Filed under: Politics | Tags: Don't Argue With Dr. Peterson, Indoctrinating Students, The Left
This discussion could be directed at young David Hogg, though it wasn’t. Media Matters and CNN are doing a lot of damage to that young man.
Filed under: Crime, Law, Media Bias, News, Police, Politics, Progressives, Terrorism | Tags: Approved Speech, Las Vegas, The Left
Whenever there is a tragic shooting, the Left is ready with their talking points because they have hauled out the gun control theme so often that it is well developed. Gun control has enormous appeal to the Left as its message, because they believe deeply in the efficacy of control.
Much of the Left’s basic program is about control in its many forms, and since Republicans are known as major supporters of gun rights, the Second Amendment (which needs to be repealed) and the NRA. Republicans are low-class rednecks from the deep South, and former members of the military who may have PTSD. They are known to possess dangerous weapons like machine guns, and pose a significant danger to the gentle, peaceful, highly educated people on the Left.
I’m coming to believe that the prompt appearance of talking points, the right words to use, and easy ways to attack Trump, means that those on the Left gratefully don’t have to bother with a lot of reading. With the themes all developed for them, they don’t have to pay much attention to what the other side says. They know they are correct, because they are highly educated, compassionate, empathetic, good people, and those racist, sexist, nasty homophobes are not.
This leaves Leftists in an awkward position because they are not prepared for logical response or probing questions from Conservatives who actually have studied up, searched for the latest statistics, and comments from well informed people. But by then, time will have passed, new talking points will appear and attention will move to other subjects.
Republicans, in general, have not caught on to the focus-group tested vocabulary. They are usually more concerned with central ideas, and will not notice that they are using some focus-group-tested words. An example is calling the illegal alien ‘children’— “Dreamers” who were brought here “against their will”, and they are always described as “children,” though the cut-off age was under 31. They are never described as ‘illegal’ but instead as “undocumented.” ABC in a careless moment called them “undocumented citizens.” That sums up the language problem.
Border agents say that probably 40% to 50 % are fraudulent, but that is not an official statistic. Many lied about their age. Current border crossers have children with them, but they are, so far, not included in the DACA group. Most moms who have raised children know that saying “Well, just this once” is recipe for disaster.
Any amnesty is an insult to those who have applied legally, following the rules, and are waiting patiently for their turn to be admitted. There is a limit for the number of immigrants who can be admitted in any one year. There are around 4.4 million people on the wait list.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Free Speech, Freedom, History, Law, Media Bias, Politics, Taxes, The United States | Tags: Real History, The Left, The Pathetic Press
Again, the Left is frothing at the mouth, not at the stupid groups looking for an opportunity to do battle of some kind, but at Donald Trump who didn’t condemn them strongly enough, or soon enough, or in the right words, and can we impeach him for that? The Right, exhausted with the wretched excess, finds the Left funny.
People actually on the right side of the political spectrum don’t include white supremacists, nor neo-Nazis, nor anti-Israel violence in their group at all. Never have. History is a little more complicated than that. The Confederate statues that the historical revisionists are trying to tear down were erected during the Woodrow Wilson administration. Wilson was a prejudiced bigot, a Democrat, and praised the KKK from the White House. The attempt to change history by eliminating statues or changing names of buildings or monuments or programs will not change history, but then most people have no idea who or what the statues are, what they represent, nor any idea who the buildings were named for, anyway.The most current idea is to remove the name Lynch, a common surname, from buildings, street names, parks, and any where because once upon a time blacks were lynched. Just how they are going to get everyone in the Lynch family to cooperate is a question. They can check with Loretta.
Our schools should have been teaching some real history and some real constitutional law, and some geography instead of “social” justice— which does not exist. There is no such thing as “social” justice. Justice involves the United States Constitution, the courts, and the laws and regulations passed by our governing entities.
The Democratic Party has adopted the idea of “social” justice in which everyone can be a victim. They will “save” the victims by giving them other people’s money, which will make them dependent on the government, so they will vote for Democrats again and again to keep the other people’s money coming. History, with which they are unfamiliar, shows that sooner or later they run out of other people’s money. Margaret Thatcher famously said that, but that’s a bit of history too.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Politics, Regulation, The United States | Tags: Observing the Obvious, The Left, William F. Buckley Jr.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economics, Free Markets, Freedom, Immigration, Politics, Progressivism, Socialism, The Constitution | Tags: BREXIT, Charles Krauthammer, The Left
Reposted from June 25. 2016
—Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker asked rhetorically “Why are Liberals so Hateful?” Good question. James Taranto pulled up a 2010 piece from Charles Krauthammer, to explain why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting. Krauthammer finds a pattern:
— Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
Taranto says: Krauthammer portrays this as a cynical game: “Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. . . . What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.”
Because their motives are pure, their intellectual superiority and managing expertise entitle them to rule over the rest of us ignorant, backward, stupid, religious nuts, and clinging intolerant bigots.
We daily hear about “the elites” and “the working class”— where do they get that? The “elites” naturally include as the cognitive elite the nation’s reporters, columnists and scribes. Businessmen are not really part of the elite—they are more apt to be included in “Wall Street” or excluded as manufacturers. We do have some wealthy playboys (and girls) but most everybody else supposedly works for a living, yet “the working class” are those who perhaps went to trade school or do those “dirty jobs” that Mike Rowe built into a successful career,( with some very good advice for future members of the employed ranks.) That leaves rather a large segment of the American public who actually do work for a living, enjoy it at least part of the time, and feel good about putting supper on the table and enjoying a movie now and then—out of the picture as — what, unmentionables?
Are BREXIT and Trump and all the international anger about being sneeringly called “the working class” when we are obviously more than a little short of work? Unemployment is a big problem in the EU as well as here. Holman Jenkins, business columnist for the Wall Street Journal remarked recently: “It turns out government cannot spare us collectively from having to adapt and compete in an economy.”
The Left, in their headlong race towards what they conceive to be a more perfect world, when they get the rest of us bullied into shape, simply do not grasp basic human nature. We are flawed creatures, imperfect, and human nature is not perfectible. At the end of their relentless drive towards an imaginary utopia is — Venezuela, or Cuba, or Auschwitz or the Gulag.
Well, no wonder they think of themselves as an “elite.”The federal government has too many people working for the government, and there isn’t enough work for them to do. Government workers make 78% more than the private sector for comparable jobs according to Cato. They call themselves “public servants,” but they don’t mean it. When they start to think of the U.S. Constitution as an impediment rather than a guarantee that the government belongs to the people and the public servants are there to work for us, not the other way around, we’re in trouble. So here we are.
I think it was Mike Lofgren, author of The Deep State, who captured the essence of Leftist discourse: “Take offense, call your opponent names, refuse to let them speak, decline to debate.”
That pretty much covers it.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Free Markets, Freedom, History, National Security, Regulation, The United States | Tags: The Cold War, The Left, William Voegeli
In 1993 after the USSR had dissolved and the Berlin Wall been pounded into souvenirs, Irving Kristol wrote, “There is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me.” Instead, the defeat of Soviet Communism signified only that “the real cold war has begun,” a multi-front civil war against the “liberal ethos,” which “aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.” Kristol explained that he had come to believe that “rot and decadence was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism.”
The fight against collectivism hasn’t been won, but remains hard-fought and competitive. The end of the Cold War signaled the demise of socialism and central planning as ideals people fought for, or even took seriously. In 1997 Richard Rorty chided his fellow leftists for their vague desire to repudiate and move beyond capitalism, despite failing to figure out “what in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. Until the left comes up with clear compelling answers to such basic questions, he said, it should limit its ambitions to “piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.”
These are the first two paragraphs of an essay by William Voegeli in The Claremont Review of Books, and well worth pondering. Is that what the Left is all about? Political and social collectivism on the one hand and moral anarchy on the other? It seems to me that they talk collectivism and supposedly dream of collectivism, but in action, or in the real world they want to make other people equal but put themselves in charge of doing so. They want to control, regulate, force, and make the necessary laws, just like Stalin who starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor to enforce collective farming.
Moral anarchy — yes. That’s obvious.
Filed under: Freedom, Politics, Women | Tags: Control, Health, The Left, War on Women
Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) has proposed new legislation to encourage over-the-counter status for birth control. Every medical authority agrees that birth control is advantageous for both individual women and society at large. Removing the prescription barrier would seem to be a great benefit to women, giving them more control over their own health-care choices, reducing costs and improving access.
Well, not so fast! The supposedly pro-woman Left were outraged. Planned Parenthood’s president claimed the bill “is a sham and an insult to women.” NARAL Pro-Choice America’s president called the idea “nothing but political pandering to trick women and families into thinking we are covered while dismantling one of the most critical gains in the Affordable Care Act.” Seventy percent of Americans favored making birth control available over-the-counter in a recent poll.
At the present, the federal government requires a prescription for birth control. The prescription requirement means that women must have a once a year visit to the doctor, for pelvic exams and Pap smears. That can help their physicians detect everything from sexually transmitted diseases to cervical cancer, it doesn’t tell them anything about whether a woman can safely take birth control. The World Health Organization and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have said that doctors can safely prescribe the pill without a full examination.
In 2013, the New York Times estimated that American women undergo more than 63 million pelvic exams a year. That comes at a huge cost to our health-care system, even disregarding the time women are forced to take off work to visit the doctor.
The examination alone costs around $125, and a Pap test adds roughly $40 to the expense, according to reports by the American Board of Internal Medicine’s nonprofit ABIM Foundation. Planned Parenthood alone makes around $1.2 billion each year from contraceptive services.
Time to relax a bit on a three-day weekend and catch up with what you missed this past busy week?
Victor Davis Hanson: “Were we right to Take Out Saddam?”
Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.
Republican candidates vied in attacking Bush’s initial confusion about answering the question. Most reiterated that they most certainly would not have invaded Iraq, regardless of what they know now or thought they knew then. Politically, it appears to be wiser to damn the decision to invade Iraq and to forget the circumstances that prompted the war — and the later political environment that ended the American presence.
Unfortunately, our country seems to be suffering from collective amnesia.We apparently have forgotten a number of crucial points: …
Victor Davis Hanson: “Obama and Hillary are all Too Happy to Coerce Acceptance of their Agendas”
What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic press, and allies in Hollywood, academia, unions, and philanthropic and activist foundations. Yet all that support was not sufficient to ensure “correct” public attitudes about Obama’s agenda on health care, entitlements, taxes, guns, abortion, and cultural issues. …
The answer is usually not enemies at the gates, but the pathologies inside them.
What ruins societies is well known: too much consumption and not enough production, a debased currency, and endemic corruption.
Americans currently deal with all those symptoms. But two more fundamental causes for decline are even more frightening: an unwillingness to pay taxes and the end of the rule of law. …
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Taxes, The Constitution | Tags: Dennis Prager, The Left
The prospects are chilling. The Washington Post reports: “President Obama’s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.” CNN adds a footnote: “Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.”
Predictions from the Congressional Budget Office are even more disturbing — a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year — a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy, which will continue to climb inexorably.
What we do not hear from the White House is any sense that these numbers are troubling, or that they intend to do anything to rein in the deficit or reduce the national debt. Don’t these numbers trouble the administration? Most Americans would assume that they do.
They would be wrong, says Dennis Prager, national talk show host and columnist:
They would be wrong not because the Democratic party and the president are economic illiterates or bad individuals, but because the Democratic party and the president are leftists, and most Americans, including most Democrats, do not understand the Left. They may understand liberalism, but President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. Few Americans understand the difference.
They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that, from Karl Marx to Barack Obama, the Left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.
Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt that will negatively affect most Americans’ quality of life, render the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermine America’s prestige and power in the world — these developments do not particularly disturb the Left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic party, and their allies on some political level, but that pales in comparison to the Left’s zeal for what it really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.
Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The farther left one goes on the spectrum, the more contempt one sees for the present quality of American life; the Left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life, from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to the SUV, or almost any car, in the driveway (Americans should be traveling on public buses and trains and by riding bicycles, they believe)….
And as for America wielding less power in the world, the American Left considers that to be a positive development. They think it is the world community as embodied in the United Nations that should wield power throughout the world, not an “overstretched,” “imperialist,” and “militarist” United States.
I used to believe that the Left and the Right had similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted to use to get there. I was mistaken. The Left has a very different vision of America than those who hold to America’s founding values, most especially individualism and small government. Their vision is one in which a once-in-a-lifetime chance to establish a giant welfare state dominated by the Left is worth any price — even America’s steep financial decline.
