The winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are The March of Folly by Joshuapundit, and Why Intellectuals Love Defeat by TCS Daily.  You can find the full results of the vote over at Watcher of Wasels. …

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are The March of Folly by Joshuapundit…

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council li…

Well, what exactly do you mean by “social value” or “family value”? To one person it means a decent minimum wage and affordable health care; to another person it means banning gay marriage. What you may see as loose-morals liberal dreck coming out of an out-of-touch Hollywood, I may see as sexist high-profit shlock from a moneygrubbing media industry made possible by excessive deregulation of our public airwaves — and we can both see this as a “values” or even a “morals” issue.

As a fiscally-conservative, socially-liberal Independent, what makes me “afraid” of “social/family values Conservatives” is that they’ve demonstrated that their version of “family values” is largely focused on what people do in their own bedrooms, with their bodies, and on their own computers and TV screens. They’ve approached incredibly complex issues like abortion and gay rights with vitriol and myopic extremism, while largely ignoring _real_ family issues that affect millions like meaningful jobs, affordable health care and childcare, quality mass education, the shrinking middle class, etc.

I groaned when I saw Bill Clinton sharing a stage with Al Sharpton back in the 90’s. But seeing Pat Robertson and James Dobson being all buddy-buddy with President Bush after Robertson publicly blamed gays and lesbians for causing 9/11? Now that’s frightening.

Get a Goldwater on the ticket, and you’ll get the Independent vote again. Until then, I’ll take my chances with marginally competent Democratic Party focused on Iraq over a wingnut Republican Party focused on gays and stem cells.

You need to deal with the reality, xenophone, that the Constitution of the United States is not there for you to alter and shit around with. The government exists to enforce the constitution. It is not subject to your whims, my son.

My analysis also shows that the West can be divided into three or four parts. The prairie west, states like the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma, these are still red. The West Coast, Cali, Oregon, etc, are blue. The mountain west and the southwest are getting pretty purple. The southwest is slightly more amenable to Democrats than the mountain west; the folks of Idaho still don’t quite trust the Dems, but no longer have any love for the GOP.

So basically the GOP has its base in the south and a few prairie states while the Dems have their base in the northeast, the west coast, and now the midwest. The question is, will the Dems listen to their new moderate overlords in the midwest, or will they push them right back out of the tent? If the midwesterners moderate the Dems, the GOP will have a really hard time winning back the House for the foreseeable future. The West is just sort of observing all of this as if all we easterners are crazy (and perhaps they’re right) and I really get the impression that westerners are sort of waiting for the right time to send another Ronald Reagan out here on a white horse to clean up our mess, which is what they usually have to do.

Advice to Republicans for 2008: find a Bill Clinton. That is, find someone who can win the blue states, the way Clinton won all those red southern states after 1994. McCain and Giuliani seem the best bets right now.

1. Big spending/big government. We are now drastically more in debt than ever.

2. Abandonment of the military. We are sending our soldiers off to Iraq and not providing them with adequate armor and other supplies when they are there, and when they return wounded, they are not given proper support. I read an article about how huge numbers of soldiers’ wives are on food stamps and have to go to soup kitchens to get food while their husbands are in Iraq. Not to put to fine a point on it, but WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? And under those circumstances, would you want to send your noble, idealistic child to fight in that war as it is being run now?

3. We are not standing up for individual liberties. We have always stood for the right of the individual, as in the right to own guns to protect ourselves. But now it’s OUR party that wants to give up the right for people to have privacy in their own homes. When did we become such freaking cowards over one terrorist attack? It was a terrible thing, but just as I’ll protect my right to own a gun, I want to protect my right to make a phone call to my doctor without having the government know all the gory details!