I pulled his wikipedia quote from the GOP credibility thread if we're making thesis statements into separate threads. Bob McDonnell is the republican gubernatorial candidate in VA. He is up against Creigh Deeds who has served in the VA House & Senate and who was described as the most conservative democrat from the primary field, but nowhere near as conservative as his republican opponent.

Quote :

"These positions "included ... opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest ..., covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family and public policy discrimination against those he labeled as "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." In this master thesis he also declared his belief that working women harmed the family and described 1972's Griswold v. Connecticut as "illogical". At page 20 of the thesis, he wrote, "man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter.""

10/23/2009 1:25:04 PM

this has been beat to death by Deeds in the campaign.






I'm not saying it is right, just that it has been beaten to death. That being said, again, the two candidates which have been presented us are both far less than desirable. Unfortunately, McDonnell is representative of a sizeable corner of the GOP.

10/23/2009 1:27:32 PM

yes, make sure the (R) is in there so all the libs can get in here and bash on the state of the Republican Party

10/23/2009 1:27:46 PM

Quote :

"man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter"

Gee, I wonder what underlying beliefs would cause him to believe that?

10/23/2009 1:52:01 PM

As long as he fixes the fucking roads up here, I don't give a shit what he thinks about women.

10/23/2009 2:48:20 PM

Quote :

"opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest"

If you are against abortion, you would have to be against it in these cases too. I guess being consistant is bad?


Cash is right Deeds was trying to beat this over Bob's head, but many people dont give much credit to a paper written 20-30 yrs ago. And deeds if Fing horrible.

After his debate he promised NOT to raise taxes. Watch him get caught in his bullshit.

http://www.deedsuncut.com/

10/24/2009 8:42:57 AM

I never even came close to understanding the notion that a child should die because their father is a rapist.

10/24/2009 10:38:44 AM

Quote :

"he wrote, "man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter."""

This kind of talk scares me more than redistribution of wealth.

10/24/2009 11:29:00 AM

I don't see why... Both are equally intrusive attempts to control people's personal lives.

10/24/2009 11:50:23 AM

^

10/24/2009 11:50:55 AM

1. Welcome to 2 months ago in the Commonwealth of Virginia!
2. ^^ Thanks for posing that website! I haven't see it except for on TV every 5 minutes and in every banner ad on every news site ever! Basically you just posted every GOP TV ad run in SW Va. for the past month. Hey, at least he has a plan to fund things (here's a big secret: he would raise the gas tax more than likely. OH NO NO TAXES!) aside from "sell liquor stores and pull money from education while somehow also giving teachers raises".

Quote :

"but many people dont give much credit to a paper written 20-30 yrs ago."

Except when it was Hillary Clinton's thesis and it mentioned some LEFTISTS! GASP! Or those academic records that people keep demanding from Obama. Or, let's cut to the chase and just say it's when the shoe's on the other foot. Look at his actual record in office. He kept introducing bills about abortion.

Deeds doesn't even support the public option or cap and trade. He's basically a less progressive Mark Warner clone who's running in a state that has elected governors from the minority party for the past 30 years. If this state didn't have anything terribly better than these two (it doesn't), I wouldn't have even donated to Deeds.

10/24/2009 11:55:33 AM

partisan.

10/24/2009 11:59:31 AM

Quote :

"I don't see why... Both are equally intrusive attempts to control people's personal lives."

We already redistribute wealth. Legislating fundamentalist christian morality is a different story. But I'm going to get into this with you. You just want to troll people who have an opinion either way.

[Edited on October 24, 2009 at 3:19 PM. Reason : ]

10/24/2009 3:18:45 PM

i like to check TWW to find out what's going on in NC and Raleigh, plz to stop posting stories about shit i deal with every day and will probably be stuck dealing with for the next 4 years now.

10/24/2009 3:29:07 PM

^You are just going love this

http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2009/11/republicans-headed-for-virginia-sweep.html

Quote :

"Republicans headed for a Virginia sweep Bob McDonnell leads Creigh Deeds 56-42 in PPP's final poll of the race. ... McDonnell will be bringing some folks with him. Bill Bolling leads 54-41 for Lieutenant Governor and Ken Cuccinelli has a 55-39 advantage for Attorney General. Republicans also have a 48-39 lead on the generic House of Delegates ballot. Voters in the state seem to know what's coming. 64% say they think McDonnell will win to only 24% who believe Deeds will pull it out. It's likely to be a quick election night in Virginia Tuesday."

11/2/2009 10:15:41 AM

AP has already called it for McDonnell

11/3/2009 8:08:46 PM

Deeds ran a piss poor campaign, and even the national Democratic Party wrote him off near election day. As for the thesis, the whole part on the evils of working women was foiled by the McDonnell campaign when he ran a series of ads talking about his three successful daughters including the one who served as a platoon leader in Iraq.

11/4/2009 1:28:02 PM

He issued two anti-gay executive orders early on (looks like he hasn't changed much since that thesis), and now he has just moved on to this for April:

Quote :

"Virginia Governor Celebrates the Confederacy, Forgets Slavery Virginia governor Bob McDonnell issued a proclamation last week declaring April to be Confederate History Month. Virginia's last two governors, Democrats Tim Kaine and Mark Warner declined to issue a similar proclamation. Republican Jim Gilmore, who served from 1998-2002, was the last Virginia governor to set aside a month to celebrate Confederate History. But McDonnell's proclamation was noticeably missing one feature that Gilmore's proclamations all had-a mention of slavery. Asked why he omitted a mention of slavery from his proclamation, McDonnell said, "There were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia." People For the American Way President Michael B. Keegan issued the following statement: "Governor McDonnell's choice to celebrate Confederate History while omitting any mention of slavery is an egregious rewriting of history. Declaring that slavery wasn't 'significant' enough to merit inclusion in his statement is an insult to the Virginians whose past was shaped by the most abhorrent policies of the Confederacy. Issuing a declaration honoring the confederacy is disturbing enough; failing to acknowledge slavery while doing it is inexcusable. "Governor McDonnell has repeatedly shown himself to be far more radical than his Republican predecessors, and much more extreme than the moderate image he projected of himself during his campaign. This new attempt to ignore the worst parts of Virginia's complicated past is irresponsible and dangerous. By appeasing his supporters in the radical Right, he has turned his back on his duty to serve all Virginians. We cannot allow our elected officials to practice this kind of dangerous revisionism.""

-People for the American Way

It seems like this stuff only shrinks the party instead of expanding the tent, and this guy has been elevated since he was chosen as the republican rebuttal speaker to the State of the Union. And how many fiscal conservatives really want to see their public officials spending their hours on the job doing this sort of thing?

4/7/2010 11:36:35 PM

He and the Virginia AG are on a roll... if their purpose is to rile up their base, this is the sort of red meat that will make 'em happy, and keep the rest of us talking.

4/7/2010 11:38:05 PM

F!!!

4/8/2010 5:56:03 PM

As a Virginian first and an American second (cause really, I could give a shit about South Dakota), I can understand the confusion about the Confederate History Month proclamation, but...

almost 100% of the opinion pieces I've read in the national news are either pathetically ignorant of Southern history or trying too hard to make this a partisan hit on a governor who looks as if he's going to come out of his first year with enough baggage to relegate him to the same dustbin of history as Jim Gilmore.

Case in point:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/10/media-debates-the-merits_n_532420.html

Quote :

"On the other hand, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell -- reviving a tradition beloved by other Virginia Republican Governors -- thinks that the state's economy could benefit from catering to the thin sliver of the American populace who would prefer to simply learn about and publicly appreciate the rebels of the Confederacy that threatened to split the Republic asunder."

Civil War tourism is a major economic contributor here, and there are plenty of war historians with interests in both sides of wars. Not to mention, a thin sliver of those rebels, the rank and file troops, owned or had even as much as seen a slave.

Quote :

"Then you'll hear it's mean to pick on the Confederate states when other states had slaveowners, too (but the non-Confederate states didn't secede). "

The first draft Lincoln wrote of the 13th amendment, which was sent to state governments, enshrined slavery in Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. It simply ended the expansion of slavery. They didn't stay because they wanted to rid themselves of slavery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_amendment

Quote :

"And finally, the piece de resistance, you have Pat Buchanan, generously offering, "I think both sides were right." Slaves were right to want to be free, and the Confederacy was right to fight to defend their right to maintain a workforce of abused, indentured servants who were selected for the task solely because the ruling class deemed them to be part-human. You'll want to cherish that logic most of all, during Confederate History Month."

Buchanan's an easy guy to beat up, but he's smarter than most of the media, and he's right here. Planters wanted slavery, but the overwhelming portion of people fighting for the south did so for nationalistic reasons. Lee and Davis didn't expect slavery to stick around. As I said before, most volunteers or conscripts had probably barely had contact with black people and didn't know what to think of them. Blaming them is like blaming the German Army regulars for the holocaust.

Slavery should have been banned everywhere, but the Confederacy would have had a legitimate claim to self-determination regardless (but I would still argue its legitimacy would have depended on eventual total abolition).

So McDonnel did this in a terrible way, but it's hardly a proclamation of KKK Celebration Month like most idiots in the media think.

4/10/2010 2:02:39 PM

who cares? It's about the most tone-deaf thing he could have done for the GOP... ever.

4/10/2010 2:27:03 PM

Quote :

"the rebels of the Confederacy that threatened to split the Republic asunder"

it wasn't the Rebels that were the threat. It was the politicians in Washington who failed to adhere to the Constitutional limits that were placed on them. I love revisionist history

4/10/2010 2:30:23 PM

^ I still think you're a moron, but they were within their constitutional bounds to leave at that point, yes.

I'm not going to blast people who probably haven't tried to do much reading on the Civil War in the first place and thus can't be expected to trot out a fully-baked argument, but the best option would be for people like this to just shut up until they can afford to do the research. Even relatively liberal Civil War-era historians agree with me.

4/10/2010 2:50:07 PM

So where is Obama's college thesis, so that we can attack him on it?

4/10/2010 2:57:25 PM

IM SURE ITS ABOUT MAXISM OR SOMETHING ALL COMMUNISTY

4/10/2010 3:35:39 PM

Quote :

"In this master thesis he also declared his belief that working women harmed the family"

And you honestly think it hasn't? Not saying women shouldn't work, but there's most certainly a trade-off.

4/10/2010 8:24:00 PM

who is to say that if women worked and men stayed home, the family wouldn't be stronger?

who gets to decide when the family is hurt

4/10/2010 9:40:11 PM

^ it's hard to say without the context of the quote, but that would generally be a meaningless observation.

who's to say if the gov. didn't build mansions for everyone, we wouldn't all be better off? We all probably would be, but it's a senseless thing to point out, because it wouldn't ever happen.

Likewise, if women were like servants and all just stayed home to tend to kids, like the Spartans, maybe would would have stronger families, but our society isn't in the business of fascism.

4/10/2010 9:45:38 PM

shit, both parents should stay at home, then we'd have some strong families.

4/10/2010 9:55:35 PM

I, too, hold people accountable for every tiny action.

4/11/2010 1:48:34 PM