*sigh* based on your last few comments, I was thinking, “Cool! This conversation paid off, in that it got us both thinking about things from other points of view, beyond the knee-jerk reactionary party lines that dominate most conversations!”

And then this happened. Where, once again, you resorted to reductive hyper-partisan accusations with no basis in reality, responding to things I never said while touting an overly simplistic binary perspectives that I never even contradicted in the first place.

Perhaps you, John, should consider that there is some validity to liberal policies – that they are not abject failures anymore than conservative policies, for which one could cherry pick evidence to support a similar claim (HELLO trickle down economics, the embarrassment that the GOP has championed for thirty years with no success?).

The greatest irony here is your continued assumption that I proudly tow the Democratic party line, when in fact I agree with many of the criticisms you’ve presented here.

The difference, however, is that I also know that the Washington GOP has offered no substantive alternatives to any of these problems, other than to “change sides” and flip the power. You could apply all the same criticisms to the GOP and multiply them tenfold, and you still wouldn’t be close to meeting the full scope of that party’s flaws. Which is why I’m not interested in attacking or defending a single party – I care about making actual evidence-based policy changes that could demonstrably improve our society, without blindly locking ourselves into a foolish future based on us-vs-them logic.

I don’t understand why that’s such a crazy concept.