Politics and Culture

Leftists may not pray, but they certainly hope. One of the things that some leftists hope for is that their political enemies commit violence. We see this in their breathless anticipation of conservative-incriminating evidence in the Kentucky killing of a census worker and their scouring of the tea party protests for Hitler signs.

Of course, anybody who knows history knows the violence in America (much, much more overseas) that has come abut as a direct result of leftism, either formal or emotional. Quick primer (look up in Wiki for details): Sacco and Vanzetti, Black Panthers, Weathermen, Charles Manson, Jim Jones of poison Kool Aid fame (Communist atheist), William Ayers, Colin Ferguson, various eco-terrorism groups like Earth First and the Animal Liberation Front, Columbine murderers, church murders, anti-abortion activist murders, Unabomber etc., etc.

Some politically-motivated conservatives have pointed this out to a constituency longing to feel the same sense of victim-hood. Here's an article from 1999:

A "virile and fertile" anti-Christian sentiment is growing around the country, religious groups said Thursday, a day after a gunman spouting blasphemous rhetoric burst into a youth service at a Fort Worth Baptist church and fatally shot seven persons.

"I believe there is a growing climate of hostility that is directed against Christians . . . who find themselves as the targets of a great hostility in this culture," said William Merrell, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention.

A "disturbing double standard" is evident in the way attacks on Christians are viewed compared with crimes against other groups, a spokesman for the Family Research Council said.

From the Matthew Shepard murder in Wyoming last year to the shootings last month at a Jewish community center in California, the media and many politicians moved swiftly to label those episodes of violence "hate crimes," said Robert Regnier, a cultural studies writer at the FRC.

In the Texas church shootings, he said, "I just don't see any of that."

Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer urged the Justice Department "to determine if a pattern of crimes against men and women of faith exists" in such crimes as Wednesday's shootings at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

Citing the 1997 shootings of a high school prayer group in Paducah, Ky., and the April murders of Christian students at Columbine High School in Colorado, Mr. Bauer said Americans are "witnessing a disturbing pattern."

Attorney General Janet Reno warned reporters that it was too early to characterize the Fort Worth shooting as a "hate crime," but said law enforcement authorities on the scene would uncover the facts.

"We must get answers and must move carefully to make sure that we understand exactly what happened so that we can take the most effective action possible," she said. "We should not jump to conclusions."

My friends alerted me to this post from Think Progress (to which I always ask, "towards what?").

Ignoring the fact that most liberals when talking amongst themselves really want all of the things people are "misinformed" about ("give benefits to illegal aliens, support abortion, and ration care? Never!"), ahem:

72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants

a. If Obama doesn't intend to insure illegal aliens, why doesn't he subtract the 10-15 million illegal aliens from the phony 46,000,000 uninsured number he throws around.

b. Does the bill specifically exclude illegal immigrants?

79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover,

a. Part of that 79% includes the CBO who said that millions will lose their private health insurance under Obamacare, a prospect that people like Barney Frank and Barack Obama must consider a dealbreaker [sarcasm].

b. Obama has said he wants single-payer, as well.

69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions...

a. A panel will decide which procedures the government will fund. The panel is appointed by the president. You can take it from there. Here's a reaction.

75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.

a. There will be a panel that will ration care. Obama himself has said that older people take up a lot of care and that a hospice might make better sense (cents). In every other country with a health care panel or commission, they come up with a quality years of life formulations to ration care. Ezekiel Emmanuel has said that he supports the concept and he's on the health care team. Peter Singer wrote an editorial in the mainstream New York Times saying the same thing.

Sarah says as much here.

b. "We are God's partners in matters of life and death"

-Barack Obama

We're on to the game, TP. Saying that it won't happen because the bill doesn't specifically say so is like saying, "Sure, you guys can play basketball. I have to go home with the ball though."

Here's what Democrats and leftists want from the American populace:

Don't use your brain. Don't take the next logical step. Trust us. We would never cover illegal aliens. We will bring down costs without rationing. We would never ever fund abortion.

Whatever happened to the days when you could call the president a Nazi fascist and support Palestinian anti-Semites with nary a criticism from either the president or Jews? When you could equate the United States with Nazi Germany (and then bristle at being called "anti-American?") No? Here's a reminder:

The good old days.

Jew devils: there's a new one.

So, why all the hubbub when conservatives protest? What's the difference?

Yes, liberals media types may naturally sympathize with the leftist protesters, but the real reason is that nobody takes liberals seriously. Liberals protest the same way that sports fans have tailgate parties- it's a chance to get together and blow off some steam. I'd say that another good analogy would be "going to church," but religion makes at least a little bit of sense.

Michael does a pretty good job, but I'd like to add a few things:

1. There's no ideal population number. It's only because no-growth liberals see people as mouths to feed instead of as inherently valuable. Combine this with liberals' need to take care of everybody and you can see how getting rid of people or, better yet, never having them come into being, would be a priority with them.

2. Lifting the income cap on Medicare and Social Security would change them from government-run insurance to welfare programs. Increasing taxes on income would be...an increase in taxes with all of the bad economic consequences.

3. What's wrong with patriarchy? The most advanced nations in the world did most of their advancing during times of patriarchy, the Japanese being the latest. The Western world has declined in power, relatively, not grown. Some blame the increase of social and emotional problems on the lack of strong father figures.

4. Both agreed that before the reformation, literacy was illegal. I'm almost certain that they're wrong. Perhaps unauthorized translations of the Bible were illegal and the expense of books before the printing press made literacy nearly impossible, but I don't think reading was actually against the law anywhere in Europe.

5. The "literacy before 7 equals war" idea is so stupid that I almost choked on my cafeteria food when he said it. Europe was more peaceful when people didn't know how to read? Vikings? Let's just take the Vikings. Hartman says that a law passed in the seventies made Swedes more passive. Err, the time when the Vikings terrorized Europe was at the turn of the first millennium. Were they very literate then? If the program started in the seventies, then why did the Swedes fight neither the Nazis or the Communists?

6. And Mary? It's true that the Catholic Church was a positive development for women, but Europe was still pretty darn patriarchal up until, well, still if you define "patriarchal" as men and women having different roles within the family.

7. Hartman claims that public power generation is cheaper and more reliable than private power. I found this from Detroit. It's hard to find articles that compare true costs, after subsidies.

8. Thom Hartman said that Iroquois women had very few babies. Assuming that they didn't use buckskin condoms and that they hadn't quite figured out the rhythm method, does that mean that Iroquois women had a lot of abortions?

Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann

Maureen Dowd:

Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told The Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall's post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall's blog.

I don't really care about this--it's too "inside baseball" for me, but I do find her explanation funny. First, when people talk about an article, do they quote it word for word or do they summarize and paraphrase it? Did he print it out and take it to the party? Second, what are the chances that Maureen would remember the quote, exactly, on the odd chance that the guy did, in fact, do that? And, then, to not go to Talking Points Memo when she got home?

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The quote itself makes absolutely no sense. It's a non-sequitur, no sigue. Why can't the Bush administration be trying to prevent terror and looking for evidence of WMD in Iraq at the same time?

It's like asking, "Why would the Obama administration be creating uncertainty by transforming health care while trying to stimulate the economy." Wait, that's actually a good question. It would be like incredulously asking, "Why would somebody be trying to prevent an attack while finding evidence against somebody he thinks might attack the United States in the future? The answer's pretty obvious, no?

From Neuroscientist Jeanine Garofalo (S/T Matthew Vadum):

JANEANE GAROFALO: Thank you. You know, there's nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry at a speech they're not quite certain what he's saying. It sounds right and then it doesn't make sense. Which, let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they'll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become -- it's like showing Frankenstein's monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don't know, because their limbic brain, we've discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it's pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring. Is Bernie Goldberg listening?

To Garofalo, only a crazy person wouldn't want to be taxed.

Psychoanalysis is her bag. The one time I heard Garofalo on radio, she was saying how miners in Virginia go home from Church in order to beat their wives. This was after the mining disaster a few years back.

Two can play that game. Garofalo's projecting. She's the racist.

This is part of the left strategy in general, as I show here.

I'd dismiss Garofalo as another lefty nut except that she nearly ruins my Mondays by showing her ugly mug on 24. This is personal. You have violated the sanctity of my LCD TV, Ms. Garofalo.

This is where liberals get almost too stupid to describe. It's so infuriatingly stupid, in fact, that I won't even try to reason with it (because, you know, asking judges for guidance on water boarding and sleep deprivation is the worst thing the Nazis ever did), hoping that anybody who happens upon this post isn't an idiot.

Story here.

Cheney wants all of the "torture" memos released. Why not? We all know why not.