‘No Labels’ Lacks Truth in Labeling
Some of you may have noticed the new “citizens’ group,” No Labels, called into being recently by a group of elite, politically connected, self-appointed leaders to combat what they regard as political name-calling and “hyper-partisanship.”
The difference between hyper-partisanship, which should be banished, and plain old everyday partisanship, which presumably meets with their approval or at least acceptance, is never made clear, although Ron Radosh has just argued very persuasively here on PJM a few days ago that the No Labelers seem to find nearly all of the “hyper-partisanship” they condemn on the right, not the left. Thus Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne can write with a straight face that moderation is “very much alive on the center-left and among Democrats” but is “so dead in the Republican Party” that even “staunch conservatives” such as David Frum are viewed as apostates.
Dionne can write that “[t]he truth is that the American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as ‘the center’ than is the left” and “there is no far left to speak of anymore” only because what until recently were far left positions have now been taken up by a leftward-moving mainstream liberalism.
What is clear, I think, is that No Labelers don’t like some of the language that appears regularly on many of the lefty blogs, and they don’t like well over half of the Republican Party and none of the Tea Party. What they want to do is police political speech, getting rid of most of it that is not “moderate.” A good example of their attitude is represented in a revealing quote from one of them, Mitch Dworkin, identified as a Dallas political consultant, in a recent Washington Post article:
“The country is not governable right now,” he said. “It’s a bunch of little brats and children who throw tantrums if they don’t get everything they want.”
No Labels, that is, wants to assume the role of a stern national schoolmarm.
“Our political discourse,” its Statement of Purpose intones, “increasingly offers up cynical, petty partisanship at the expense of practical solutions to the challenges facing our national well-being.” But not to worry; with the guidance of No Labels, “We can overthrow the tyranny of hyper-partisanship that dominates our political culture today.”
This self-important unctuousness (just think David Gergen) was brilliantly skewered December 19 by George Will, who declared that
the group’s premise is preposterous and its pretense is cloying.
The premise, obscured by gaseous rhetoric, is that political heat is inherently disproportionate. The complacent pretense is that it is virtuous to transcend the vice of partisanship….
No Labels purports to represent a supposedly disaffected middle of the ideological spectrum. Some No Labels enthusiasts speak of eliminating “political retribution,” presumably meaning voters defeating candidates with whose positions they disagree. No Labels promises to police the political speech of the intemperate.
Let me make sure I understand this.
According to no labeler philosophy, when one of them eats too many beans and goes to the doctor with a bad case of gas the visit proceeds thusly:
Beginning with the doctor.
How can I help you today?
You can mind your own business.
Excuse me. I mean are you hurting, need medicine, sick or what?
You’re the doctor. You tell me what is wrong. That is why I came to see you. It is why you get paid the big bucks.
But sir, I need some idea of about your problem if…
STOP!! What you are trying to do is pin one of your phony clinical labels on me so that you can soak the government out of more of my taxes.
Obama was right, all of you doctors are a bunch of over educated social misfits, little brats and children who throw tantrums if they don’t get everything they want. I came to you for a reason and you are too stupid to do your job, so you try to cop out and rip me off instead. Well, not on my watch you racist Neanderthal dork; I’m going to find a real doctor in Cuba, where they know bad gas when they see it.
When I first saw the headline, I thought – oh great, no labels on food cans and boxes! So, now we’ll have to guess what’s inside at the grocery store… then, I read the article and thought, oh, it’s the same thing, only now, we have to guess at what’s inside the politicians!
By the way, on forms that require one to tick a “race” box, if there’s not one marked “multiple/no response”, just tick all the boxes. That should do it.
I propose a new label for the ‘no labelers’…’Smugnuts’!
And whoever has the smallest nuts wins!
They’ve ruined liberal, socialist, progressive and communist. Now they don’t want to be labeled.
Sorry, I can’t stop laughing.
Exactly.
They’re like Cher, changing their outfit every 5 minutes with the hope that the rubes won’t notice that the ancient body isn’t sexy anymore.
What’s the next step?
No dissent allowed? No opinions? No reporting? No debate? No discussion? Give me your wallet and STFU?
What the heck has happened to our country? AND how do we stop the stupidity?
Since Obama was elected it’s like the ‘stupdity” floodgates have been flung open far and wide.
Looks more like a group of people with “no honor” or “no principles”. Charlie Crist is the posterboy for this movement. He twisted himself into
a pretzle with the many positions he took.
That’s silly! If they got rid of labels, where would the unethical crooks of the Congressional Black Caucus cluster?
WIN!
If David Frum’s a “staunch conservative”, I’m a monkey’s uncle.
David Frum’s a poor little rich kid: his mother, Barbara Frum, was Canada’s Barbara Walters. He’s been pretending to be a conservative for some time now. He’s an impostor.
Hey, it’s a living, isn’t it? A man’s gotta eat foie gras, doesn’t he?
After looking over their website, it looks to me like the No Labels group is a bunch of people (bureaucrats and/or people connected to the Democrat Party mostly) who want us all to politely agree on exactly what type of totalitarian, socialist government we’re going to have.
Think I’ll pass, since I didn’t see a single thing on their website I agreed with.
As for civility, when the government stops taking my money at the point of a gun to finance their little projects, then we can talk about civility.
Ye shall know them by the crap they support.
They may “eschew” labels, they won’t “eschew” leftism.
Remember when the lefties relabeled themselves as “Third Way”? More of the same.
I sent two very reasonable, on topic comments to this thread yesterday. What happened to them?