Charles Krauthammer (quoted in the last post), said this:
The last refuge of a liberal
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27, 2010
Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."
That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And 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.
Yesterday, the UK Independent posted this zany piece of tripe:
The threat to American conservatism
Monday, 30 August 2010
It is always tempting to home in on the absurdity of the Republican right in America, the almost comic quality of some of their views and the ludicrous nature of the accusations they hurl at President Barack Obama.
The paranoid and hate-filled world of the "birthers", the Tea Party people and all the rest is so alien to the British experience as to be incomprehensible. We tend not to take them seriously, or assume that the Republicans' constant lurch to the right inevitably renders them unelectable. We may be making a mistake. The huge size of the rally held in Washington at the weekend – where several hundred thousand people turned up to hear the Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck announce that America was "turning back to God" – provides further disturbing proof, if any were needed, of the growing popularity of the hard right.
The paranoid, hate-filled world of leftist Hillary supporter Philip Berg? Or is it because Obama brings up the birth certificate issue every time he gets the chance as a way to ridicule people he doesn't agree with? And what better way to address the birth certificate issue than to pass a law preventing it from being conclusively addressed? It's a funny soundbite on the surface, but since the long-form certificate has been hidden rather than shown to the public, it's just another indicator that transparency isn't valued at all by Obama. (Showing it would be a 5-minute solution to what the left claims is an issue.)
That part about "we don't control control every branch" sounded kinda ominous. As though he mentally punctuated it with "yet".
Tea Party hate? Oh, that's right, Brits do tend to be in favor of high taxes on the colonies. We've seen this before.
That means you, you snotty redcoat.The root of the problem is in the second sentence, though. They "tend not to take seriously". Why? Because (haughty brit accent) these are peasants from the flyover states! Why should we take seriously the drivel that these know-nothing serfs prattle on about. They should be groveling at our magnificence at our wondrous ability to lead them into a glorious future, rather than resenting the grandeur that we have bequeathed to them. These chattering bucolic simpletons had best mind their manners when addressing their betters.
Whatever haughty Brit or snooty ex-pat wrote this, they don't have a clue. They revel in their ignorance. Quite literally - they ignore ideas that disagree with them in their ivory towers, and are annoyed when someone disagrees with them.
The reason their ivory towers run the way they do is because the conservative, provincial flyover states feed them, the blue-collar conservative worker builds their houses, and the baby-killer soldier they readily mock defends them. The elitist left exists in an artificial environment - which is why none of the left's ideas ever stand up to reality. They're like the stereotype of spoiled teenagers who think their parents fools, but who don't understand that their parents are the ones insulating them from the world.
The fact that the rally was held on the site where Martin Luther King made his "I have a dream" speech 47 years ago has caused offence among the heirs of King's civil rights movement, who resent Mr Beck's assertion that the two causes have much in common. But ructions from that quarter will do Mr Beck and fellow star turn Sarah Palin no harm among their supporters. It is more likely to do the opposite. Overwhelmingly white, conservative, rural and religious, their constant complaint that they "want their country back" is in part a thinly-veiled snipe at Mr Obama's race.
And Krauthammer is right again. "Overwhelmingly white" and sniping at race. So they're racists. Well, at least the left is consistently unoriginal.
From the stack labeled "Community Organizer Chest".The problem with this is that American conservatives judge people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
American conservative values, as we've expounded upon here before, are based in conserving American virtues. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... Kinda important things that ultimately defuse racism rather than support it.
Now, did it cause offence to the heirs of the civil rights movement? Maybe if you consider people who engineer strife and hatred to keep their race-baiting going. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be out of business if they didn't keep racial resentments simmering.
Those who weren't heirs, but were actual movers in the civil rights movement seemed okay with it. MLK's niece, Alveda King, spoke at the rally.
Here on the other side of the Atlantic, we await two things: for so-called ordinary Americans to recoil from and disavow the right's toxic, divisive rhetoric; and for moderate Republicans to start re-asserting the very different traditions of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and George Bush senior, for that matter.
Toxic? Divisive? Lower my taxes is toxic? Divisive is "quit taking money from one group to give to another"? Really? Note the Independent has no actual "toxic, divisive" quotes to give. Since there aren't any.
Moderate republicans? Lincoln? Sure, he preserved the union. He also suspended habeus corpus. I guess that's sorta like the left. Strong central govt, individual rights don't matter in the face of "the greater good" and the modern left can use moral equivalents to Lincoln's actual war against slavery to justify their own abuse of individuals.
Eisenhower wasn't a moderate. He warned against the military industrial-complex expansion of government, as well as gigantic federal expansion in other sectors of public life. He espoused small-govt principles in his farewell speech. Watch:
And Bush Sr. was not a conservative. New world order, all that jazz.
Neither of those outcomes seems to be materialising. Centrist Republicans have become a marginalised minority in their own party – eclipsed and somehow out of place among people who have come to expect references to God's will to appear in almost every sentence. Meanwhile, Obama's fellow Democrats are heading towards mid-term elections in November in a mood of despondency, and expect a drubbing at the hands of their adrenaline-filled opponents.
The gulf from leftist statism to liberty is vast. Centrists are those willing to appease, who have no principles. The left - the international left - wants more centrists to cut down the power and autonomy of the American individual. The expansion of state control by Obama and his Mao-loving, genocidal, communist cohorts is something that the American people reject.
The left rejects religion, because it's an affront to worshipping the state. The Brit saying "people who have come to expect references to God's will to appear almost every sentence" is of the class that also says that God is not appropriate for a sacred spot.
The UK Independent sums up with this, praising Obama:
The man they chose as his successor remains what he was on day one; a decent, thoughtful patriot and a builder of bridges who still aspires to lead a country in which race is no longer the defining issue. He has given the country a measure of health reform and begun the process of disengagement from costly and unpopular military entanglements.
A decent, thoughtful, patriot and a builder of bridges who aspires to lead a country in which race is no longer the defining issue. He has given the country a measure of health reform and begun the process of disengagement from costly and unpopular military entanglements.
All true, provided you view evil as good and wrong as right.
Modern liberalism, both domestic and international, is threatened by the Tea Party, is threatened by folks like Glenn Beck and his Restoring Honor rally, and is threatened by people who believe in their own independence.
There's a socialist/communist anti-capitalist poster that says "the boss needs you, you don't need the boss".
This isn't quite representative of reality, as "the boss" is just an individual (or representative of a group of individuals) who's amassed enough capital to be able to employ you, the worker, to help him with production. Provided you're in control of your own sale of labor, you can change jobs if you like, build capital if you like, and potentially become the self-employed worker who exercises his own use of capital and doesn't need the boss, or be a boss. None of which is bad.The free market individual who understands this has no reason to fear this propaganda piece, that, while strictly true, isn't representative of reality.
When applied like this: "the big government bureaucrat ruler needs you, you don't need the big government bureaucrat ruler" - it becomes a threat to bureaucrats both domestic and international. America was founded on less government - and every time big government is shown to be the failure it is - big government rulers get scared.
Rush is right on this. The left will tell you who they fear. They fear individuals who don't need them. They are at their wits end, as Krauthammer notes, and have reduced themselves to crying racism. The race card is maxed out. And we don't need the big government bureaucrat ruler. The left fears that.
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