PRINCETON, NJ -- A Gallup Poll finds a statistically significant increase since last year in the percentage of Americans who describe the Democratic Party's views as being "too liberal," from 39% to 46%. This is the largest percentage saying so since November 1994, after the party's losses in that year's midterm elections.
Most major demographic and attitudinal subgroups show at least a slight uptick since 2008 in perceptions that the Democratic Party is too liberal. The increasing perception of the Democrats as too far left comes as President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have expanded the government's role in the economy to address the economic problems facing the country. Additionally, the government is working toward major healthcare reform legislation and strengthening environmental regulations.
...
Implications
The Democratic Party continues to hold the upper hand over the Republican Party in the current U.S. political environment by a variety of measures, including party identification and party favorable ratings. However, compared to last year, Americans are significantly more likely to see the Democratic Party as too liberal, and as a result, they are somewhat more likely to view the party as being too far left than to perceive the Republican Party as too far right. That may expose a bit of a vulnerability for the Democratic Party, and if perceptions of the Democratic Party as being too liberal continue to grow, the GOP may be able to win back some of the support it has lost in recent years. But that may be possible only if the Republicans are at the same time able to convince the public that they are not too far to the political right.
As the end of California's fiscal year approaches, the Governor and state legislators confront a $24 billion deficit. While Republicans and Democrats wrangle over how to address the gaping shortfall, some members of the press have started to look for a scapegoat for the fiscal train wreck. Many have blamed the California taxpayer's only protection: Prop. 13, the 1978 measure capping state property taxes at 1% of a home's assessed value.
Perhaps the most egregious example of the finger-pointing is a recent piece from TIME's Kevin O'Leary, moaning that "Before Prop 13, in the 1950s and '60s, California was a liberal showcase." He insists that "at the root of California's misery lies Proposition 13," and concludes that "in California, the conservative legacy lives on."
How ridiculous. Of all the problems contributing to the fiscal mess, state under-taxation is the least of them. California's sales and gas taxes are the highest in the country - and it has the highest vehicle license fees and the second-highest top-bracket income tax, too. Its corporate tax rates are the highest of all Western states, and for the fourth year in a row, a survey of 543 CEO's found that California's toxic combination of high taxes and intrusive regulations made it the worst place in the nation to do business.
In fact, at the real root of California's fiscal misery is the profligacy of arrogant, big-spending, left-wing legislators, who have treated taxpayers as if they exist only to support the government. Their attitude was exemplified in a recent statement from state assemblywoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa), chairman of the state Budget Conference Committee, repudiating the governor's call for the state to "live within its means":
Well, there is this mantra out there - "live within our means" - and while that sounds really nice . . . and it sounds really responsible, it's meaningless. Our means are completely within our control . . . We have just given away huge corporate subsidies in February; we have given away other tax reductions over many, many years; we've created tax loopholes; in good times, we routinely give away taxes, and then in lean times we never replace those tax deductions or close those loopholes. . . . So "live within our means" doesn't mean anything. The fact is, we have a state with a population that have [sic] needs that we have a moral obligation to provide.
Her assertions - and the obnoxious sense of entitlement underlying them - defy credulity. For politicians like Evans (and the legislature is full of them!), when the hardworking or productive keep more of what they have earned, it's only because politicians have been "giving away" the tax revenues that purportedly belong to them. In this mindset, meeting the "needs" of a greedy, ever-expanding government is the only imperative; taxpayers are nothing more than cash cows, commanded to provide the fodder that allows Evans and those like her to meet their "moral obligations" with other people's money.
Remarkably, even as they have driven California into the fiscal ditch (and demanded ever-higher taxes from its citizens), Evans and her colleagues remain the most highly compensated state legislators in the nation. Along with their six-figure salaries, taxpayers supply them with cars, gasoline and auto maintenance. As regular Californians' budgets are stretched to the limit, many of the "cuts" the state Senate is debating for itself are laughable. They include whether to reduce the benefit that provides their staffers with two new pairs of glasses yearly (or sunglasses, for those who don't wear glasses). The change would limit workers to one new pair - of course, courtesy of the taxpayers.
Ultimately, any honest assessment of California's plight must assign responsibility for the state's fiscal crisis - not to the taxpayers who voted for Prop. 13 three decades ago - but to the politicians who have subsequently exploited them without mercy. Indeed, if spending had simply reflected average population growth plus the average increase in the cost of living since 1991, there would now be a $15 billion surplus. After adjusting for inflation, the state now spends nearly 20% more per capita than it did 18 years ago; even as California's tax revenues increased by 167% during that period, state spending exploded by 189%.
Left-wing legislators like Noreen Evans can demand more taxes and journalists like Kevin O'Leary can bemoan the existence of Prop. 13 all they like. The people know better. And when voters overwhelmingly rejected further tax increases last month, they sent a clear message: It's time for the politicians to start working for Californians again, rather than the other way around.
Originally posted by fierobear: Left-wing legislators like Noreen Evans can demand more taxes and journalists like Kevin O'Leary can bemoan the existence of Prop. 13 all they like. The people know better. And when voters overwhelmingly rejected further tax increases last month, they sent a clear message: It's time for the politicians to start working for Californians again, rather than the other way around.
If they were demanding their politicians work for Californians (not the other way around), there would be recalls going on and lynchmobs tarring and feathering their overspending representatives in the streets.
IMO the message the voters sent was more like "let the feds pay for our overspending"... or in other words "let some poor bastard who lived within his means live up to his moral obligation and pay for our next coke party"
[This message has been edited by D B Cooper (edited 07-02-2009).]
If they were demanding their politicians work for Californians (not the other way around), there would be recalls going on and lynchmobs tarring and feathering their overspending representatives in the streets.
IMO the message the voters sent was more like "let the feds pay for our overspending"... or in other words "let some poor bastard who lived within his means live up to his moral obligation and pay for our next coke party"
Well, now, it's time to take another look at just how classy liberals are. In their latest move, they make fun of the "retarded". Oh, but it's OK, because it's only conservative Sarah Palin's kid...
This is beyond Palin Derangement Syndrom. It is just plain nauseating.
Headline from post at Huffpo by Erik Sean Nelson:
Palin Will Run In '12 On More Retardation Platform
Not surprisingly, it goes downhill from there:
In Sarah Palin's resignation announcement she complained about the treatment of her son Trig who always teaches her life lessons. She said that the "world needs more Trigs, not fewer." That's a presidential campaign promise we can all get behind. She will be the first politician to actually try to increase the population of retarded people. To me, it's kinda like saying the world needs more cancer patients because they teach us such personal lessons.
The quote above comes to us via Pundit and Pundette because Nelson was forced to remove the offending article. Hot Air has a screen grab if you want to read the whole thing. Just make sure you haven't eaten for a couple of hours before you do.
Nelson gives a bizarre explanation for taking the post down:
“No one was seeing the absurdity of Palin hiding behind her children, so my piece was not accomplishing anything good.”
What a bunch of baloney. When did "not accomplishing anything good" EVER stop a lefty from publishing something as sickening as this piece? And maybe "no one was seeing the absurdity" because they were too shocked that any civilized human being would make fun at the expense of a Downs Syndrome child. All he had to do was apologize and let it go at that. Instead, he pretends that he's too smart for the rest of us - we just can't comprehend his nuanced sense of humor. So not only is he a rat, he is an arrogant prick as well.
Nelson is a liar - and a very bad one at that. He crossed way over the line and knows it and was surprised when many of his lefty friends joined conservatives in condemning this filth. This makes Nelson a coward as well who runs away at the first sign of criticism from his friends.
I sincerely hope Ariana Huffington does the right thing and banishes this jerk from ever posting on her site again.
Update: George Joyce adds:
Thanks to an avalanche of immediate criticism from our friends over at Free Republic the Huffington Post has removed Nelson's pathetic and disgusting attempt at political humor. While the Huffington Post bills Nelson as someone who writes for "several comedy websites" their decision to post his offensive essay should have tremendous negative repercussions in the coming days and weeks.
The coming storm soon to engulf the Huffington Post will also stir up memories of President Obama's casual insult to Special Olympians on the Tonight Show back in March. Compassionate leftists, in other words, are about to have their cover blown.
The Huffington Post has crossed a very dangerous line by posting the Nelson essay. With Obama's poll numbers dropping and his foreign and domestic policies facing mounting criticism the last thing Obama needs right now is to be identified with his adolescent supporters over at the Huffington Post.
A final thought: the continuing liberal assault on Sarah Palin and her family will backfire with American voters. It will also make Sarah Palin as tough as nails in 2012.
A liberal acquaintance couldn't understand why conservatives are impatient with Obama. Didn't conservatives get enough of a chance with 30 years of Reagan and Bush, he asked?
OK, it's true that conservatives did get some tax-rate cuts. And we did win the cold war. And we did roll back one social program, welfare, a little, for a while.
But conservatives look on the Obama administration so far and say: Liberals are like the French Bourbons -- the royal house of France, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, deposed in the French Revolution.
After the defeat of Napoleon the Bourbon kings were restored in 1814. Talleyrand was disappointed. They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing, he said.
The whole point of the Reagan era was to demonstrate that government should keep its cotton-picking hands off the economy. Governments and their mega-projects, their subsidies, "backing winners," "investments," always end in tears, just like they did in the stagflation of the late 1970s.
But it's pretty obvious that our Democratic friends have learned nothing from the lessons of the Reagan era, and have forgotten none of their old liberal delusions.
First we got a trillion dollar special-interest giveaway that was called a stimulus package. But unemployment keeps going up, now to 9.5 percent. Then the House of Representatives has passed a cap-and-trade energy bill that's another special-interest giveaway. Next up is a trillion dollar health reform bill that proposes to lower costs while increasing the number of people covered.
Yet Democrats are honest enough to be ashamed of what they are doing. Why else would they pass their trillion dollar stimulus bill without serious hearings or even a copy of the bill available to read. The same is clearly true of the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives, sight unseen, on June 26. As Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson show on NRO Online, the Waxman-Markey bill is nothing more than subsidies, payoffs, corporate welfare and goodies for liberal activists. No wonder it had to be rushed through in the dead of night. It couldn't stand the light of day.
In the Waxman-Markey bill the grand principle of limiting carbon emissions through auctioned and marketable emission permits gets thrown under the bus in a crude special-interest feeding frenzy. What happened to saving the planet?
And buried in the bill are economic howlers that will freeze up the economy in the years ahead, write Spruill and Williamson:
Naturally, Big Labor gets its piece of the pie, too. Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete - and... Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level.
That will really help to revive the economy.
But President Obama's budget director had the best argument against the bill, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial:
In March, White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress that "If you didn't auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States."
The reason that the Democrats threw their grand cap-and-trade principle under the bus is that they didn't dare try an honest campaign to persuade the American people to back their Big Idea, that we should pay more for energy to prevent global warming.
When President Bush wanted to reform Social Security in 2005 he took his case to the American people. He failed to persuade them, and so he didn't get his reform. Democrats and President Obama don't have the guts for that sort of thing.
If only the Democrats were as queasy about the gigantic deficits they are forecasting. If only they were nervous about the rigidities they are introducing into the economy with their plans for forced-march government health care and green-energy subsidies.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the combination of wasteful special-interest spending in the stimulus package, wasteful special-interest spending in the Waxman-Markey bill place a severe cost upon the US economy. Then there is the black hole of possibilities in any government takeover of the health care industry.
In Britain, a month ago, a Conservative Party spokesman admitted that public spending cuts would be needed. Prime Minister Brown thought that allowed him to make political points, one more time, on Labour "investment" versus Tory "cuts." But then came the news that senior civil servants were drawing up contingency plans for 20 percent cuts in spending, starting after the election next year, in case the Chinese balk at buying British government bonds.
So far, the Obamanites have not realized that there might be a limit to borrowing, spending and subsidy.
That's because they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
As you might know by now, I'm in recent recovery from lifelong liberalism. Part of my program is confessing my sins. In my articles, I try to be as candid and honest as I can (which is great therapy, though, at times, I feel like I'm on one of those reality shows where you folks are chilling with a cold beer and saying, "Does she have any idea what a jerk she's been?" and, "Oh my God, does her face scream Botox or what?")
Well, you know, I deserve it. I was leftist for so many years, and I thought and said so many idiotic things that a little gentle ribbing is good for the soul (remember, the operative word is "gentle"). And I was a hypocrite. I preached forgiveness and kindness toward all, except conservatives. I prided myself on being a spiritually evolved being who refrained from stereotyping and discrimination. And yet I was engaged in prejudice against a whole group of people.
Well I've renounced it all, and feel like the world's biggest ignoramus. A meatball, blockhead, sap, twit, peabrain, chowderhead, dipstick, dolt, and dumb cluck (I consulted my thesaurus for help here). But part of the reason why I was a class A fool was because I had been fooled. I saw all the Michael Moore movies and heard Michael Parenti speak, and bought books by Chomsky and Zinn, and listened to left of left KPFA radio, and did everything I was supposed to. My father raised me to despise conservatives, so there you go. I was brainwashed.
But if you think I'm the rare bird, sorry Charley. Almost every liberal in the Blue States feels the same mindless malice toward the Right. (I imagine that in the Red States, liberals have to behave themselves because they're in the minority and, frankly, you people are armed.) Even my moderate Democratic friends from outside California regard conservatives with venom. Whipped up by rage at the Man and US Imperialism planted in the recesses of their brains by the far Left, liberals blame all wars, racism, recession, urban violence, poverty, even athlete's foot and hemorrhoids, on those satanic conservatives.
How well do you know your average liberal? To determine your LI (Liberal IQ), I have devised the following quiz. See if you can answer the following like a Blue State liberal.
1. The cause(s) of global warming is:
a. CO2 emissions.
b. Rush Limbaugh's hot air
c. George Bush.
d. All of the above.
2. The biggest threat facing the US today is:
a. North Korea
b. Iran
c. Home grown radical Islam.
d. Talk Radio.
3. We joined the Allies during WWII because of:
a. Hitler
b. Japanese Emperor Hirohito
c. Pearl Harbor
d. A Right Wing Conspiracy
4. Before I go to sleep at night I give thanks to:
a. Jesus.
b. The Hebrew God.
c. Allah.
d. Lama Obama.
5. These are a few of my favorite things:
a. Pledging to help Obama change the world.
b. Giving spare change to the victims of US hegemony.
c. Wishing bodily harm on George Bush and Sarah Palin.
d. All of the above.
If you selected D, congratulations! You have excellent LI. That's the good news; the bad news is that you are up to speed and know that there are countless people out there who despise conservatives.
Given the current climate, I didn't exactly pick the greatest time in the world to switch parties. I'm living surrounded by leftists, and hear trash talk every single day. Liberals are amazingly creative at peppering their daily chitchat with attacks on conservatives ("Hello, I'd like a decaf mocha, and didn't George Bush destroy this country?") If I responded the way I'd like to, I'd lose my livelihood and risk my life.
Instead, to cope with the constant barrage, I've perfected a beautific Mona Lisa smile: a half smile that reveals nothing. It's not an enthusiastic, perky full-smile nor is it a pejorative smirk or scowl. My Mona Lisa creates a momentary confusion in the other ("What is that odd look on Robin's face -- is she agreeing, disagreeing, or does she have gas?") just long enough for me to hop right in and change the subject. For instance, when a colleague said to me, "Obama is doing such great things to get us out of the recession which those disgusting Republicans got us into," my knee jerk reaction was to get in his face, but instead I bit off a little piece of tongue while doing my Mona Lisa personal best.
So, friends, we have a bit of a PR nightmare on our hands. In my opinion, conservatives need to mix things up a bit and get the word out that we are not the offspring of Lucifer. Perhaps a big tent, an end to infighting, and a sense of humor will help. Here is my small contribution to this political face lift, an Extreme Makeover, Conservative Edition: Robin's top ten list. Please post some of your own to keep the positive energy (as we say in Berkeley) going.
Robin's Top Ten List of Why Conservatism Rocks:
(Actually there are more than ten -- there were too many to limit it!)
16. We have lovely Miss Carrie Prejean; they have Missing Link Janeane Garofalo
15. Cool men of Steele: Shelby and Michael.
14. Conservative guys will beat the crap out of our assailant; liberal men will offer him money for food.
13. Can remove sign, "When it's yellow, let it mellow; when it's brown, flush it down,"and flush toilet with impunity (yes, actual sign seen in Berkeley)
12. Higher resale value on my car: No angry bumper stickers!
11. Now we can rail against the Man (which they are, even if they deny it)
10. Replaced mean Sean (Penn) with clean Sean (Hannity)
9. Talk Radio!
8. No need to queue up for latest Michael Moore movie
7. We have God; they have trolls.
6. Being part of sexy, countercultural, free thinking new movement.
5. My work ethic has already improved. (it's true!)
USS REAGAN Seeing it next to the Arizona Memorial really puts its size into perspective.... ENORMOUS!
BEAUTIFUL!
When the Bridge pipes 'Man the Rail' there is a lot of rail to man on this monster: shoulder to shoulder, around 4.5 acres. Her displacement is about 100,000 tons with full complement.
Capability
Top speed exceeds 30 knots, powered by two nuclear reactors that can operate for more than 20 years without refueling
1. Expected to operate in the fleet for about 50 years
2. Carries over 80 combat aircraft
3. Three arresting cables can stop a 28-ton aircraft going 150 miles per hour in less than 400 feet
Size 1. Towers 20 stories above the waterline
2. 1092 feet long; nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall
5. 2 rudders, each 29 by 22 feet and weighing 50 tons
6. 4 high speed aircraft elevators, each over 4,000 square feet
Capacity
1. Home to about 6,000 Navy personnel
2. Carries enough food and supplies to operate for 90 days
3. 18,150 meals served daily
4. Distillation plants provide 400,000 gallons of fresh water from sea water daily, enough for 2,000 homes
5. Nearly 30,000 light fixtures and 1,325 miles of cable and wiring 1,400 telephones
6. 14,000 pillowcases and 28,000 sheets
7. Costs the Navy approximately $250,000 per day for pi er side operation
8. Costs the Navy approximately $25 million per day for underway operations (Sailor's salaries included).
US Navy Welcomes the USS Bill Clinton
Sunday, July 2, 2006 Vancouver , BC . Headed for Seattle, WA., the US Navy welcomed the latest member of its fleet today.
The USS William Jefferson Clinton (CVS1) set sail today from its home port of Vancouver , BC.
The ship is the first of its kind in the Navy and is a standing legacy to President Bill Clinton 'for his foresight in military budget cuts' and his conduct while president.
The ship is constructed nearly entirely from recycled aluminum and is completely solar powered with a top speed of 5 knots. It boasts an arsenal comprised of one (unarmed) F14 Tomcat or one (unarmed) F18 Hornet aircraft which, although they cannot be launched or captured on the 100 foot flight deck, form a very menacing presence.
As a standing order there are no firearms allowed on board.
The 20 person crew is completely diversified, including members of all races, creeds, sex, and sexual orientation.
This crew, like the crew aboard the USS Jimmy Carter, is specially trained to avoid conflicts and appease any and all enemies of the United States at all costs.!
An onboard Type One DNC Universal Translator can send out m es sages of apology in any language to anyone who may find America offensive. The number of apologies are limitless and though some may seem hollow and disingenuous, the Navy advises all apologies will sound very sincere.
The ship's purpose is not defined so much as a unit of national defense, but instead in times of conflict, the USS Clinton has orders to seek refuge in Canada The ship may be positioned near the Democratic National Party Headquarters for photo-ops. The Clin-toonsShould be very proud.
Remember how the Democrats, including people here, whined and complained about Republicans allegedly blocking Democrats and not being bi-partisan? I guess it doesn't apply when they are in power...
WASHINGTON – In their zeal to protect their members from politically hazardous votes on issues such as gay marriage and gun control, Democrats running the House of Representatives are taking extraordinary steps to muzzle Republicans in this summer's debates on spending bills. On Thursday, for example, Republicans had hoped to force debates on abortion, school vouchers and medical marijuana, as well as gay marriage and gun control, as part of House consideration of the federal government's contribution to the District of Columbia's city budget.
No way, Democrats said.
At issue are 12 bills totaling more than $1.2 trillion in annual appropriations bills for funding most government programs — usually low-profile legislation that typically dominates the work of the House in June and July. For decades, those bills have come to the floor under an open process that allows any member to try to amend them. Often those amendments are an effort to change government policy by adding or subtracting money for carrying it out.
The tradition has often meant laborious debates. But it has allowed lawmakers with little seniority to have their say on doling out the one-third of the federal budget passed by Congress each year. It was a right the Democrats zealously defended when they were the minority party from 1995 through 2006. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., insists the clampdown is to prevent debates from dragging on and on. Republicans, however, have agreed to limit the amount of time debating the bills.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., acknowledged in a brief interview that one reason for restricting amendments is to save members of his party from having to cast politically painful votes.
So instead of debating an attempt backed by House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio to allow more children living in Washington to receive school vouchers, the House will vote on a Quixotic attempt to eliminate the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
"What they want to do is they want to avoid tough votes on appropriations bills," said Rep. David Dreier of California, senior Republican on the Rules Committee. Even some Democrats are chaffing at the heavy-handed clampdown on debate. Abortion opponent Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., on Thursday lashed out at his party's leaders for denying him and others a chance to vote on restoring a long-standing directive by Congress blocking taxpayer-funded abortions in Washington, D.C. Democrats effectively reversed that stance while the bill was still being considered by the Appropriations Committee. Stupak said the Democratic leadership's new policy on floor debates "muzzles the voices of pro-life members."
The process has become so relentlessly efficient that Democrats were actually forced to drag out action to Thursday on a $33 billion measure funding energy programs and water projects. The reason? They need to stretch the workweek into Friday to force lawmakers to remain in Washington for committee work on health care and other spending bills.
Republicans complain that unless a member of their party is one of the 60 members of the Appropriations Committee, he is essentially blocked from having any say in shaping the budget.
"That simply disenfranchises most of the members of this body," said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. Democrats say that months ago, they offered Republicans the chance for a more open process in return for a guarantee that Republicans wouldn't drag things out. Republicans initially said no but recently have agreed to limit how long a bill can be debated. Too late, say Democrats. "We offered Republicans the opportunity to work with us in a bipartisan way to offer amendments so we could complete the appropriations process in a timely manner," said Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "They rejected that offer and have repeatedly used delaying tactics."
Ah, yes. The oldest trick in the book, and one that liberals LOVE to use: misdirection. When THEIR plan isn't working, then shift attention to the Republicans...
With their trajectory heading further downward and the profligate spending they authorized putting not a dent in the weakening economy, the Democrats have reached into their bag of tricks and are recycling old lies.
The AP, among others, reports that House Intelligence Chairman Reyes has announced an investigation into a variety of post 9/11 intelligence opeartions undertaken by the Bush administration.
Included in this investigation apparently is a charge that Congress was not informed of a never utilized notion about killing Al Qaeda leaders who had taken refuge in countries not allied with us in the fight against terror, a plan not only never carried out but
(a) one which was reported on the front page of the New York Times seven years ago; and
(b) one which certainly if successful would avoid collateral damage to civilians now injured or killed when the very same thing is done by unmanned drones; and
(c) one which apparently--and contrary to Panetta's statement--never was ordered to be kept from Congressional notification by Vice President Cheney.
But that is all part and parcel of the Democrats' unending efforts to tar and destroy those who did everything in their power to defend us.
In case you've forgotten the sort of thing I'm talking about here's a reminder of what they did to Alberto Gonzales.
A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude. "She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a Republican." "I am," replied the man. "How did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me." The man smiled and responded, "You must be an Obama Democrat." "I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?" "Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You've risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."
When I snapped out of my left wing trance last year, I was lost in space. I had no conservative friends and was clueless about web sites and books.
I had heard something vaguely about Talk Radio. So I scanned my AM dial and found Michael Savage. (It took several months, and a chat with a rather bemused new friend, before I even realized there were other hosts as well.)
Being a lifelong liberal, I'd never heard anybody like Savage in my life. He yelled; he called people "vermin." He was unbridled masculinity, not the touchy feeling kind I was used to. And he totally accepted himself: his moods, passion, temper.
But what shocked me the most was his saying that men have become "feminized." I'd never been so offended. "Well, what's wrong with men being more feminine?" I shouted back at my radio. "Is there something wrong with femininity?" Men being way more in touch with their yin and less with their yang sounded good to me.
I hadn't exactly been a big fan of masculinity. Like any good feminist, ranting and raving about men were two of my favorite pastimes. Men frightened me. Testosterone fueled types like Michael Savage scared the bejeezus out of me. I had good reasons, of course, given episodes of harassment and abuse.
I couldn't tune Savage out because he was the only game in town (or so I thought). Also, he was spot on about Obama, and his show was a rich tapestry of politics, philosophy, history, and religion. So I stayed glued.
What a difference a year makes. Now I see Savage as a seer warning us of the dangers we were in for if men went the way of the dinosaur. I had thought taming men's animal nature was a win-win for everybody. Now I realize it was tampering with Mother Nature.
And I have to wonder whether the feminization of men has been an unforeseen result of liberalism or some twisted scheme hatched by the left. In some ways, it feels paranoid to even go there, like I've watched too many sci fi flicks. But at the same time if Professor Bill Ayers and his ilk could plot infiltrating the schools with all things Marxist, why stop there? Why not engineer a designer man who would go along with the liberal flow?
Step one: loosen men up through psychotherapy where they can get in touch with their inner child. Have them exchange their arms for drums that they can pound in the woods with groups of brothers. Teach them to reject logic and lead with their emotions.
Idolize gayness, because after all, aren't gay men just XY versions of the superior women? Degrade anything masculine. Marginalize and vilify the macho types like Savage, by banning him from the U.K.
Hike up the costs of SUV's and trucks, and squeeze men into deracinated cars like the Prius (notice how prissy even the name sounds?) Even better, herd them to work in buses and trains to save the planet (and control them).
Ask the question, as Maureen Dowd did in her bestselling book, "Are Men Necessary?" Answer in the negative by glorifying single mothers and supporting sperm donors. Why bother with a bossy husband when the government can put moms on the dole? And anyway, with gayness being the next big craze, there may be fewer straight men out there.
On the horizon: making the notion of gender arbitrary anyway. Allow people free and easy access to sex change operations (I'll bet good money they will be readily available under ObamaCare.)
Allow children to choose their own sex. (By the way, the fad is already in vogue and called "gender neutrality." Parents don't inform their child of his or her or its gender and let the little mutant choose one.)
Even better, have your child be Bob one day and Becky the next, another hot trend called "gender fluid." It's already happening at a few San Francisco Bay Area schools, where bathrooms are unisex and children get to alter their gender as the mood strikes them.
The piece de resistance of feminization: wreck the economy. If you want to cripple men, rob them of their life spring: their ability to provide for their family. No worries: the government will step in as a worthy substitute.
And the final stroke of genius: disempower the true symbols of masculinity: the military, police, and intelligence officers. Investigate them, sue them, protest them with riots in the street. Make them feel intimidated about doing their jobs. Require them to attend plenty of sensitivity workshops.
So, after decades of my going along like an automaton with the liberal program, I finally got it. As people like Savage have warned us about for years, tampering with gender is a disaster. And not just for men.
Because society shrinks when we are forced to give up who we are, and we become shells of ourselves when we're robbed of our birthright: dignity, freedom, individuality. We become cloned people, with this part and that part, never discovering who we are.
We become what the Tibetans call "hungry ghosts:" tormented beings looking all over for happiness but never finding it because we've forgotten the only place it lives -- in our spirit, which is connected to forces Beyond. We lose forever the knowledge of our true nature that we first glimpsed when we were knee high.
Because the fact is that humans cannot, should not, fool with Mo Nature, shouldn't take nature in our hands and play God. To do so can unleash madness and danger as we know from every horror movie.
Because while we've been engineering a kinder, gentler man, much of the world has been doing the opposite. Countries like Iran and North Korea have been building nuclear weapons and poisoning their young men with hatred of the U.S. They have been making their men stronger, meaner, and better armed.
Liberals: be honest with yourselves. In the end, if the worst case scenario happens (God forbid) and we are attacked, who will you run to? Will you scream out for the Green Czar?
No; all of us, liberals and leftists, conservatives and feminists, we will go where we have always gone from the beginning of time; we will search desperately for the big, strong men to protect us, the ones who have always had the guts, the courage, and yes the cojones, to put their lives and limbs on the line.
From a link that Red88FF had in another thread, about another subject, comes a good lesson about how the liberal's favorite illusion, socialism, doesn't work, and hasn't for at least 400 years...
Now, the real story of Thanksgiving: "On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible," and this is what's not taught. This is what's left out. "The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work. But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford's detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims -- including Bradford's own wife -- died of either starvation, sickness, or exposure.
"When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well." They were collectivists! Now, "Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives.
"He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. ... Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn't work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years -- trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it -- the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson," every kid gets. "If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future." Here's what he wrote: "'The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing -- as if they were wiser than God,' Bradford wrote.
"'For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense...that was thought injustice.'" That was thought injustice. "Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result?" 'This had very good success,' wrote Bradford, "for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." Bradford doesn't sound like much of a Clintonite, does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? ... In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. ... So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians.
"The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the 'Great Puritan Migration.'" Now, aside from this program, have you heard this before? Is this "being taught to children -- and if not, why not? I mean, is there a more important lesson one could derive from the Pilgrim experience than this?" What if Bill and Hillary Clinton had been exposed to these lessons in school? Do you realize what we face in next year's election is the equivalent of people who want to set up these original collectivists communes that didn't work, with nobody having incentive to do anything except get on the government dole somehow because the people running the government want that kind of power. So the Pilgrims decided to thank God for all of their good fortune. And that's Thanksgiving. And read George Washington's first Thanksgiving address and count the number of times God is mentioned and how many times he's thanked. None of this is taught today. It should be. Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks. You deserve it. Do what you can to be happy, and especially do what you can to be thankful, because in this country you have more reasons than you've ever stopped to consider.
Message to conservatives - this is how the left see and feel about you. They honestly think they are better than you, above you, and that you need them to show you the way. They insult your religion, your life, your values...everything about you. Read this, understand it and never forget what we're up against.
The media elite hate Sarah Palin with a passion -- the same passion they have used for decades to rant about us. We are the "primitive strain," the "booboisie," or, as The New York Times put it, the "Philistines." We are a people, according to Times columnist Maureen Dowd, that displays a "reptilian American desire " for prosperity and an innate disrespect for culture and our betters, who are the political and media elite that "must nurse us through our affluenza."
Welcome to Mainstream Media World, where Sarah Palin is...us.
Call it Palin Envy, Palin Derangement Syndrome or even Palin Jealous. But the irrational hatred pouring from a thousand well-fed mouths, dripping from manicured fingers, from the talkers and squawkers of mainstream media, is fueled by the increasingly angry certainty that we -- and Gov. Sarah Palin -- simply don't know our place.
Witness rabid Palin-hater Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post and National Review columnist who has scored regular guest status on MSNBC for finding more than a hundred ways to say Palin is dumber than a chimpanzee... which, Parker opines, shows how much "deadwood" "Miss Alaska" has between her "low-brow" ears. After all, her "oogedy-boogedy" Christianity doesn't recognize the primacy of the primate in human affairs, putting her "Clearly Out of Her League" amongst cultured folks.
You don't need the brains of a chimpanzee to recognize the gulf between the world inhabited by Palin and that of Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal, National Review), and David Brooks (The New York Times and National Public Radio) to name a few of the leading conservative lights of Mainstream Media World. To them, Sarah Palin represents the average U.S. citizen, who inhabits the American version of Bizarro World, the alternate Earth of Superman comics that was pledged to hate beauty and love ugliness; Bizarro inhabitants could achieve nothing without help from their betters.
Brooks says Palin is "a fatal cancer," representative of average America. And Brooks knows average America, which he describes from his perch in Midtown Manhattan as having a "trashy consumer culture" filled with those who live in the "vacuous realm of unreality." The denizens of Palin World -- us -- need to live a life of "contemplation" and be less "materialistic," he scolds. He expressed his disdain for the Alaska governor, "who scorn(s) ideas entirely," while dining at New York's Le Cirque restaurant (luncheon portion of spaghetti with tomato sauce, $28 -- no meatballs, too common; however, he was there for dinner and a larger portion, which begins at $98), which has "wined and dined high society in New York for half a century" and, praises the Times, makes its "regular customers feel pampered and important."
Time magazine all but giggled when Palin was interviewed after her resignation "while plucking salmon from the family fishing nets aboard a boat" on the ocean. And the giggles came from both left and right: On Fox, Dana Perino, who served as President George W. Bush's press secretary and now works for an A-list beltway lobbying firm, expressed dismay that a serious political player would handle fish... other than the kind that is smoked, nestled on cream cheese over toast points, and dotted with capers. Real players take the time to stage interviews, she pronounced, her blonde locks swinging and giggle dripping with gravitas.
They don't get it: Sarah Palin is not a real player, just as we're not real players. Like us, she's a real person. And real persons don't do staged. We simply live life, doing what we can to "pursue happiness" and help others. Service counts: Gov. Palin, for example, had programs to help Eskimos struggling with winter food shortages.
That doesn't say food shortages are not a concern to Brooks, Parker, et al. Parker, who won journalism's prestigious H.L. Mencken Award for "attacking (the) ignorance and stupidity" of Palin America, recognized that Washington Post readers need to understand "the concerns of everyday people" in this economy. So she travelled to New York City (from her home in South Carolina, or her home in Washington, or her vacation place in Florida -- as Parker says, she lives an "ordinary life" among "ordinary people") to observe the unemployed commiserating over lunch at Sarabeth's, where "extraordinary cuisine and casual elegance" cheer the Manhattan equivalent of Eskimos laid low by the economy.
Winter food shortages are in full swing on this snowy day in January in Manhattan. "Pasta and champagne dinners" are no longer the "norm," Parker laments, as she sadly watches America's unfortunates do subsistence (choking down Cobb Salads, $26 a pop, or making do with hardly-a-mouthful Guacamole and Chips at Central Park South pricing of $13.50),while sitting in faux-Zebra covered chairs overlooking the park a few doors down from the storied Plaza Hotel.
But cheer up: Parker's niece, newly unemployed, points out that the women of the great north (above trendy Soho in lower Manhattan) are bearing up well, experiencing destitution with style, cheerfully concluding "if you gotta be broke, you may as well be cool about it." And, of course, when the going gets tough (before you pawn that $1,500 Gucci you bought with your first paycheck), there's always mummy and Aunt Kathleen. Welcome to the economic downturn in Mainstream Media World.
Sarah Palin, who was ridiculed by one pundit for jewelry that looks like it "had been picked up at a local craft fair," asks a simple question: when did "pasta and champagne" replace macaroni and cheese? And she challenges the central tenet, stated openly by Parker, that the average American wants those people who are better and smarter than them to take charge, to give them a country "to be led by...elites." Otherwise, Parker warns, we'll get a woman whose "lack of depth" and "lack of intellectual curiosity" would have us doing things that prove, as Brooks writes, that we are, in fact, "as shallow as we look."
But never fear: those whose superiority allows them to lead have some tips for those, like Palin, born to follow. Kathleen Parker offers advice: she'd like to see Sarah do something literate, like take up journaling and use a few French words while referencing great literature, perhaps writing "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." French means intelligence to Parker, "n'est-ce pas?" (translated "isn't that so?" to those who pluck salmon or believe in "that great big problem: G-O-D"). A reference to the classics, a bit of French, and a literary pastime might change for the better a woman who, as David Brooks says, shows no sign of contemplation, "scorn(ing) ideas entirely."
In Mainstream Media World, thought and contemplation are highly valued. Brooks demonstrated this when sitting at dinner next to a Republican senator who, he said, "had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time." What to do? Think. Breathe deeply. Contemplate. And so he thought and breathed and contemplated the hand on his thigh for more than an hour. Finally, dinner over, he came up with this reaction: "I was like, ehh, get me out of here."
No doubt, it is different in Palin World, where we take our cue from the Bart (Simpson), rather than the Bard (Shakespeare). Simpson asked of a nearsighted friend who, like Brooks, wears eyeglasses, "How can someone with glasses so thick be so stupid?"
Faced with the same situation, for many of us there would be no contemplation. We would immediately take a fork -- there are usually three, sometimes four in the place settings at the ritzy restaurants inhabited by Mainstream Media World grandees -- and drive it into the senator's hand.
And then, giving Kathleen Parker the French she asks for and the senator the reaction he so richly deserves, declare "Le thigh, c'est moi."
I never thought I'd be a big fan of David Brooks, but now I've developed a new-found admiration for him and his independence of thought. I thought he was just being paranoid about the ultra-conservative wackos in the Republican Party being out to get him. I was wrong; you're not being paranoid when it's true.
All of my conservative friends ... and there are many of them, including a retired fighter pilot who lives in Alaska ... are unanimous in their opinion that Sarah Palin has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that she is unqualified for national office. We deserve better.
Wank on, guys!
[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 07-25-2009).]
I never thought I'd be a big fan of David Brooks, but now I've developed a new-found admiration for him and his independence of thought. I thought he was just being paranoid about the ultra-conservative wackos in the Republican Party being out to get him. I was wrong; you're not being paranoid when it's true.
All of my conservative friends ... and there are many of them, including a retired fighter pilot who lives in Alaska ... are unanimous in their opinion that Sarah Palin has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that she is unqualified for national office. We deserve better.
And none of that excuses the way she's been treated. The left has show it has no morals, no restraint, no decorum...and so on.
And none of that excuses the way she's been treated.
I agree with you that discussions about Sarah Palin's jewelry and clothing are just as unfair and inappropriate as the distasteful discussions about Nancy Pelosi's neck, but there's a huge difference between "She has been treated unfairly" and "Any way you look at it, it's us vs. them," particularly when "them" is your own party.
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Wow. That's a mature response.
... and, in this case, both consistent with and appropriate to the anti-intellectual theme of the article you cited. Perhaps you would prefer, "We have met the enemy and he is us" ~ Pogo (20th century philosopher). You don't need to convince each other (as in the present thread) to achieve your goals, you need to convince the mainstream of American voters. Rather than tilting blindly at the abstract concept of "Liberalism" and bashing other conservatives who don't measure up to your standards, perhaps you need to provide better alternatives, alternatives that even intellectuals can understand, to the specific ideas that you oppose.
[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 07-25-2009).]
Originally posted by Marvin McInnis: I agree with you that discussions about Sarah Palin's jewelry and clothing are just as unfair and inappropriate as the discussions about Nancy Pelosi's neck, but there's a huge difference between "She has been treated unfairly" and "Any way you look at it, it's us vs. them," particularly when "them" is your own party.
The bad treatment goes WAY beyond clothing and jewelry. They've done everything possible to trash her, her family including underage daughters and infants, thrown every kind of ethics charge they could (and has beaten them all, and will probably beat the latest one) - the conduct of the liberals has been inexcusable.
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... and, in this case, both consistent with and appropriate to the anti-intellectual theme of the article you cited. Perhaps you would prefer, "We have met the enemy and he is us" ~ Pogo (20th century philosopher). You don't need to convince each other (as in the present thread) to achieve your goals, you need to convince the mainstream of American voters. Rather than tilting blindly at the abstract concept of "Liberalism" and bashing other conservatives who don't measure up to your standards, perhaps you need to provide better alternatives, alternatives that even intellectuals can understand, to the specific ideas that you oppose.
What I post is relevant because liberals are in virtually total power, and are pursuing an agenda. The enemy is "us", it's only "some of us". I didn't vote for socialism, increasing taxes and fees and tripling the deficit. The liberals did. This thread is for looking into the philosophy and motives of the liberals. It isn't an abstract concept, it is a well-organized political ideology with an agenda, one that you are seeing played out as we speak.
John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, considered compulsory abortions and other Draconian measures to shrink the human population in a 1977 science textbook.
President Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.
Holdren, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford and headed a science policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the past 13 years, won the unanimous approval of the Senate as the president's chief science adviser.
He was confirmed with little fanfare on March 19 as director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, a 50-person directorate that advises the president on scientific affairs, focusing on energy independence and global warming.
But many of Holdren's radical ideas on population control were not brought up at his confirmation hearings; it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.
The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe.
The three authors summarize their guiding principle in a single sentence: "To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people."
As first reported by FrontPage Magazine, Holdren and his co-authors spend a portion of the book discussing possible government programs that could be used to lower birth rates.
Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.
To help achieve those goals, they formulate a "world government scheme" they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world's resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an "armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force" to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.
Holdren's office issued a statement to FOXNews.com denying that the ecologist has ever backed any of the measures discussed in his book, and suggested reading more recent works authored solely by Holdren for a view to his beliefs.
"Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth," the statement said.
"Straining to conclude otherwise from passages treating controversies of the day in a three-author, 30-year-old textbook is a mistake."
But the textbook itself appears to contradict that claim.
Holdren and the Ehrlichs offer ideas for "coercive," "involuntary fertility control," including "a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child," which doctors would be expected to do right after a woman gives birth.
"Unfortunately," they write, "such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries," where doctors are not often present when a woman is in labor.
While Holdren and his co-authors don't openly endorse such measures on other topics, in this case they announce their disappointment -- "unfortunately" -- that women in the third world cannot be sterilized against their will, a procedure the International Criminal Court considers a crime against humanity.
Click here to see the passage on sterilizing women | Click here for the full section on "Involuntary Fertility Control"
"It's very problematic that he said these things," said Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Lieberman faulted Holdren for using government as a solution to every problem and advocating heavy-handed and invasive laws.
But other members of the scientific community said accusations against Holdren are wholly misplaced.
"John Holdren has been one of the most well-respected and prominent scientific voices urging the federal government to address global warming," wrote Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement.
Holdren's co-authors, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, said in a statement that they were "shocked at the serious mischaracterization of our views and those of John Holdren," caused by what they called misreadings of the book.
"We were not then, never have been, and are not now 'advocates' of the Draconian measures for population limitation described -- but not recommended" in the book, they wrote.
Still, William Yeatman, an energy policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, faulted the Senate for not screening Holdren more strenuously during his hearings before confirming his nomination by unanimous consent both in committee and in the full Senate.
Despite "the litany of apocalyptic warnings that turned out to be incorrect, no one was willing to stick his neck out" and vote no, Yeatman said.
Some of Holdren's views on population came under fire during the otherwise quiet confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, where Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked him to revisit his past statements about environmental catastrophes that have never come to pass.
"I was and continue to be very critical of Dr. Holdren's positions -- specifically his countless doomsday science publications and predictions that have been near universally wrong," Vitter told FOXNews.com.
"I wish that the Commerce Committee had taken more time to evaluate his record during his nomination hearing, but like with everything else in this new Washington environment, the Democratic majority and the White House were pushing to speed his nomination along," Vitter said.
Vitter grilled Holdren during the hearing, asking him to clear up his 1986 prediction that global warming was going to kill about 1 billion people by 2020.
"You would still say," Vitter asked, "that 1 billion people lost by 2020 is still a possibility?"
"It is a possibility, and one we should work energetically to avoid," Holdren replied.
Sen. John Kerry, a leading Democrat on the committee, said the renewed scrutiny was essentially a Republican smear on Holdren's good record. Kerry told FOXNews.com that senators already had "ample opportunity" to question Holdren, who "made clear that he does not and never has supported coercive approaches, end of story.
"The Commerce Committee and the Senate then unanimously concluded what I have long known -- that John Holdren is a leading voice in the scientific community and we are fortunate to have him lead the fight to restore the foundation of science to government and policymaking that has been lacking for almost a decade."
Holdren has confronted a number of challenges during his four-decade scientific career, including nuclear arms reduction, and was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics," as the Nobel Committee said.
Now his greatest focus is global warming, which he said in a recent interview poses a threat akin to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
Holdren told the Associated Press in April that the U.S. will consider all options to veer away from that cliff, including an experimental scheme to shoot pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays and cool the earth, a last resort he hoped could be averted.
"Dr. Holdren is working day and night for the Obama Administration and the American people, helping to develop science and technology policies to make the country stronger, more secure, and more energy independent, and to make Americans healthier and better educated," his office told FOXNews.com.
Four months after Holdren's confirmation, his critics are keeping a wary eye on his work in the White House, where they assert that he has the president's ear on scientific issues.
"It is interesting that this 30-year-old book is finally coming to light," said Lieberman, of the Heritage Foundation.
"The people who are concerned about Holdren, quite frankly we didn't do enough homework."
I'll bet this has happened to you. Some friend or relative is a little bit nuts -- maybe they just are, or maybe they have been burned by painful experiences. So they get very anxious about imaginary threats and outraged by imagined injustices. Maybe they're paranoid because they're smoking dope, or they drive drunk because they're young and stupid and think it's cool. Or maybe they're just jealous of people who look happier, or prettier, or have better toys. It's just ordinary human folly.
And to keep the peace, we indulge their craziness.
That's our biggest mistake. That's why we are in such trouble as a people and a culture.
We have been taught to indulge craziness. It's supposed to show that we're "compassionate". Psychiatrists know this: If you let crazy folks set the rules, you have to get crazy right along with them. It doesn't matter if your client is crazy for good reasons. The cause doesn't matter one little bit. Good therapists are taught never to indulge craziness, because that just makes everything worse. Alcoholics Anonymous has long understood exactly the same thing. Real compassion doesn't mean joining people in the pits. That just means that you get two crazy people instead of just one. And then you get more and more, as the phony compassion spreads.
Our culture is now actively teaching racial paranoia to blacks, gender paranoia to women, and abuse paranoia to everybody with a beef. All those exaggerated fears and phony fits of rage have been cynically whipped up by the Left to grab more power. That's their Compassion Fascism. The rest of us go along, because we don't want to be bothered to stand up against it. But in the aggregate, over time, we have become a culture driven loopy by race, gender, and group paranoia. We have adopted the madness of the most race-obsessed people, and made them rich. Over time, they have worn down our sanity, so that our culture has literally gotten crazy.
Obama's first crazy-making person was probably his father substitute in Hawaii. By all accounts Frank Marshall was a race-obsessed black guy. It's not that he was wrong to feel angry, at the time. There were a ton of injustices against blacks. It's rather that he turned his pain into fanatical campaign of hatred, spreading it around to everybody else. That was Obama's first father figure in Hawaii.
Enter Henry Louis Gates, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Attorney General Eric Holder and Barack Obama: All of them built fame and wealth on paranoid race politics. Enter Ruth Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Barbara Boxer (I'm no lady, I'm a Senator!), and an endless Conga Line of victim feminists. Look what those folks have done to Sarah Palin -- a high-tech lynch mob, driven mad with envy of Palin's good looks, popularity and joie de vivre. In the universities raging feminists, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and Queer Studies nabobs -- among others -- have exploited the career specialty of victimology. It's a standard way to get tenure and promotion -- by slander, rumor-mongering and intimidation. We've seen the faculty lynch mob at Duke U going after white lacrosse players. At Harvard, it's how the Left fired Larry Summers for daring to tell the truth.
Summers used to be a respectable economist, more or less, but now he is toeing the mendacious Obama line on the economy. Is it possible he was just burned at Harvard? Maybe Larry learned fear of the lynch mob at Harvard U, and Obama now has him under his thumb.
You see fear in the eyes of white guys around Obama. Brian Williams has his eyes cast down. Tim Geithner has this little head bow, looking at Obama with fear in his eyes while keeping his head bowed down. They look for all the world like Step ‘n Fetchit. That's all very amusing for purposes of racial revenge, but it means Obama is surrounded with lying commissars who fear to tell him the truth. Michelle is even scarier than hubby, and must be a terror in the White House. It was Michelle who got IG Walpin fired from her private playpen, Americorps. It's Michelle who is the child of the Chicago Machine, after all.
So this White House really does have Czars - Obama being Numero Uno -- and a Czarina -- Michelle, who supports the atmosphere of intimidation. If Obama seems badly out of touch with reality, the answer should be obvious: By spreading fear he guarantees that his commissars will lie to him. That's how the Roman Caesars drifted more and more out of touch as they gained more and more power. It's how Europe's monarchs managed to live in isolated splendor, totally in a glass bubble. It's how the Chinese and Japanese courts began to live out a Noh play.
Humans have a hard time facing reality. Power-hungry people drift into their own fantasy world by cutting off the truth-tellers. This is the most fantasy-driven administration in US history. That will be their downfall, as we are already beginning to see right in front of our eyes.
I grew up with a mean older brother who was ten when I came on the scene. Family lore is that Tom ran away when my mother left to deliver me. When she returned he responded with disgust, "At least you could have brought me home a brother."
Tom's main passion in life was tormenting me. He delighted in mocking me, scaring me, making me cry. He'd laugh and make this strange, guttural sound when he saw my terror. As I got older, he enjoyed more menacing methods of torture, like holding me down and pretending to suffocate me.
It was easy to have access to me since my parents were usually galavanting around town with their pack of carousing adults, all of whom were in arrested development. When my folks were around, they'd yell at him but he'd just start up again when they were gone.
After I grew up and became a psychotherapist, I learned that there was a name for Tom's behavior, sadism. Sadists get a thrill out of being cruel and watching others suffer. While most abusive parents are motivated by a misguided effort to socialize and control, sadistic siblings just want to have fun by inflicting pain.
I rarely think of Tom, who disowned my family years ago. But when I reflect on what was done to Sarah Palin, I remember him and his sadism. And I look around and see more and more Tom's, all grown up; but they haven't grown up, actually; they refuse to grow up and use self control and restraint. And, alarmingly, many of them are in positions of power.
Let's call them by their true name. When an actress calls for gang raping Palin, she's a sadist. When people torch Palin's church with children inside, they are sadists. When bloggers call her a c___t and scorn her disabled son, they are being sadists.
Each day I wake up and the world looks more and more like my childhood: Tom's and Terry's who get a thrill out of terrorizing others; aging Peter Pans who won't grow up and enforce rules; parents too busy partying or saving the world to stay home, guide their kids, and teach them that all important word "no."
Television shows that humiliate people by publicly rejecting and demeaning them; movies where audiences are kept pumped up on sex and violence; an Internet where you can post the vilest things anonymously, unfiltered.
A secular society where anything goes, where self fulfillment reigns, where morals and values are as disposable as yesterday's underwear, to be thrown in the trash when you're tired of them.
A society gone mad, a "return to the primitive," as Ayn Rand described it forty years ago when she witnessed the growing power of the Left. Adults who have the impulse control of two year olds marching around, unhinged and uncontrolled, like Lord of the Flies. Teens beating up each other and teachers and uploading the video on YouTube.
Good people like Palin and Carrie Prejean being victimized in a manner so malicious that the intent is nothing short of destroying them. And the Powers that Be which could stop the growing brutality at any time by calling off the dogs, calling for order, won't do so because it serves their needs. After all, it's what Saul Alinsky preached: control the masses by keeping them agitated and paranoid.
Maybe what's happening today goes beyond Left and Right and speaks instead to the ancient struggle between good and evil. We live in a nation that has banished evil, that denies it even exists. But this is naive and foolhardy; good and evil exist hand in hand in the fiber of all human beings. We each have in us the seeds of Gandhi and the seeds of Pol Pot. It all depends on which ones we feed and nurture.
Evil, unacknowledged and unrecognized, takes root and becomes a virus so virulent, it threatens everyone whom it touches. Because evil changes people; it wipes out what makes them uniquely human; it turns them into something completely different, unrecognizable, alien.
And goodness is not just some old fashioned concept, some relic of days gone by. It's a privilege bestowed on us from the universe and we must cradle it and protect it as we would a newborn babe. We must never take it for granted, mock it or abandon it because it's the only thing that stands in the way of us and total anarchy.
Philosopher Jacob Needleman tells a story of walking on a bustling San Francisco street with a religious scholar from Tibet. Needleman asks his friend, "If it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?" His friend ponders the question silently for several seconds. Then he looks at Needleman and responds quietly, "How many human beings do you see?"
I look around each day and ask myself the same question, "Where are the human beings?" I see fewer and fewer each day. But there's a shining example in Alaska of a woman who maintained her integrity in the midst of cruelty that would have crushed many of us; who never descended to the level of the thugs; and who exits the scene with something that the sadists will never have, not even in their dreams -- her humanity.
Within the world of the far left, individuals have no value. Only the state matters. That is why the modern American statist devalues individual achievement and wealth. If, as in the socialist world of Marx, Engels, and Adolf Hitler (yes, Hitler, as I will explain later), God does not exist and humans have no souls, then the state determines the value of a human life. This philosophy leads to an ominous conclusion.
In my never-ending quest to understand the statist mind, I have attempted to use the principles of objective observation, or phenomenology, to analyze their intentions based on their behavior. Statists, it appears, have two proclivities: One, they are perpetually unhappy and dissatisfied with the current political and social environment, no matter what it happens to be. Two, they are viscerally angry at whoever stands in their way to the next level of progressive utopia. They do not tolerate alternate points of view. An objective individual might classify this behavior as classic immaturity. But there is much more darkness to the statist soul than mere boorish behavior.
The seemingly endless downward spiral into Dante's seventh level of socialist utopia was made into a movie back in 1968, aptly titled "Wild in the Streets". It was a pretty cheesy flick, but one particular scene left a lasting impression on me. This was where the radical leftist youths who took control of the government sent the old folks off to national concentration camps and forced them to drink from water coolers filled with Kool-Aid laced with LSD. For some reason, this image keeps popping into my head whenever I hear about ObamaCare. At the end of the movie, there is a foreshadowing that an even younger and more radical regime is about to overthrow the radical leftists in power. On and on it goes, with Dante's infernal utopia never quite achieved.
Concessions to the fantastic demands of statists lead to more dissatisfaction and anger, and increasingly fantastic demands. This is similar to the strategy of the radical Islamists living in Western countries. In fact, you can phenomenologically observe many attitude similarities between the statist and Islamist. Intolerance of divergent opinions, hatred toward "non-believers", the obsession to dominate and control every aspect of others' lives, and a dogmatic attitude guided by emotion rather than logic, are some examples. Of course, Islamists are just statists with a state religion. To the Islamist, the end game for the Infidel is conversion or death.
The statist philosophy, whether Islamic or otherwise, appears to condone and even embrace the concept of eliminating the members of the opposition by murdering them. While the left projects hatred, racism, and evil on the conservative end of the spectrum, it is they who actually exhibit these attributes. As New York University professor George Watson states in his book, "The Lost Literature of Socialism":
But it was the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism (the Nazi party) from being seen as socialist. The assumption that socialism was never racist can now be seen as a misunderstanding.
The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.
Watson continues:
Socialism offered a blank check to violence, and its license to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory which, to his profound satisfaction, the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret. In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors in the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station.
But after all, nothing like this could happen in America, right? Obama's building up of ACORN community organizers and the AmeriCorps civilian army with billions of dollars from the Stimulus couldn't be used against its own citizens, could it? His statement that "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded (as the military)" doesn't scare you, does it? Read the following transcript from the testimony of Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated a 1970 meeting conducted by Obama's close friend (and probable ghost-writer) William Ayers and included the leadership of the socialist Weather Underground.
I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re‑educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, "Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't re‑educate, that are die-hard capitalists?" And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated and when I pursued this further, they estimated that they'd have to eliminate 25 million people in these re‑education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.
The end game of the left is the abortion and eugenic elimination of the "undesirables", the euthanasia of the old and infirm, and the genocide of those who disagree. Its objective is the purity of socialist thought. And it is pure evil.
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." - William F. Buckley, Jr., Great American Thinker As Barack Obama spends day after day touring the world (how many days has he spent in the Oval Office?), trashing America and taking the country on a trip to hell in a hand basket, the liberal electorate and fawning media for the most part remain completely enthralled by the One. Although his poll numbers have dropped considerably, liberals have yet to abandon ship as they remain strong supporters of the Dictator-in-Chief despite his anti-American agenda.
From socializing the country's infrastructure to gutting the Constitution, from cozying up to the world's tyrants to abandoning proven allies, many on the left simply cannot, or will not, open their eyes to the frightening direction in which Obama is taking our country. There are only so many times that one can use the phrase "drinking the kool aid" or "brainwashed by his rhetoric." At some point, liberals must be held accountable for their willful ignorance.
I recently bumped into a Jewish neighbor who I had not seen in over a year. During the course of the conversation, she made a point of telling me that she was a proud Obama supporter. When I mentioned to her that I recently returned from Israel and was very concerned about the impact that his administration would have on that country's future, she asked me why. As I discussed the litany of concerns, she stared blankly at me. After a brief moment she stated, "Well I think he will be great for our country."
This woman had no idea what I was talking about with regard to the administration's Mideast policies that have been at the forefront of every decision he has made to date. On what does she base her confidence in Obama's ability to lead America in these tumultuous times? Just for the fun of it I asked her how bowing to the Saudi king, shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, silently nodding throughout Ortega's hateful anti-American rant, apologizing to the Muslim world and abandoning missile defense would be helpful for the future of the country. Another blank stare turned into an insecure smirk and the conversation was clearly over.
This is but one example of the encounters that I have on a regular basis with friends, family, and colleagues who have no idea what is going on in the world. They read the New York Times and believe they are informed. There is no intellectual curiosity, no questioning of reporting, and no analysis of what the mainstream media is pouring out to the masses. While we all like to blame the fawning media which is complicit, if not actually abetting, in the usurping of the Constitution, I repeat: at some point we all have to take responsibility for our own thoughts and decisions.
As I watched events unfold in the streets of Iran after that country's rigged election, I was reminded of a conversation with a close liberal friend who voted for Obama but who could not intelligently discuss any major issue or explain why she voted for him other than the vapid (yet common) response that he will take the country in the right direction. Months into the presidency we had another conversation during which she wore her ignorance like a proud medal of honor, lecturing me that everyone is entitled to vote no matter how uninformed the person may be. And while she is sadly correct, that is surely not what the founding fathers intended.
Individuals were given the right to vote in order to ensure freedom. Millions of American lives have been lost fighting for that freedom both here and abroad. The right to cast a vote is a privilege, with that privilege comes responsibility. We have learned that too many Americans did not take that responsibility seriously in our last presidential election. The ignorance of the electorate is simply astounding, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.
How many people flock to the magazine stands to buy the latest Vogue with Michelle Obama on the cover? What is it about her arms that have the average reader going gaga? She is not particularly attractive, when she opens her mouth she says nothing particularly insightful, and she is not very interesting. But magazines continue to feature Michelle and Barack Obama because evidently people cannot get enough of Michelle's latest $500 sneakers or $8000 purse and Barack's singularly unimpressive pectoral muscles and mom jeans.
Here in New York City, people believe that Obama is doing a bang up job. Perhaps some of them dislike America as much as Obama apparently does and they are not offended by his apology tours across the globe, his labeling of Americans as arrogant, or his socialist political agenda. But I surmise that despite the higher education so many liberals have been fortunate enough to receive, they lack the intellectual curiosity required for critical thinking and rational thought. And that applies to Obama and his entire administration as well.
If only someone would tell our newly elected Elitist in Chief that he is not chairing a think tank but is presiding over the free world and managing the greatest nation in the world. Unfortunately, our POTUS, graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, has surrounded himself with similarly educated professionals and advisors who fail to understand that they are not simply playing war games or posturing economic theories on a learn as they go basis.
The Obama administration is bursting with Ivy Leaguers who have been indoctrinated by, and who program others through, liberal education, yet who are clueless about the difference between idealism and reality. Alan Dershowitz is the perfect example as he opined in the Wall Street Journal on Obama's continued support for Israel despite the President's transparent animosity towards our ally (the only promised transparency we have seen to date from Obama!) As noted in my articles responding to his opinion, Dershowitz said nothing of substance, and yet liberals see his name on an article and it has instant credibility. Serious thought has disappeared under the Obama presidency.
I recently had dinner with a very intelligent acquaintance who had just learned of my conservative ideology. The conversation could have gone in any number of different directions addressing issues concerning Honduras, North Korea, health care or cap and trade. Instead, with an amused look on his face he said to me,
"What I want to know is why Monica Crowley is so angry these days. Is it because McCain lost and she was hoping to be his press secretary?"
Since the depth of the conversation was clearly not headed in the direction that I had anticipated, I responded to him with a similar type of question,
"What I want to know is why liberals allow themselves to be informed by a media which has lost all credibility by its lack of questioning and analysis of the Obama presidency. Is it because journalism as a profession is dead or is it because half of the electorate have turned their brains to autopilot?"
When I first began writing for American Thinker, I had a conversation with submissions editor, Larrey Anderson, in which I stated the maxim, "Great minds think alike." Larrey corrected me and responded, "Great minds think." Unfortunately for America, it appears that we have stopped producing great minds and are spitting out more and more individuals who enthusiastically allow the media, academia, and the government to think for them. Without great minds, this country has very little hope of remaining the greatest power in the world, and a beacon for those who aspire to achieve greatness
President Barack Obama talks about restoring economic growth. But his science adviser, John Holdren, once called for zero economic growth while writing with Paul and Anne Ehrlich--who predicted mass starvation in the 1970s.
Reports Cybercast News Service: At a time when it was popular among environmentalists to talk about capping pollutants, John Holdren was writing about placing "caps" on the U.S. economy itself--and working toward "zero economic growth." Holdren, who is now President Obama's top adviser on science and technology policy, wrote in the 1970s that it would be "entirely logical" to cap the Gross National Product--the total productivity of the American economy. "It is by now abundantly clear that the GNP cannot grow forever. Why should it?" Holdren asked in a 1977 college science textbook he co-wrote with Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, titled "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment." "Why should we not strive for zero economic growth (ZEG) as well as zero population growth?"
Admittedly, President Obama hasn't formally adopted this goal. But by putting the economy into hock and running up government borrowing, which even the Congressional Budget Office warns will crowd out private investment, the president seems determined to prevent a robust recovery. Maybe John Holdren will get his wish after all.
I get asked by readers all the time: how can you go from left to right at such a rapid fire pace? Were you a conservative all along? Are you just yanking our chain; you're really still a liberal in conservative clothing?
Great question. This is a topic I ponder daily.
Now that I look back, I had the seeds of both a conservative and a liberal in me all along. On the liberal side: I was raised a secular Jew, and, for some God forsaken reason, most of us are Democrats. My upbringing lacked meaning and substance, which propelled my devotion to social causes. Of course, arriving in Berkeley in my 20's only hardened my liberal propensity.
I became a therapist, made friends with therapists, and spent tons of money having shrinks dissect my psyche. So my life was focused on problems, complaints, and kvetches. As Milton said, our minds can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell. My preoccupation with the darkness put me in a liberal state of mind.
But the conservative was alive and well in me too: My grandparents came from Russia with only the shirts on their backs. Yet they never complained about the hardships or expected any government help. My parents, in their own wacky way, were devoted, dutiful, and fiercely patriotic.
I was also victimized early on by do-gooder liberal politics (though I didn't put two and two together until last year). I attended public schools with forced busing that ignited tremendous animosity and racial violence. As an adult, I've been harassed and molested innumerable times on urban streets both east coast and west, and was mugged several years ago in broad daylight.
Unlike most liberals, I never blamed myself or the dominant culture. I placed culpability directly on the thugs and on those in authority who remained silent. Whenever my friends excused immoral behavior, I would get seriously ticked off.
Lastly, my personality has always had elements both left and right. Now that I think about it, it's been dizzying living in my brain. I'm a straight shooter and detest phoniness (conservative), though I wanted to be liked (liberal). I've never been a group think person and don't like to be controlled (right), but at the same time, I wanted to fit in (left).
And it is impossible to hypnotize me. I took a hypnotherapy class once and the teacher put everyone in a trance, except for me. I asked the teacher about it afterwards. He said that there is a very small minority of people who cannot be hypnotized. (I now wonder whether most of them are conservatives!)
As I got into my 40's, my conservative, logical side started making more frequent appearances. I had some epiphanies: That, even with all my best efforts, the world was pretty much the same as when I entered it -- filled with both good and evil, dark and light. I had to admit, to my disappointment, that utopia wasn't around the corner, and that fate was in the hands of a Higher Power, not humans. I realized that life wasn't supposed to be easy, and that we shape our character through the hard stuff.
I viewed my parents differently, as struggling humans who did the best they could. I let go of my resentment toward them and literally threw out all my old journals that were filled with complaints. Feeling grateful, I wrote them each a letter of appreciation thanking them for the many gifts they bestowed on me.
But it was four years ago, when the bottom fell out of my life, that I transformed into a different person. First, my father died, the next day I was diagnosed with a life threatening blood condition, and three weeks later my mother died.
I recall sitting at my desk, so dazed and stunned that I could barely move. I heard this voice inside my head: Robin, you only have two choices: to hold on tighter to your illusions, or to let this experience shatter you and take you where you've never gone before. I chose the latter, an experience that felt inspired by the Divine.
Suddenly, I grew up. I remember a session with a long term client after I returned from leave. She knew about my parents, and wondered aloud how she might feel when her parents died. She inquired, "Even though I'm a mom, I still feel like a little kid. Do you?"
I answered instantly, "Not any longer."
I woke up from a very long and deep sleep, like Robin Van Winkle. The traits of my arrested development, such as codependency, started melting away like snow in June. I started respecting myself more and requiring others do the same. I ditched friends who needed me as a teat or who treated me unkindly. I guess I was starting to embody conservatism without even knowing it.
My work with clients changed. I stopped reinforcing their stale, rigid stories. Rather than dredge up the past, we talked about how to live now, how to harness inner resources like courage, perseverance, and faith. I hoped to offer them the guidance and wisdom that I lacked in my younger years.
And then two years later, Obama came on the scene. He felt creepy; and I saw before my eyes that the sick, evil fringe of the far left had invaded the Democratic Party. As though I'd been slapped across the face, I snapped out of my trance. The last vestiges of my liberalism flew the coop, and the rest, as they say, is history.
One more question this week:
Dear Robin:
Robin appearing on the Savage Nation? You show your true colors -- pure emotion and no substance like Michael Savage.
E
Hey E,
Never in my wildest imagination would I have thought that my name and Savage's would be included in the same sentence. It took me awhile to get used to Savage's style but now I appreciate his moxie. I've grown tired of living in an air brushed, sanitized world. With Savage, what you see is what you get.
Plus, Savage would fit right in to my family. My kin didn't talk; they screamed. What might look to the casual observer like an episode of Family Feud, was actually a friendly chat. My parents would never say, "Robin, I'm concerned about what you're doing." They'd bellow, "What, are you crazy? You want to ruin your life and make your parents miserable?" I never liked it as a kid. But as I got older, I realized that they always had my back, they had my best interests in mind, and they yelled at me because they cared. Sort of like Savage.
In my high school World History class I remember reading about moral relativists who expressed moral indifference at the practice of forced female circumcision common in some African cultures. These moral relativists argued that moral principles were culture-specific and not universal. According to this theory, there is no objective standard by which to judge cultural norms.
Curiously, the moral relativists were equally reticent about immoral acts committed in the United States. They defended the violence of The Weathermen and other extremist groups, excused brutal murderers sentenced to death row, and extolled the virtues of the 60's counter-culture. The argument that morality is culture-specific was spurious, employed out of convenience, not principle. In principle, the moral-relativists refused to moralize across and within cultures.
The far left's tolerance (and in many cases open support) for the atrocities committed by communist regimes in the 20th century is well documented. The far left opposed the Truman Doctrine and Containment, arguing that America had no right to interfere in other countries. The fact that the Soviet Union was poised on global domination and had enslaved millions of people did not illicit moral outrage from committed American socialists.
It is true that many on the left became partially disaffected with the Soviet Union after Premier Khrushchev's speech condemning Stalin's atrocities was leaked to the Western press, and especially after the Soviet Union brutally suppressed Hungary's anti-communist uprising. However, aside from some stern rebukes, there was no real moral outrage and whatever tepid moral outraged did surface was always qualified by a moral-equivalence argument. That is, the Soviet Union's misconduct was no worse -- and perhaps more utilitarian -- than America's misconduct.
So what lies at the root of the far left's ethical code? What ideology compels them to excuse history's most tyrannical regimes, death row inmates, and homegrown anti-American militants? Is it moral relativism or is it something more insidious?
Moral relativism holds that all morality is subjective; nothing is fundamentally good or bad. Morality is in the eyes of the beholder and no one can claim the moral high ground. I don't doubt that there are purists who unwaveringly adhere to this nihilistic philosophy, but the far left does not belong to this orthodox breed. In fact, the far left shuns moral relativism with as much fervor as the "moralizers" the far left purports to despise.
The far left has no qualms about defending third-world barbarism, yet proclaims with an aura of ultimate righteousness that corporations are evil and that the men who lead them are corrupt tyrants, who profit at the expense of the public good. They routinely vilify Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, Christians, and all others who do not adhere to utopian Marxist ideals and variations thereof. To many of these so-called relativists Dick Cheney epitomizes evil; a man who served not only as the Secretary of Defense for the imperialistic United States but as Chief Executive of the multinational corporation Halliburton, itself a symbol of evil.
The far left's tirades against "evil" corporations and Christian (but almost never Muslim) zealots are not relativistic, neither in tone nor in substance. They are unambiguously absolutist. The left moralizes about perceived injustices -- be it the effects of capitalism or the war against global jihad -- with a religious-like conviction, never uttering the word "relative" in its condemnations.
After Saigon fell in 1975, the American left willfully ignored the enslavement, expatriation, and slaughter of millions of Vietnamese by the North Vietnamese Communists. Of course during the war itself, the left was quite brazen and outspoken in condemning America's involvement. The cries of "immoral" and "unjust" in reference to the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were ubiquitous.
The charge of moral relativism is simply not credible. If the left were truly morally relativistic, they would not deign to censure any policy, any doctrine, or any person. They would treat corporations and America's foreign policy with the same moral indifference as they treat murderers.
The common denominator of the people, doctrines and institutions that are despised by the far left has its origins in Western culture.
The aversion to Western culture and its core ideals, namely individualism, personal responsibility, and capitalism is the cornerstone of the far left's ethical code. The far left tolerates or condones only that which is the antithesis of Western culture: third-world barbarism, communist despotism, nihilism, and so forth. If Western ideals are the root of all evil, then its opposites must be good, or at least, not as bad.
The far left's support for domestic militarism is based on the premise that American institutions, especially constitutional republicanism and capitalism, are inherently corrupt and engender violent reactionary movements. Similarly, the barbaric acts of Communist despots are justifiable on the grounds that they represent a natural reaction to the oppressive capitalist system, as well as a means to a utopian end.
The aversion to Western institutions is in part rooted in Rousseau's famous, and almost always misunderstood, aphorism that "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains". Rousseau did not mean that men are "in chains" because they live under illiberal and undemocratic regimes, as most did during his time. Rousseau believed that men are in chains because modern norms, rules, and laws did not exist in man's natural state. Man was "good" and "free" in the pure state of nature, but over time was corrupted and imprisoned by artificial institutions. The absurdity of this nihilistic philosophy has been thoroughly dissected by many philosophers, and I will not repeat some of their counterarguments. What is relevant for the purpose of this essay is that Rousseau's nihilism is the primary building block of the far-left's ethical code.
The left maintains that Western institutions bear responsibility for all of society's evils. How often have we heard the claim that murderers are byproducts of their society, and therefore can not be held accountable for their actions? Personal responsibility is an illusion if we accept the premise that man's psyche is invariably corrupted and controlled by artificial institutions. Man is rendered helpless by unnatural norms and rules and therefore is incapable of being "good".
The only logical solution to this institutional crisis is to destroy Western institutions and to restore the state of nature. Laws, social norms, and all other elements of modern human civilization must be vitiated, if we are to be truly free, happy, and good.
The far left would be hard pressed to praise Islamic terrorism, so they instead justify it on the grounds that it is the byproduct of Western oppression. The reigning godfather of the far-left, Noam Chomsky, sees the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a symbol of the third-world's repudiation of Western imperialism. It makes little difference to Noam Chomsky that Imperial Japan was ruled by a ruthless dictatorship engaged in monstrous atrocities against other cultures, most notably the Chinese and the Koreans. What matters to Chomsky and the Chomskyites is that Japan in 1941 was the antithesis of Western culture. It shunned individualism in favor of collectivism, and practiced a religion that was at odds with Christianity. To Chomsky, a culture that rejects Western ideals is by definition noble.
The obsession with victimization and "the oppressed" is an important manifestation of the far-left's ethical code. You're either the oppressed or the oppressor. This simplistic derivative of Hegel's master-and-slave dynamic acts as an important theoretical underpinning.
Victimization enables the far left to incorporate multiple themes into its cultural and political framework. The Israelites, who are "white", oppress the Palestinians who are Arab, and Muslim to boot. It doesn't matter to the leftists that a large part of the Arabic and Muslim world is in a perpetual state of sectarian violence. What matters is that the Palestinians practice a religion which has at certain times in history been at odds with Christianity. Again, the far left does not care that Christians stopped killing in the name of Christ many centuries ago, while to this day there are millions of Islamic extremists who believe in killing or enslaving Christians and Jews.
What is important from the far left perspective is that radical Islam represents the antithesis of modern Christianity. The maxim is simply that which is not an emblem of Western culture is by default good.
Therefore, from the far left's perspective, the core significance of the conflicts between the Palestinians and the Israelis, NATO and Al-Qaeda, is that they pit Christians against Muslims, Whites against "people of color", the oppressors against the oppressed, and in the final analysis, Western ideals against non-Western ones.
Moral relativism is a doctrine too rigid and counter-intuitive for most people to apply consistently. Human nature compels us to be repulsed or angered by certain types of conduct, be it rape, theft, or the murder of the innocent. Our experiences and education further shape our moral compasses. It is then a question of which acts and institutions evoke moral outrage. Are we more offended by the nuking of two Japanese cities in order to end the bloodiest war in human history or by the slaughter of innocent men, women and children at the hands of despots who ostensibly seek to establish a paradise on earth?
Those who embrace Western ideals generally reject third-world barbarism as backwards and unjust. On the other hand, those on the far left who reject Western ideals condone acts and institutions which they see as a just reaction against Western oppression. What is clear is that neither the pro-Westerners nor the ant-Westerners are morally relativistic.
More insight into the mind and attitude of the selfish, childish liberals. Heck, with this method, I'll be you could live in this country on just a couple hundred bucks a month!
It takes neither a genius, nor a shrink, to see why Alinskyite Democrat pols are so confused by all this 1776 Redux confronting them in their home-district townhalls. Since they are so accustomed to calling up pals in unions and various other community agitators for a little rent-a-mob action to bolster support for their agendas, they naturally project this tactic onto anyone opposing their issue positions.
They've become so immersed in the Alinsky Way that they've nearly plum darned forgotten the American Way, folks.
They seem to be moving closer to tar and feathers by the minute, so I hope they remember American-style angst pdq.
Now, there is a most telling anecdote in Horwitt's biography of Alinsky, which perfectly demonstrates the fundamental difference between the Alinsky Way and the American Way.
Back in Chicago (really, is there something weird in Chicago water?), when Saul Alinsky, young-and-rising social engineer, was just beginning his attempts at community agitation, he seized an opportunity to try out his still-developing method. The Back of the Yards neighborhoods in Chicago, during the late 1930s, were filled with groups of ethnic immigrants. Most were Catholics from East European countries, and each country of origin even had its own separate parish church. This separation, naturally, made for some very stiff competition and the language barriers made for lots of fighting and feuding too.
The men formed softball leagues (truly American; they were catching on) as a way of safely expending excess energy and walloping each other without throwing real punches. The competition was fierce. Saul, professional meddler that he was, hung out in the ‘hood a lot and ingratiated himself with the locals, so that on this day, he had a ringside seat on the action. Two days before a long-anticipated championship softball game between two competing groups of immigrants, one of the star players came down on the rotted step of his apartment house and broke his ankle, which rendered him unable to play in the big game.
Saul merely ventured, as the disgruntled players were discussing their misfortune, that it need never have even happened. "How so?" the men asked. Saul proceeded to explain that there was now federal-government money for housing and that if they wrote letters to the right people, they would get some money to get carpenters to fix things. Of course, they then wrote the letters, got some money and thereafter knew how to shakedown the taxpayers to get their needs met.
Saul became an immensely popular guy in the immigrant ‘hoods, something he had never been in his own, and thereafter knew that his Alinsky Way had legs. From suggesting letter-writing, he moved on to his angry-mob approach to problem solving and became the invisible hand behind nearly every public temper tantrum thrown in these United States for the past 40 years.
Now, if the first thought you parried, dear reader, while reading this account, was why on earth some guy in the ‘hood didn't see the rotted step, get himself a hammer, some nails, a new step board, and fix the darned step himself before one of his own children was injured, then you are an American through and through.
Pat yourself on the back and sing Hallelujah at the top of your free-as-a-bird lungs.
The fundamental difference between the Alinsky Way and the American Way is so darned simple that even a first-grader, who has had decent parenting, understands it. The Alinsky Way involves asking others to do for you that which you are plainly capable of doing for yourself, but prefer not to do. The Alinsky Way is the purely childish method employed by tantrum-throwing tyrants of all ages, and has existed in one form or another since the beginning of time. It is egocentric, childish human nature carried into adulthood and all the way to the end of life, as long as others are too weak to just say, "NO," or too beguiled to see through this silly, selfish ruse.
If you should ever happen to see an able-bodied grown man in a homeless shelter, supping at the table of charity, while snapping photos with a $500 techno-gadget, you have most likely spotted an Alinsky acolyte. If you should happen to see demonstrators carrying signs, obviously made in a professional sign shop, but the men holding the signs cannot read them, then you are most likely seeing Alinsky Way useful idiots.
The American Way, as we all know, is the do-it-yourself approach to life, which has been taught from toddlerhood to adulthood by every decent, upstanding American parent for more than 200 years. Every conscientious American citizen understands down to his gut that the most essential ingredient to serving the common good is to take care of his own self first and foremost. When a person takes care of himself, only then will he not become an unnecessary burden to his fellow citizens.
Those in the Democratic Party, who have adopted the Alinsky Way and thrown out the American Way, have done so with less than altruistic intentions. Keeping citizens as little children, incapable of doing for themselves, is the way to winning their votes and keeping them dependent upon the power of the state, which Democrats hope to control now and forever.
If one lacks a nation full of pitiful, can't-do-it-ourselves wee ones, there's no need for a Nanny-State, now is there?
And the only reason why Democrat pols are now so confused with all this loosely self-organized democracy in action at their townhall meetings, is that they honestly believe the American Way has already been defeated and we are all their children now.
These people really need to get out more.
There certainly are two Americas. Democrats control a portion of us through their Alinsky Way infantilizing tactics. But the vast majority of us still practice the American Way of do-it-yourself for the common good, which is the only reason this Country is still standing. If we all become children who produce nothing, there will be no pie for the Democrats to divvy up to the screaming kids they control.
My Open Letter to Liberals sparked some concerns from readers that I had returned to the warm embrace of Mr. Rogers. Several kind souls even offered to spirit me away to safer pastures, sort of like a conservative witness protection program.
I can understand why it might have looked like I relapsed, perhaps by inhaling too much medical marijuana. But truly, there's a method to my madness.
I get it; evil exists, and it's running rampant all over the country and spreading like wildfire. The meanest, most sociopathic fringes of the far left have been set loose, like rabid beasts unleashed from a cage, and they're sinking their diseased fangs into conservatives. And there's more people foaming at the mouth every day.
But this is part of the Left's plan: Keep conservatives so agitated that we can't tell the nice liberals from the maniacs. There's a term for it in psychotherapy: hypervigilance, and it's associated with trauma. I don't know about you, but the constant cruelty, combined with the real threat of communism, is making me feel pretty traumatized these days.
But it's a particularly maniacal method that commies use: set their dogs on us so we feel persecuted (because -- hello? -- we are being persecuted). Then discredit, ridicule, and label us "paranoid." It's sick, it's vicious, and it's all part of their game plan.
So I'm not writing for the brain dead and the possessed. I deal with them sparingly and only for a darn good fee for a 50 minute hour.
But there have got to be others out there like me, with the potential to see the light. Yes, there are countless subhumans, but their mouths are bigger than their numbers. I was heartened that there were even two thoughtful liberals among the postings to my Open Letter. While I didn't necessarily agree with their views, I was pleased they were tuning in to AT, and that they were expressing themselves respectfully.
I'm reaching out to those liberals who haven't lost their marbles yet. So I want to roll out the welcome mat to: Hillary supporters and other Democrats who chose Obama as their second choice; conservatives who punished Republicans but didn't bargain on Marxism; Ron Paul supporters who are looking for safe harbor; centrists who voted for Obama but are alarmed by the extreme left turn; and Obama supporters who liked him but now are having buyer's remorse.
As a therapist, I foster change. So I'm trying out in the cyberworld what helps my clients. For instance, here are some techniques:
1. Tailoring my words to the audience. I used a phrase like trauma in my open letter because that's a word on liberals' radar.
2. Engaging people: If I make them feel comfortable via empathy, they may stay awhile and start listening.
3. Zooming in on common bonds: I referred to experiences that unite all people, such as the search for happiness and our mortality.
4. Acting in unexpected ways: Liberals assume I'll be all snarky. If I'm not like this, it's harder for them to dismiss me.
5. Externalizing the problem: This is a handy technique borrowed from narrative therapy. If people don't feel blamed, they're more likely to change. So in my piece, I cited big government as our common foe, rather than point fingers at Obama and the Democrats.
6. Cultivate doubt: Spot the vulnerability and plant seeds of uncertainty. As an example, I was speaking to a colleague who depends on health insurance for his private practice. I expressed skepticism that ObamaCare will keep paying for therapy. (The look on his face: priceless.) Creating doubt can be as simple as a mystified look or a well placed "Really," as in, "Oh, you still believe in Obama's stimulus plan. Really?"
Another handy trick: instill doubt by making people feel separate, isolated. We are pack animals and most of us don't like to feel alone in a crowd.
So when an acquaintance made a nasty crack about Palin, I looked puzzled, then said, "Oh, you don't like her? I do." When she recovered from shock, she sputtered, "I don't know anyone who likes her." I answered, again appearing bewildered, as though I'd never heard an anti-Sarah crack in all my life, "Really? Everyone I know respects her. Did you know that she's one of the few successful women politicians who got there on her own?" To her credit, she backed off and apologized (Yay! There's at least one liberal out there who is operating on all cylinders!)
6. Storytelling: This is a great technique culled from the master hypnotherapist, Milton Erikson. (There's much talk that the left has used hypnosis on us for decades, so it's time we get in on the game.) Erikson would subtly influence his clients through subliminal methods like storytelling. Rather than confront a client's defenses, he'd meander in and out of their unconscious, like a graceful ballerina. For instance, with his son who suffered from a chronic illness, he'd tell stories about a hardy tree outside his son's window, using the tree as a metaphor for overcoming great adversity.
So, here's how I used it with a friend who was waxing rhapsodic about Obama's stimulus bill. Rather than challenge her, which would have started a no-win argument, I listened, then we chatted about something else, and then I said the following:
I've been thinking a lot about my parents; they died four years ago this month. I didn't appreciate them much as a kid, but now I really do. It blows me away how my grandparents arrived here from Tsarist Russia dirt poor to only face horrendous prejudice and poverty. But they literally kissed the ground when they got off the boat at Ellis Island. There was no government assistance back then. The Jews helped each other, just as all the immigrants did.
My grandparents raised their children in conditions that would be considered impoverished today but they never complained. My parents were also so grateful for the little they had, and they just loved this country. Sometimes I feel so ashamed of later generations. We have light years more than they ever did, and yet we always want more; we never say thanks. I wish my parents were around so I can tell how grateful I am to them and the sacrifices they made.
Then, as I observed my friend's utter incredulity and confusion, I changed the subject.
Think subtlety won't do the trick? The Left has managed to put half the country in a mass hypnotic trance using these strategies.
7. Last but not least: Allowing people to safe face. People will not change if they feel stupid or ashamed, even if the truth smacks them in the face. Robert McNamara elucidates this principle in the documentary, The Fog of War. According to him, the planet was saved because JFK permitted Khrushchev to remove missiles from Cuba on his own volition, thereby preserving Khrushchev's image.
For instance, if I say, "What in the world made you vote for Obama? Didn't you see all the warning signs," the person will get defensive and dig in his or her heels. But if instead I remark, "I think the media has been negligent in giving us the honest facts about Obama," or, "I remember voting for so and so and being sorry about it afterwards," then you help them save face.
So these are some of my therapeutic trade secrets. Is it a pipe dream to think I can sway a wavering liberal? Perhaps.
But I keep reflecting on a story about Suzuki Roshi, a beloved Buddhist teacher in the 60's. He was giving a talk and declared, "Life is impossible." A student raised his hand and asked, "If life is impossible, how do we do it?" Suzuki responded, "You do it every day.'"
So I'll keep trying to make a difference even if it sometimes feels utterly futile and impossible. But that's what the hoodlums want us to believe, isn't it?
When I saw this video interview of Bill Burton, White House Deputy Press Secretary, I could not help but be reminded of one of old Saul Alinsky's favorite fake-em-out tricks of the revolutionary trade. Burton is reinforcing Pelosi's earlier claim that people were carrying Swastikas at townhalls, but goes even further and claims that folks are actually "dressing up like Hitler."
You got to give ole Saul a little credit. He was one wily deceiver, right after his hero, Deceiver in Spades, Lucifer.
Saul Alinsky, crusader for the downtrodden, darling of the Auxiliary Archbishop of Chicago, was just an underachieving nobody with neither guts nor moral code, who flummoxed a whole lot of willing-to-be-deceived power seekers. Saul Alinsky didn't invent a single new thing. His whole methodology, so widely-hailed by whole generations of leftists, could have been devised by any 12 year-old gang-style bully with half a brain and an ounce of charisma.
It's quite disheartening, now, to see the top echelons of the Democratic Party using Alinsky tactics in an attempt to freeze political dialogue, most especially when that dialogue is about the most intimate service we Americans procure for ourselves and our families: our medical care.
Nevertheless, they've decided to go at this whole hog, even if it means stripping off their dignity and parading their political bloomers right out in the public square.
When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and now the president's own deputy press secretary conjure up images of Nazis at healthcare townhalls, they are engaging in one of the oldest tricks in anyone's book, but an especial favorite of their mentor, Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky himself employed this method, quite deviously. Alinsky biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using precisely this same diabolical tactic to deceive the people. From Horwitt's Let Them Call Me Rebel:
"...in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University...students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations - a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration's Vietnam War policies. The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush's address. That's the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative - and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.' And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results."
Planting major falsehoods has been a favorite Alinsky strategy from the start. His acolyte, Barack Obama, learned his Industrial Areas Foundation lessons on deceiving for power while on a side trip during his Harvard years, then taught the Alinsky power tactics at the University of Chicago.
Hardly qualifies as ‘Constitutional Law' if you ask me.
Covering for oneself by accusing the other fellow has been the left's most successful deception for decades now. It took on its best traction lately, as leftists within Moveon.org and others have used this Nazi smear tactic for the past eight years against George W. Bush. They've seen how well it's worked and just can't stop themselves now.
Here's a little hint from me on the Nazi card. If a few folks actually do start showing up at townhalls, opposing the MediCoup*, even dressed like Hitler and carrying a Swastika poster, I'll lay good hard cash on a bet that they've been sent by this Alinskyite President or his minions to deceive, just as Saul did with getting students to dress like the KKK at that rally back in the 70s.
And any newsman worth an ounce of table salt ought to be able to pin the tail right on that Alinsky donkey.
*MediCoup is a term coined by writer, James Lewis, right here on American Thinker.
Boy howdy, that Fierobear fella sure has mastered the copy and paste function on Winders. He's even become a master at name calling, and could put almost any 9 year old to shame in that department. Well almost. While he has called me an A hole repeatedly because I don't agree with his narrow minded, jingoist agenda, he hasn't called me a NAZI yet. Don't you love me Fierobear? What do I have to do to be elevated to NAZI status in your world, Hackster?
[This message has been edited by NEPTUNE (edited 08-13-2009).]
Boy howdy, that Fierobear fella sure has mastered the copy and paste function on Winders. He's even become a master at name calling, and could put almost any 9 year old to shame in that department. Well almost. While he has called me an A hole repeatedly because I don't agree with his narrow minded, jingoist agenda, he hasn't called me a NAZI yet. Don't you love me Fierobear? What do I have to do to be elevated to NAZI status in your world, Hackster?
