election coming up in about a month. No time like the present to start paying attention and acting on it, whichever side (and there are more than two) you come down on.

So there’s no hope then.There’s no chance of persuasion.

According to the current Republican Party and its faithful, that’s exactly the message. They are ideologically set. There is no compromise. Shrink that government until you can drown it in a bathtub. This is an article of almost religious faith. It is core to the philosophy. Which means that today’s Republicans are quite happy to push government to fail more and more—unless they calculate it’ll hurt their own chances at power. Or their ability to blow stuff up. So yup, you hit the nail on the head, there is currently no chance of persuasion. The hope lies in marginalizing the Republican Party, shrinking its power to the point that folks give up on it and start looking for actual constructive alternatives.

“We can’’t do anything because the other party won’t let us.”

When the other party has control of one of the houses needed to pass laws, and enough Senators in the other to filibuster just about anything they don’t like, it’s an entirely valid argument. And when the president takes the modest measures that he can within the limits of the executive, the Republicans cry bloody murder. And when he doesn’t do what they want him to (say, bomb Syria back to hunter-gatherer days), they also scream bloody murder. Lucky for them on that latter one, he seems primed to send the bombs along wholesale.

So, how do you suggest governing in a bipartisan manner? What is “the higher road”? Doing everything the Republicans want? The times when the Democrats have done that, the Republicans have responded by upping their demands. So that’s not exactly bipartisan either, is it? You can chalk it up to ineptitude or being afraid all you want to, but the parties are at loggerheads like never before, and it’s because one of them, the Republicans, have become radicalized in their right-wing ideology and obstructionism.

Unless you’re willing to share specific suggestions on how to move towards more bipartisanship, you’re no better than you claim Lalo is. All tearing down, and no constructive ideas.

My suggestion is to vote the Republicans out, render them into a rump party, and allow a new party to form that’s actually interested in governing.

The first step is to stop blaming. That’s a great suggestion.

I wouldn’t say that’s such a great suggestion. It’s basically the same as saying that a doctor shouldn’t diagnose a disease. No diagnosis = no cure.

Everyone blames, as evidenced by the same arguments here.

You’re engaged in false equivalencies here. There is a party that has very publicly stated that its aim is to ensure the president fails, and has consistently acted to try to make that happen. One guess as to which that is. Even in the midst of the most acrimonious debate with the previous president, there was still a sense that Democrats were interested in trying to govern. Not so the Republicans of today. They have gone completely off the rails, and the Tea Party and Koch brothers have helped steer them that way.

I see Lalo’s viewpoint and effect on his audience as non-constructive and inflammatory.

If you find this strip “inflammatory,” I really worry about how you deal with the slings and arrows that daily life must bring. If you want inflammatory, look up your average Republican congressperson’s speech to their base. Look at an average day of “Fox & Friends.” Look at our own resident mdavis.

As for the Democrats being “my” party. Well, that’s a huge assumption, and not necessarily correct. But one thing they definitely have going for them is they’re not the Republicans. Which is not saying much, but is saying something.

I suspected you’d not have any particular suggestions for getting the parties to work together. And it’s not just one party or another that suffers because of Republican intransigence. It’s this whole country. And, arguably, a lot of the world. Take the growing Ebola epidemic, for instance. You’ve got a Republican senator (Vitter) calling for funds to get the disease under control not to be appropriated because the money would be spent in Africa. Another (Inhofe) held up the money because our military budget is “stretched too thin.” When one kid just walks up and starts pummeling another, is your first reaction to stand back and say, “That kid getting pummeled should really do something to fix the situation”? No. If you’re a responsible adult, you get the pummeler off the pummelee, then go from there. Are you a responsible adult, indie?

1. Obama tried to get the bipartisan thing to work so hard that his own party was unhappy about it.2. have you ever tried to change someones mind whose mind is shut and locked?