The pope's not supposed to be an offender of God, tho. Elevating the creation (as just one example) detracts from giving *all* of the glory to the Creator. (I'm pretty sure "thou shalt have no other gods before Me" includes "thou shalt have no other gods alongside Me", even lesser ones.)

I have reverence for God, and nothing else shares/competes with my reverence. Not even a Bible. I have reverence for the words, but not any given printed version of them. It's just a paper and bindings. Placing one's hand on a Bible and swearing to anything, is stupid. Same with the American flag. Go ahead and burn it; it's just fabric.

Profit is not an evil, having a financial keeper is, because of what it does to you. Like your Pope, you talk of things that are just all Leftism (AKA paganism, a subset of Satanism) to me. Exploitation of resources and development does not hurt the poor, it helps them. And the earth is not my sister.

So it's the Republicans' fault, for the moral decay of the country, because they didn't fight back hard enough against the perpetuators of moral decay. Nice logic.

This could be just pandering to the libertarian Right of the Republican Party towards a bid for its presidential nomination. Or he could really believe in citizen privacy rights. Who knows.

The War on Poverty was towards a different kind of revolt; an incremental one versus one big glorious overthrow. Encourage people to give up hope in the American Dream, in capitalism, and in self-reliance, and to instead get comfortable with reliance on government and redistribution schemes. (I.e. get them comfortable with the ideas of socialism, without calling it by name.)

Get over 50% of the households signed up for some sort of redistribution program and the battle's probably all over except for the shouting. The Left got the people to participate in a (gradual) revolt against what is the American system, without them even knowing it.

If you're suggesting that Republicans don't really care about abortion because they haven't tried to just end it all, in case you hadn't noticed, the country is becoming even more hostile to socially Conservative issues.

So what do you do, pick your battles to stay alive to provide some resistance to the Leftward collapse of America, or go for an all-or-nothing fight and risk finishing off the party and its voice?

Thank you for the link; it was interesting. I'm okay with business bankruptcy (vice personal), especially Ch. 11 (reorganization), in comparison to closing up shop via Ch. 7 (liquidation). Investors are voluntarily risking their money, and people who start and try to grow business ventures are taking risks, and most people probably have heard that most businesses fail.

If he never succeeded, then I certainly wouldn't consider him a good businessman and wouldn't even be considering him for prez. But among non-politician businesspeople in the race, I think it's only him and Carly Fiorina, and I don't think she was successful at HP.

"The Lefties don't actually care about unions!"

Preposterous poppycock. Traditionally they've wanted the working class to revolt against the ownership class and overthrow the (capitalist) system. Even if most of them today have transferred most of their hopes from that to the devolve-the-system-in-place/incrementalism/death-by-a-thousand-cuts tactic, sustaining that division in people's minds and antagonism between the two serves to oppose and destroy capitalistic success and gets people used to non-merit based organization (in the worship of equality).

"The only thing the Lefties care about is power."

More happy thoughts. They are not so innocent as you make them out to be. If they only cared about power, they would be something like Saddam Hussein; as long as he had his golden palaces, and could fuck over anyone he didn't like, he was content with the status quo in the society. Instead, Lefties are like Islamists, wanting to establish a full-blown, world-wide commie Caliphate. Satan has multiple false religions going on. One appeals to Mideastern culture and mindset, another to Western enlighteneds'.

"just been a wing of the organized crime,"

I think that was waaay in the past. The problem since then has been that the larger ones at least have been just a wing of the communist movement in the U.S.

As is often the case, I have no idea WTF you're talking about. On both of those.

"In an election you have to go for the one you dislike the least overall, not the one you love for one particular question."

I think I'll be doing exactly the latter this next time. I think I'll vote for Donald Trump, because I think a lack of an economic recovery this time means the end of the U.S. as I've known it. So I really don't care about where the candidates stand on social issues, or foreign policy. Because the American Dream is almost dead (and even worse, almost forgotten).

"is a separate issue from"

Technically, yes. In practice, no; by the point a Leftist feels like something is worth enough to contribute his own money towards, it's already way past the point of being important enough to him to force other people to do so.