Libertarian Leanings

The Harvard Educated In Their Own Words

Sissy Willis presents the words of some Harvard elites explaining why they are elite.

"I think it is fair to assume that most Harvard graduates are of above average intelligence and education and tend to believe in such things as evolution and global warming.

I'm not sure which proves which, whether belief in global warming is proof of above average intelligence in Harvard grads, or belief by Harvard grads is proof of global warming.  I think maybe option two.

It's Not As If We Didn't Know

The thing about “Primetime Propaganda” by Ben Shapiro is not so much that it's some sort of breathtaking revelation.  We all knew that Hollywood had its left wing message to peddle.  It's hard to miss.  It's not even much of a surprise to discover what kind of people they are, but it's something to hear in their own words. 

One example is Dwight Schultz, best known for his roles as Murdock in The A-Team and Barclay in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The late Bruce Paltrow knew that Schultz was a fan of President Ronald Reagan. When Schultz showed up to audition for St. Elsewhere, a show Paltrow produced, to read for the part of Fiscus, Paltrow told him: "There's not going to be a Reagan asshole on this show!" The part went to Howie Mandel.

Progressive Logic

David Harsanyi offers some entertaining examples of twisted progressive logic today on Real Clear Politics.

Though Walker -- who won office using obnoxious Third World oligarchic tactics, e.g., getting more votes than the other candidate -- is a cancer in the heart of democracy, union-funded Democrats evading their constitutional obligation to cast votes are only protecting the integrity of representative government by completely avoiding democracy.

You're getting it now, right?

In this world, when you tax a citizen a bit less to try to generate economic growth, you are not taking less from the taxpayer, but "stealing" from a third party who, at some point in his life, was told he had an indelible right to your wallet, no matter the cost. And if you don't hand it over? Well, even though Wisconsin is home to some of the nation's highest taxes and even though the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that tax cuts are "not even in effect yet, so they cannot be part of the current problem," you can't stop unionists from blaming "giveaways" to the rich.

And isn't it always the rich?

It's always about the money, for sure.  Progessives want it, believe they're entitled to it, and will stop at almost nothing to get it.  The pipeline for tax payer dollars, through union paychecks to union dues and on to the Democratic party, is a revenue stream that progressives hope to salvage at all costs.

Something Offensive And Pointless

That would be Jacob Weisberg.  Pointless, anyway.  Yesterday in Slate Mr. Weisberg explained how offensive and pointless was "the politically charged inquiry into what might have been swirling inside the head of Jared Loughner." 

That was by way of introduction into his own politically charged analysis in which he concluded that the Tea Party didn't actually cause Jared Loughner to go on his shooting rampage, but Tea Party politics increased the odds that he would.  You just can't make this stuff up.

First you rile up psychotics with inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country. Then you make easy for them to get guns. But if you really want trouble, you should also make it hard for them to get treatment for mental illness. I don't know if Loughner had health insurance, but he falls into a pool of people who often go uninsured—not young enough to be covered by parents (until the health-care bill's coverage of twentysomethings kicked in a few months ago), not old enough for Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid. If such a person happens to have a history of mental illness, he will be effectively uninsurable. To get treatment, he actually has to commit a crime. If Republicans succeed in repealing the Obama health care bill, that's how it will remain.

There you have it.  Oppose ObamaCare and you are an accomplice to murder!  Dare to complain that your congressional representative doesn't represent your wishes, and promise to take back the country by voting him out, you are an accessory to assassination. 

The injustice of Weisberg's charge would be infuriating if it weren't so pathetically stupid and ineffectual.  It's funny instead.  I'm delighted at so many distraught lefties kicking the hell out that dead horse.  They just can't stop themselves.  

Rush Limbaugh's been keeping score.

Here's a partial list of some of the incidents the left has tried to pin on conservatives.  The Columbine shooters. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (specifically they tried to blame me for that).  The DC sniper.  The New York City Times Square car bomb attempt.  They tried to blame that on some Tea Partier angry at the health law, then we find out that was radical Islamists.  The February 2010 IRS plane attack in San Antonio. Remember that? It had to be an anti-government clown that flew that plane into the IRS office, had to be.  The Pentagon subway shooter. The Fort Hood attack. The Discovery Channel hostage taker.  And this guy [John Patrick] Bedell who went into the Pentagon and wanted to shoot these people up.  This guy, by the way, is a dead ringer for Loughner.  Amy Bishop who shot her colleagues at that Alabama college.

The list goes on and on and on. They are countless.  The list actually is never ending of incidents like this where the media is damn certain, damn well certain they can give Obama his OKC bombing.  They can give a Democrat president some kind of massive murder or disaster caused by conservatives.

If we can just get the lefty pundits to keep doing what they're doing, they might just kill off the progressive movement altogether.  Imagine.  We could be on our way to generations of common sense government.  Government that's not buried under myriads of loony leftist experiments in social and economic engineering.  If it wouldn't be too inflammatory to suggest.

Progressives Deplore The Rhetoric of Violence

Except for those times when they think it's appropriate.

The Rhetoric Of Violence

Our progressive friends deplore the vitriol in today's political discourse.  In fact Joan Walsh, for one, is so distressed by it that she has admirably promised to set an example by swearing off the rhetoric of violence.

Sadly, to my knowledge, no conservative leader has yet called for dialing back the rage on the right in the wake of the Giffords shooting. Sarah Palin sent condolences to Giffords' family, but said nothing about her unconscionable SarahPAC map putting 20 House members, including Giffords, in actual crosshairs for supporting healthcare reform, or her infamous Tweet telling conservatives "don't retreat, reload." Giffords' 2010 Tea Party challenger, Jesse Kelly, hasn't apologized for inviting supporters to "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for victory" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office." Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle hasn't yet recanted her statement about the need to pursue "Second Amendment remedies" if political change lags behind the Tea Party's dreams.

Although there's no evidence Tea Party rhetoric had anything to do with Giffords' shooting, it can be no surprise that her father, when asked if his daughter had enemies, told the New York Post tearfully, "Yeah, the whole Tea Party."

Oops.  My bad.  I should have read past the headline.  I thought Walsh was eschewing the violent rhetoric, but I can see now that she just wants the other side to do it.

But seriously, nobody expects the lefties to tone it down in the least.  As Glenn Reynolds points out, progressives exuberantly leap to any pretext for calling Tea Partiers accomplices to murder. 

As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently.There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.

Aren't those casual accusations themselves the rhetoric of violence?

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

I think I get it, though.  Progressives are good.  Ask any of them.  They'll all assure you, progressives are good.  Anything said by any progressive, anywhere, is for the greater good, and therefore, is not and cannot be considered the rhetoric of violence.  That would be a contradiction in terms.  An impossibility.

They remind me of the English Chaplain in George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan.

'WARWICK. I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something of the Mahometans. They were not so ill-bred as I had been led to believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours.

CAUCHON [displeased] I have noticed this before. Men go to the East to convert the infidels. And the infidels pervert them. The Crusader comes back more than half a Saracen. Not to mention that all Englishmen are born heretics.

THE CHAPLAIN. Englishmen heretics!!! [Appealing to Warwick] My lord: must we endure this? His lordship is beside himself. How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.

CAUCHON. I absolve you, Messire de Stogumber, on the ground of invincible ignorance. The thick air of your country does not breed theologians.'

It's simply not possible for progressive rhetoric to be considered violent.

Update:  From Power Line,

Something like mass hysteria has broken out among liberals in the mainstream media. Among the victims are Joe Klein, Paul Krugman, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and CNN.

The hysteria is occasioned by the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords. It manifests in the condemnation of Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement, and conservatives in the media. They are all none too subtly held responsible for the attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords by virtue of their resistance to the Democratic agenda.

According to lefty pundits, if you resist the Democratic agenda, doesn't it follow that you would be capable of murder?  Progressive logic from paragons of towering progressive intellect.

Democrats Frustrated As Messages Lag

With just over two weeks to go until election day Democrats are still looking for the magic formula.

Perhaps nothing has frustrated Democrats more than their yearlong failure to find a message that could puncture the anger of millions of voters who seem bent on punishing the party in power. It wasn't for a lack of trying.

It wasn't for lack of persistence either.  Two years down the road with consecutive trillion-plus deficits under his belt, unemployment at nearly 10 percent, and recovery nowhere in sight, President Obama continues to lay the blame on George W. Bush.  The message is not resonating, and progressives are at a loss to explain it.

And that's not the only message that failed to penetrate.  The if-only-voters-were-smart-enough-to-understand-Obama's-brilliance message hasn't caught on either.  Democrats are mystified.  The reality based community was perplexed, but then the explanation hit them over the head like a two-by-four.

Rejection of policies like health care reform is really rejection of the president because he is African-American, they said.  They had discovered a vast body of Americans who were still racists!  Mystery solved! But somehow, public gratitude for this important constructive criticism never materialized.  Progressives are bewildered.

Instead of showing appropriate gratitude for this progressive enlightenment, Americans have been pouring millions into Republican election campaigns.  In fact, Democrats trail Republican fund raising by a wide margin.  It has gotten so bad that Democrats have been forced to pull advertising from several races.

Democrats, desperate to hold their losses to three dozen seats, plan to run TV ads in 59 races in the remaining days. But their chief House campaign committee has recently canceled millions of dollars worth of advertising for struggling Reps. Steve Driehaus and Mary Jo Kilroy of Ohio, Suzanne Kosmas of Florida, Betsy Markey of Colorado and Steve Kagen of Wisconsin.

Out of the Republican fund raising advantage comes Obama's new message:  The US Chamber of Commerce is a threat to our democracy.  David Axlerod went on Face the Nation last week to accuse it of using money from foreign sources to pay for political ads.  According to Axlerod, no offense but the Chamber is dishonest, criminal actually, until it proves otherwise.

It's odd, but this new message hasn't struck a chord with the electorate, either.  And though there is still time for it to take hold, there's not a lot of hope that it will.  Obama and his progressive allies may eventually find their way to comprehension, painful though it may be. 

But then again, maybe not.  In one of his more recent pronouncements Obama identifies yet another factor that clouds voter judgment:  fear.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country's scared.”

Obama told the several dozen donors that he was offering them his “view from the Oval Office.” He faulted the economic downturn for Americans’ inability to “think clearly” and said the burden is on Democrats “to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling.”

The strategy of casting American voters as ignorant, racist, dishonest, and stupid hasn't worked, but it's given Obama an idea for a new message:  Irrationally fearful Americans are responsible for the recession because they can't think clearly.  What could possibly go wrong with that one?  After all, we'll have the Democrats to allay our fears.

Updated at 6:45pm

Liberalism From An Analytical Perspective

On the left they are nearly unanimous in their disapproval of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally.  Bill Press, for instance, decided that the Lincoln Memorial, being sacred ground and all, was no place to talk about God.  Meanwhile back at Ground Zero, the site of those towers turned into rubble in the name of radical Islam, talking about and worshiping Allah is very much OK, and to object to it is very much bigoted.  Richard Fernandez essay takes an analytical view of the situation.

Some things are never OK if you’re Glenn Beck. Some things are always OK if you’re the Imam Rauf. It’s just like certain programming languages, which have rules like: x or y if x is false, then y, else x. In this case ‘conservative’=false. Also, anyone who the Left doesn’t like =’conservative’. From this all else follows. This is especially important when it comes to identifying evil or potentially evil people. 

The bar is set at whatever level progressives say the bar ought to be set depending upon who or what is measured.  Progressives have their established order of precedence in these things.

How's This For Winning Hearts And Minds?

The Best of the Web makes note of the extraordinary consternation on the left that arose from Obama's statements and misstatements about the Ground Zero Mosque.  Progressive opinionators have even resorted to calling upon George W. Bush to rescue Obama from himself.

Things have gotten so bad, the Washington Examiner's Byron York reports, that the pro-mosque left is looking for leadership from George W. Bush:

Distressed by President Obama's waffling on the issue, they're calling on former President George W. Bush to announce his support for the project, because in this case Bush understands better than Obama the connection between the war on terror and the larger question of America's relationship with Islam. It's an extraordinary change of position for commentators who long argued that Bush had done grievous harm to America's image in the Muslim world and that Obama represented a fresh start for the United States. Nevertheless, they are now seeing a different side of the former president.

But in their rush to the defense of Obama, progressives just can't help themselves. From the brilliance of their intellectual, moral, and general all around superiority, progressives just can't help but insult the rest of America for holding opinions which, sadly, differ so markedly from their own.

With Obama having seized the initiative and quickly abdicated it, it is left to the professional controversialists of the left to make the case for the mosque scheme. This cackle of rads are the worst public diplomats you could ever hope to find. Their approach has been to try to bully Americans into submission by piling insult upon insult: Bigot! Un-American! Not only is this unlikely to win anyone over, it also perpetuates the lie that most Americans are anti-Muslim bigots.

Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson, meanwhile, can't even criticize Obama without insulting tens of millions of Americans:

How can President Barack Obama be so right about the mosque and yet get it so wrong?

Here's how: He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers.

Brilliant, penetrating analysis.  One question:  Is Ms. Carlson more brilliant than Obama?  It's so hard to know, blinded as we are by the dazzling radiance of their intellectual incandescence.  We can only straggle forward as best we can – towards November.

Progressive Elites And What They Must Do

From Thomas Sowell:

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of "czars" wielding greater power than Cabinet members, without having to be exposed to pubic scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.