Reply #20: Every politician breaks promises, but this does not mean that all politicians are "the same". [View All]

[SemiCharmedQuark]

Kennedy, Nixon, Lincoln, Hoover, FDR, Buchanan, Clinton and W. all said things to get elected and they are not all the same. Does this mean that breaking promises was the right thing to do? No. Does it mean that they were correct to break these promises? No. It only means that binary thinking does not serve us well.

This is why I find the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" meme to be faulty. Rather, one could more accurately say, as you did "I agree with X Y Z, I disagree with A B C."

The "New Boss Same as the Old Boss" reasoning gave us W. You will never ever convince me that we'd be where we are now if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001. But no. Rather than look at each issue critically, people just threw up their hands and said "Well, they're both shit on *this* issue, I guess they must just be the same on *all* issues."