I have been thinking for a while that the Culture Wars are turning and that the pervasive “libo-progressivism” of our Kultur is moving slowly rightward, but several reports of the last few days have convinced me this is happening more quickly than I had imagined.
The first comes from a post by the Anchoress showing parallels between recent comments by Woody Allen and NYT columnist Tom Friedman. Both men seem to be suffering from a kind of nostalgie du fascisme as opposed to the better known and more bohemian nostalgie de la boue — yearning for the mud — popularized by Orwell and others. (I wish it were the latter).
Woody Allen told Spain’s La Vanguardia that it would be a good idea if Barack Obama could be dictator for a “few years” to overcome obstructionist Republicans. Just a few days later, Friedman fantasized, on Meet the Press yet, that the solution to America’s problems might be to be more like China.
These are liberals? Well, you might say, and you might be right (pace Jonah Goldberg), that this has been their unspoken attitude all along. But publicly, this is crazy stuff. It’s self-destructive. Okay, Woody’s career is close to over, but Friedman still has his spot on the NYT opinion page. Talking about emulating the butchers of Tiananmen, even in jest, makes him sound like a totalitarian nutcase. Why is he spouting this stuff? Why is the governor coming off his motor now?
If the Right is winning the culture war then why is Rand Paul now fleeing into the same Right-wing cocoon Sarah Palin is hiding in?
Palin is hiding? Since when?
Yes, she limits her appearances to friendly audiences.
And now Rand Paul is joining her on the partisan lam.
But the cocoon itself is expanding. More and more audiences are becoming friendly. Check out hillbuzz.org or Cynthia Yockey’s blog, for example.
The generic ballot polls suggest the Democrats are currently ascendant.
So instead of tennis between the two parties we now have them both doing solitary wall practice while the pundits subjectively decide which side is “winning?”
You must be limiting yourself to KosKid polls.
I was looking at the latest Gallup generic congressional poll that shows the Democrats have pulled ahead:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127439/Election-2010-Key-Indicators.aspx
ohhhhh, 1 poll, out of dozens, and a poll that uses voters instead of likely voters.
Boy, you are easy to please.
You have your finger on the pulse Perto! Keep your head in the sand! All is well! The Rethuglikkkans are in a cocoon! Hope and Change! Everything is fine! Everything is fine!
Perhaps perto missed this particular poll:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll
You mean like the hand picked audiences Obama is seen in front of?
Exactly!
Don’t forget the Planted Questioners or little children- they are the only ones allowed to ask the Great One any questions ( prepared in advance, of course).
Palin and paul limit themselves “to friendly audiences,” eh” As opposed to Obam, you mean? he hasn’t even had a press copnference in nearly a year. Neither he nor his mouthpiece will answer questions they don’t like on any subject. His endless series of speeches are all given before friendly, even fawning audiences.
If the press indeed even begins to really question him on anything at all (they don’t need to “turn on him,” just to do a small sliver of their supposed job,) he will fold like the empty suit he is. His famous thin skin and glass jaw wilkl show us what he is made of: smoke, mirrors and a lifetime of bloviating without ever having been challenged or held to accounbt for anything at all.
I dont think being selective is super bad esp when thoes expressing opposing opinions are not listening but only name calling. We are becomming extreamly polarized in my opinion. Which actually is good to me. Rand never said anything bad really. Its just that we are breaking into thoes who want govt to rule over everything and thoes who do not. So there prob wont be too much good to come from shouting matches on either side
The Democrats are ascendant?
That is the most delusional statement I have read in some time. I know of no legitimate polling institution that shows that trend. In fact, all polling I have seen over the last several months shows the exact oppposite occuring. Critz in PA 12 won by campaigning against his own parties policies.
Your assertion is literally incredible, and quite frankly, I sincerely hope that your fellow party members believe as you do. You are in for one hell of a massacre on November 2, 2010.
Yes, the Dems heads are ascending up their a$$e$.
He’s a super hero of the right wing! Anti Abortion, Pro Gun, Anti Health Bill. Apparently despises Obama. Tea Partiers love him! Sorry, you lose on this one.
When you live in a leftist cocoon, the real world appears to be a right wing cocoon.
What? Is this a phase you are in? Please interpret what you are trying to say.
Palin hiding? Is that why Random House has a professional sycko/stalker renting a house next to her to follo her’s and her family’s every private move. Well, maybe the author is right, the left is today’s fascists.
@Perto;
We are broke. It is easy to be liberal when one is rich. the country has ZERO choice, BUT to move to being conservative.
conserve=save.
liberal=spend.
I perceive it to be less a swing to the right than a realization that this administration is not just Danish-minded but fully committed to Socialism, Mao/Castro/Ayers style. Even the servile media are coming becoming aware that, despite their brown-nosing, they are being considered disposable. Hell has no rage like a sycophant journalist scorned.
I’ve said it before: When the American people voted for “change,” it was a vote *against* Bush and the Republicans, not a vote *for* the Democrats or the entire Progressive agenda.
Bugs,
You are exactly right. The American independent voter elected Obama because he was the antiBush and because they were not clued in by the fawning MSM about his radical associations and past.
They are getting an education now on the extent of his leftist agenda and what an incompetent, anti capitalist Obama is. He and his congressional allies, possessed with huge majorities in Congress, are now exposed as the enemies of capitalism and free enterprise that they are. The lot of them are in the process of being rejected. The majority of American voters are about to issue a huge vote of no confidence in this collection of leftists and their anti American agenda.
Appologists like Friedman and Allen are unmasking their true antidemocratic beliefs in their frustration at the failure of their hero Marxist Obama. They can’t stand the fact that their ideological foundation is crumbling for all to see as Europe implodes in self immolation caused by unwise fiscal and social policies.
Everyone can now see how wrong these people are. Rejection is not going to go down well with this bunch of blowhards.
I think it was more of a vote for the “1st black president” … and now people are seeing what is below skin color and finding they dont like this inexperienced marxist.
Look, part of the problem is that the Independents and Reagan Democrats who started turning to the Democrats in 2006 were disgusted by Bush and the Republicans over Iraq, Katrina, and the spending. Obama appealed to their sense of “putting the divisons of the country” behind them. They truly believed that a vote for Obama was a vote to get past divisiveness.
It was all a lie, of course.
Plus, a significant faction of the voters wanted free stuff, and knew that Obama and the D’s would give it away like candy. Now they are getting the blowback.
Maybe that old crank Michael Savage is right, “Liberalism is a mental disorder”.
MAYBE??!
To paraphrase M. Savage – ‘Progressivism is a mental disorder’.
You have a funny notion of MSM attacking Obama! Sure don’t see this myself day to day and I am a media watcher. If they are attacking him it is with softballs and much soul searching. The media is doubling down on every lie they have supported over the past year and a half. I will start to believe when someone stands up and calls him a liar. Why? Because he is a liar and a liar in plain sight. But he is soooo bright and speaks so well.
Yes, but anything other than slavish encomia is nonetheless a change.
“… but Friedman still has his spot on the NYT opinion page.”
Ah, but NYT is going to the trash heap of history. Ergo, Friedman’s career is as over as Woody’s.
These are the interestingest times I’ve ever lived in, and that’s for sure.
I find it particularly significant that the failure of the endlessly redistributive state here in America isn’t yet indisputable — that the evidence of the unsustainability of left-liberal policies is coming from abroad. Time was, left-liberals would respond to such data by saying “it can’t happen here,” or “we’ll get it right where they got it wrong.” In other words, they reposed their faith in American exceptionalism.
Can’t do that any more, can they?
Very perceptive, Francis.
Non-sequitor: Roger notes that Friedman, et al’s Liberal Fascism is a sign of deep insecurity and weakness, but then suggests that this indicates toothlessness. Here I disagree, for the same reason that I respect a weakened, wounded, and cornered bear. We have to be alert for serious overreach on the part of Liberals who’d like this fevered Totalitarian dream to come true…
Right you are, but thankfully the left has no guns, the police and military definitely lean conservative, and conservatives have a lot of guns. Like Allende in Chile, they need time to build up their parallel military before they can openly make the changes they want to. The gang-bangers won’t do, nor the illegal aliens. They could manage some serious civil disturbances, and perhaps serious bloodshed, but it would take more than that for them to remake America into a fascist state. There’s no doubt that they want to; the current crop of Democrats are square with fascists on every point including eugenics.
Whoa! If I may, Jim, please don’t lose sight of the fact that the progressives and marxists and commies and illeagals and moslems and whoever else wishes us ill have their hands on the levers of power in this country! obama is their guy, and he hates America.
Starting a civil war or whatever they may have in mind would not bother them a bit if meant destroying the US. Most of the military might, but probably, will come down on the right side of things, but how many wouldn’t, for whatever reason?
And don’t count on the cops. They’re union, after all, and I know some/ many would be doing the right thing, but did you see the SEIU mob in MD last week was escorted in and out by LEO’s, and local LE did nothing to protect the targeted family or disperse the mob?
Speaking of SEIU, they’re some 2.5m strong and will make up obama’s civilian security force, with the ‘legitimacy’ of the H/C law.
We’re in for a very long, hot summer, all at the hands of the Domestic Enemies in Congress and the White House.
What the hell are you talking about here? Dump the friggin letters and write using whole words so everyone can understand!
Good point. Ah, but faith in themselves remains strong. THEY are exceptional, and with THEM in power, that which has never worked before will work! “We are the ones we have been waiting for!”
Well it is about time the media wakes up and gets in step with Main Street America. If “Rules for Radicals” guides this president’s management style, “rules for other people” describes his governing style. We’ve had enough of the “I am quite exceptional! but America may not be” attitude. Here are some clues. Most of us don’t grade the crimes of “sexual predators with [directorial] talent” on the curve. We don’t give a pass to someone who claims to care about the environment and then does not have an effing clue how to mobilize government resources to clean up an oil spill. And finally, most of us know an enemy from a friend. Many in this administration treat “racial islam” like Lord Voldemort, he “who must not be named”. Sorry, we should not be so concerned about hurting the feelings of people who want to kill Americans; my empathy is in short supply when people wish me dead. Summer vacation is over. It’s time for the grown-ups to be back in charge.
Sincerest apologies, that should be “radical islam”.
Apology accepted, I am sure, I believe both are true. At least GWB knew who wanted Americans and others slaughtered.
Morton:
Catastrophic, perhaps, illogical, perhaps, maybe even “stupid” and “insane”. But “interestingest”? Not even close.
We live in at time of boringly predictable doofs doing boringly predictable doofinishinges. Frightening? yes. Terrifying? Maybe. Interesting? Not so much.
I suppose I was being unnecessarily neologistic. You are right. These are scary times, bizarre, insane even. After the unhinged apotheosis of Obama, coming at the same time that a heinous reinvigorated Islam begins again it’s long rape and murder of civilization, coupled with staggering swindles incolving billions and even trillions of dollars, one is sometimes reduced to floundering around for words as descriptors for our predicament. Interestingest was my dry attempt.
I think a lot of the liberal meltdown in this country is coming from events happening in Europe, Greece especially. The “great” socialist experiment is falling apart and the liberal left just can’t handle it.
For years, we had to endure liberals holding up Europe as the gold standard of democracy, where the state provided everything (except a decent military) and people had to worry about nothing. Now that the European Union and the Euro are close to collapse, most of the European governments have been shown to be nothing more than ponzi schemes. Europeans now have to face the uncomfortable reality of having their many social-welfare benefits cut and the liberals here in America are going insane because they can no longer point to Europe as the model we should all be following as a “civilized” nation. I guess it sucks to be European right now, and the liberal left knows it.
One thing that seems to be missing in this debate, though, is Europe, especially NATO’s, military capability. The European countries were always weak militarily compared to their actual capabilities and populations (because of all of those darned social-welfare programs, don’t ya know). But now that Europe is an economic disaster, who wants to bet that the first thing the Europeans cut in order to remain solvent is their small militaries?
The Europeans may become an even bigger joke than they already are when it comes to military spending. I’ll bet they will cut their military spending A LOT, especially in the southern European countries, like Greece, Italy, and Spain, possibly even France. How fast do you think they’ll pull out of “joint” operations now, like Afghanistan, or with the UN in places like southern Lebanon and Africa? The European economic crisis is going to make a big dent in Europe’s defense profile. Question is, is anyone out there going to exploit that, such as al Qaeda?
Al-Qa’ida by proxy. Despite the Mediterranean being as wet as the American Southwest is dry, Spain and Italy would be as overrun by Maghrebi Muslims as we are by mojados if they weren’t as brutal as Mexico is about policing their southern borders. Look to see them bargaining with Iblis, using the naval money and the Maghrebi illegals to prop up the welfare state…and them hoping that they all die of old age before the Cordoban Caliphate is re-established.
Point well taken about European countries being able to afford their social programs because they really depend on US military might. Their already weak military forces will probably be cut.
Now, if Europe implodes financially and goes down like dominos, what nearby nation is there that is doing well economically and has plentiful, obedient troops with which to fill the power vacuum?
At last I understand why Maurice Strong hides out in China. God forbid that it should happen.
Chinas’ economy is mostly smoke and mirrors.
The same people who are now telling us how well China is doing, were touting the wonders of the Soviet economy. Right up to the moment the Soviet Union collapsed.
As to their obedient military. Most of them grew up being not only, only children, but also only grandchildren. 2 parents and 4 grandparents doting on their every need.
Mirrors reverse Left and Right, and sometimes
Cause and Effect; The USSR fell because its
kleptocratic culture could not construct a
modern economy; It was Mexico with missiles,
and imported consumer goods for the nomenklatura.
China has constructed, and is expanding, a modern
economy, with a unique advantage: China need not
include all its people in that economy, and can
thus survive a crash which would destroy a western
state.
China has constructed a modern economy?
Where?
As to the claim that they can maintain this “modern” economy while at the same time excluding the vast majority of their citizens from it. Not a chance. They are already having to divert vast resources to their hinterlands to quiet the ever more restive natives. The bigger the economic gap between rural and city becomes, the more angry the rural people become.
The myth that the Chinese rulers are ruling on behalf of the rural poor is the only thing left that gives the oligarchs any legitimacy. Threaten that, and you threaten their control over the country.
Much of China is being polluted from what you call a ‘modern’ economy. Doesn’t seem so modern when you see the distruction of their rivers and streams and lakes. If we had their ‘average’ air quality anywhere in the USA an air pollution alert would be issued.
How much longer can they carry out the poisoning of the land before the land bites back? Some form of restraint will be needed – and soon – if they are going to have any staying power in the world economy. Feeding billions of mouths from imports is expensive and will exact a heavy toll.
Russia’s a lot closer than China, and Putin’s rarin’ to go again, thanks to Obama.
Putin was always planning on advancing the Russian sphere of influence, Obama’s just making it really easy for him.
Thanks to all for the comments. I’ve assumed that since China buys so many of our T-bills and America is flooded with “made in China” products, they were doing pretty well economically. It is a welcome and happy thought that such a repressive and cruel regime is actually in the process of collapsing from within.
If only the nuclear threat from Iran could be short-circuited in the same way! It is inexcusable that Obama has not shown any support for the Green revolution in Iran.
I agree that you’ve made the right connection. In the northern Eurozone, conservatism is making a resurgence. The “Club Med” zone is the real danger to the glory of Socialism. Greece, imagine retiring at 53!! With a delining birth rate too boot, who’s going to pay the retirement check?
The majority of the Eurozone paid lip service to NATO commitments so they could float their Socialist welfare. We should have called them out on it much, much sooner.
The sad part is that the majority of the Democrat party in power today is enamored of European Socialist crap agenda and is pushing it vigorously and with abandon here in the US. Friedman senses that it’s “gameover” in November and his wished for Socialist nirvana will be put on hold . . . hopefully permanently.
And more. Many Europeans and Americans conveniently forget that there’s a big swing in American and European spending. We spend to defend them, so they don’t have to (at least, not as much). That really is a zero-sum: it’s a plus in their column and a minus in ours.
Do that for 60 years and see how many pretty trains you can build.
materialist,
Remember the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”.
I am sorry, but quoting Woody Allen? Apart from the fact that the man is engaged in an incestuous relationship with his stepdaughter who has heard about anything he has done lately. Thomas Friedman, once a man who showed true intellectual promise and has now become a characateur of himself. That you hear zeitgeist from the left, that is because there is philosophy and there is reality. They don’t like reality anymore, than a rightwinger who has to abide by the miranda rights when questioning terror suspects. That the left is imploding, well they deserve it, but it doesn’t mean that what we end up in the end is going to be better than what there is now. Intersting times, to say the least, and very dangerous times at that.
Let Thomas Friedmand even try one of his attitudes in my presence. I will
drive my fist into his face.
I’d enjoy seeing that!
Follow the money. The daily newspaper is going the way of the three-corner hat, network news is irrelevant, liberal pundits and their activist sycophants are ignored, and the celebrities who trumpet every social cause imaginable have proven themselves to be uneducated, unhinged narcissists. Nobody’s buying anymore.
Prior to July 3, 1863, it looked as though General Robert E. Lee and the Confederates were about to triumph over the Union armies. Then there was the disastrous Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, which is often referred to as “the high-water mark of the Confederacy.” Less than two years later, the American Civil War was over and the Confederacy was in ruins.
Perhaps the Left has reached its high-water mark.
Although history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes rather nicely.
God Save Our Republic!
The opposite of Communism, Socialism, and Liberalism is relaxing in the complexity that is the world’s natural state no matter what. We are always at the edge of chaos and the only way to remain within our dynamic equilibrium that most of us prize is to make very frequent, very small corrections – like riding a bicycle. Any “reform” or “control” must fail. It can be no other way ever, whatever else we might imagine. Like riding a bicycle, we may choose our destination, but we must get there by making those frequent and small corrections constantly. Otherwise we will fall into the abyss of chaos, otherwise known as Revolution – which is actually a goal of some idiots among us.
Interesting point. Socialism is all about control – or the belief that you control things. All you need is enlightened leaders controlling everything according to socialist theories, and the people will always be happy, prosperous, just, and “good.” Unfortunately, life doesn’t like to be controlled. Maybe they’re figuring this out, finally.
It’s not so much that life doesn’t like control. Though that is definitely true.
The big problem with socialism is that a small handfull of brains, no matter how smart they may think they are, are never as smart as millions of brains, each figuring out how best to live their lives and how best to interact with their neighbors, friends, suppliers, customers, etc.
Those who seek to control, will never have as much information about a given situation as the men and women who are closest to the situation. They will never have as much experience as the men and women who have been dealing with that situation for years.
The brilliance of the capitalist system is that it allows each person to work out for themselves, what the best solution for them is. The end result of these millions of minds, each trying to maximize their own personal happiness, is that happiness is in the end, maximized.
Dear Dr. Bones,
Please make a memorandumb of the Freelord Kiddiemaster’s “personality constructs.” I have a hunch PC’s are crucial to how yalodrama works.
Healthy days.
Idealism leads to revolution, leads to chaos, leads to guillotine, leads to dictatorship. We’ve seen this pattern before circa 1789.
Policy failure leaves the true believer in a bind. He must stop and admit his underlying philosophy was wrong all along, or double down and demand more extreme measures in support of the same failed orthodoxy.
An electoral defeat at the polls this November will leave progressives bleeding but still breathing. I say let the disease run its course so that this agenda is discredited once and for all. The results will be painful in the short term, but history instructs us that republics have remarkable powers of recuperation.
You’re the only one here who sees this “turn” as a bad sign.
You’re off, however, on the “short term” pain that you see.
The Bolshevik crap took 70 years and 120 million deaths to (not quite) wind down.
While I understand the sentiment that you’re expressing, I think that you miss a salient point: the US military swears an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States, not it’s govt.
I’ll assume you get my meaning.
The president and congress take such oaths upon taking office.
oops,
I misunderstood the thrust of your argument. Sorry.
In the election of 2008. Onlyl 1 in 10 serving US military officers voted for Obama. Confirmed by two polls that I am aware of. Support and defend the constitution (not the president)is taken very seriously by this bunch. They are leaders and well educated in politics as well as military matters. By wearing the uniform they must refrain from open participation in politics; but ALL of them vote. If our current president and administration believes they have the support of the US military now or in a crisis of their own making; they are sadly mistaken.
We have three things going for US in the coming collapse/social cohesion test/NWO/attempted global communism imposition:
1. The U.S. military is with US and with the constitution as it was originally written. They would NEVER fire upon the citizens, especially if asked by Obama, they hate they guy.
2. WE are armed to the teeth and only an invasion by a foreign enemy with aircraft, tanks and heavy artillery would be a match for our citizen’s firepower. They’d have to deal with our military first anyway.
3. We have GOD. ‘Nuff said.
As the Russians learned in Aghanistan, even heavy equipment is of little use when you are surrounded by a hostile and armed country.
I don’t remember who it was who said that when you have a rifle, you don’t attempt to kill a tank. You wait for your chance to kill the tank driver. They can’t stay inside the tank forever.
Combine that with raids on forward ammo dumps to enhance your own supplies. The US citizenry, when properly motivated, is more than a match for any invader.
The Japanese in WWII (before they bombed Pearl harbor) considered whether part of their strategy should involve invading the continental US. Their American experts quickly disabused them of such notions. As they are reported to have said–if you invade the US, behind every blade of grass there will be a gun.
Do you happen to have figures for enlisted personnel?
I have only one anecdote to offer — an enlisted man I know used to have a picture of the First Family as his desktop wallpaper and now doesn’t. However, as we all know, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.
I don’t know how many enlisted people voted for Obama, but I do have three year old data that states that 60% of enlisted members are conservative.
I see your point, a republican victory will give the left breathing room to lay blame on the “right” for the country’s condition, that republican opposition would have stalled the presidents efforts to lead the country into a recovery. Standard operating procedure here in CA when it came to the budget showdowns of previous years.
Of course the lesson of California is blame really does not mean much when we all suffer as a result. I havent forgotten what the republicans did when they had power, but ill take anything to stop the presidents agenda. Given how much he has already done, (not to mention two supreme court nominees), I do not think we can wait another two years. America is a center right country, the emperor has no clothes, so the time is this midterm cycle if we are to make anything happen.
Remember, We are not Europe, we do not endorse bowing deeply to Islamic Kings while denying the existence of radical Islam, we don’t blame Bush for everything, Cheney is not related to Genghis Khan and we are not your babies daddy. It is all about November.
re: Cheyney is not related to Ghengis Kahn………..I always considered that his one weak point.
Although Roger only makes an illusion to it but Friedman and the Progressives he speaks for are merely returning to their roots. After the death of Mao the Chinese traded unworkable Marxism for the Middle Kingdom and Mussolini. They ceased being Red and moved to Black. Progressivism now returns to its beginning when they idolized not Lenin but Mussolini (See The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie)
America is about to realize that “progressivism” doesn’t mean progress. It means incompetent leadership, inappropriate apologizing, a slow response to natural disasters, record deficits, corruption, passing unpopular legislation, payoffs, bribes, ignorance of Constitutional principles, appeasing islamic radicals and offending former allies, seeing patiotic Americans as enemies, the use of the race issue to divide the country and other failures that are becoming far too numerous to list conveniently.
In short, it’s an abandonment of traditional American values and we are right to reject it. And reject it we will come this November.
How are we going to keep them from stealing the elections?
Francesca said. . .
“How are we going to keep them from stealing the elections?”
http://www.theprecinctproject.com/
tD
And now dear children we see what happens when you allow the smartest kids in the class to have too much latitude. The natural order of the rest of the animal(mammals)kingdom isn’t survival of the smartest, it the fittest! All the smart people live in Europe has been the mantra of the smartest kids (elites)in the class since the 1960s’ unrest related to children being taken seriously. Their ivory tower elitism is falling down around them. Their Utopian model is on the verge of complete chaos and collapse. They have deluded themselves with the notion that socialism really will work if you allow the smartest kids in the class run it. Well, it hasn’t ever worked anywhere it is tried. Woody Allen for all his inane works has hit upon the end game of socialism, when it dosen’t workout as planned the only way to sustain it is for a dictator to surface, ie: Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro. Americans have a deep seated belief in how America succeeds, we have given the smartest kids in the class too many opportunities in relationship to their numbers, it is time for the Adults in the room to take charge. As with misbehaving children, it is time for a trip to the woodshed. We have tried “time outs” with these “educated bullies”, it has proven to be in-effective, so as with other failed remedies, we then revert to time proven meassures to correct, ie: the woodshed. Don’t you just love it when the smartest kids in the class show just how “dumb” they really are?
Those in charge proclaim their intellectual superiority to us. While we in the real world know that the actual “smartest kids in class” did not major in journalism, ethnic studies or other various navel gazing topics. They studied hard science and business and became our doctors, engineers, business people and other productive members of society.
I think you’ve mistaken the bully in the class as being the smartest one.
Trouble is – the entire class seems to be made up of bullies.
Just clarification on bullying, one can be physically bullied, or intellectually bullied. Intellectual bullies are those who discount those who recieved their education at “lessor” institutions. Remember the distain leveled at Sarah Palin because she attained her education at various “community colleges” rather than at a real university. That is intellectual bullying. Alan Deurshwitz (spl) Harvard lawyer discrediting George W. Bush, I guess the the lawyer from Harvard feels that the MBA program at Harvard passes out its degrees. Can that be said of the Law school?
I think part of the appeal totalitarianism has for the “smart ones” among us is their naive belief that, being smart, they will be in charge. None of them seem to consider whether Stalin was the smartest guy in Russia, Hitler Germany, Mao China, Kim Korea, Ceausescu Romania, or Pol Pot Cambodia.
No, the people who rise to the top of a totalitarian structure are never the most intelligent. They are the most ruthless. Sure, Friedman thinks it will be different in his dreamland dictatorship, but he’ll fall victim to the first thug who manages to denounce him at a Party Congress, or who just has him shivved in the bath. A creampuff such as Our Thomas will fall before he even realizes he’s in trouble. If he’s very lucky he might spend years in the Gulag wondering how he came to his state, but in no way will he end up running things. That distinction will fall to those willing and able to send tanks to Tiananmen Square to kill their own children.
Those people will not only be able to tell all of us how to do things, but Friedman as well. Has he ever contemplated a totalitarian state where he wasn’t in charge? Is his ego capable of conceiving such a thing?
Nearly anything is tolerable in small doses. A productive nation can survive a few parasites. We are beyond that stage, with tens of millions of illegals violating our borders, and tens of millions more living off the work of others. Well, the productive are dying off. Jobs are moving overseas, or vanishing forever. Soon, there will be nothing left to take. The government will give you paper, but there won’t be much left to buy.
Good luck, you’re going to need it.
Friedman lives in an absolutely gigantic mansion and has the damn gall to call on WORKING Americans to meekly submit to having their meager resources confiscated by progressive monsters like himself. Eff Friedman and all his progressive, commie, ilk. I would say a political beat down of epic and historic proportions is in order. In fact this should be the New World Order, a MASSIVE BEAT DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Combine Woody’s recent continued support for Roman Polanski and his marriage to Soon Yi with his dictator quote, and who knew that the part of ‘Bananas’ when Commondante Esposito becomes a dictator and utters the line, “Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now… 16 years old!”, would end up be the key to understanding Woody’s entire world view about governing and what rules the privileged artistic/intellectual classes should be allowed to live by.
As for the turn against Obama, while the general public’s mood may have undergone a permanent shift, we’re still way too far out from the 2012 election to believe the media’s current grumbliness will remain the same. Remember, this is the same crew that carped at Bill Clinton during his first term but went running back to him even as he triangulated to the middle because they were terrified of what that radical right-winger Bob Dole would do, and going back a generation, the same media came up with oodles of scare stories about Ronald Reagan and rationales for re-electing Jimmy Carter in 1980, even though they had spent most of the previous four years at odds with the peanut farmer (albeit because they thought he wasn’t liberal enough, which is how the “Teddy in ’80″ campaign started).
Dreamer! You’re only seeing the very early signs.
When statism-socialism doesn’t work, because it can’t work, they always “flail around”.
Then they pull out their guns to MAKE you do it, damn it all!
The crescendo in China hit 70 Million murdered.
In Ukrain, 18 Million starved to death.
Kulaks who whouldn’t collectivize: 23 Million murdered with the implements of their farming.
Cambodia, etc., etc. etc. — when will you learn what it is and where it leads?
Boy are you all naive if you think this is a sign of the end of the “liberals”.
Couple what you said with the dream of conservatives taking power and pulling back on the reins and all being made right again in the world. Then, just like in Greece, there will be riots in the street after cutting entitlements. There will be physical push back from right and/or left. Hard days ahead no matter what. Then all the talking on blogs or editorials in the NYT won’t matter.
But, you gotta try. And you gotta find small victories where you can.
Who has the guns, pelaut?
Don’t expect this to be a replay of something that happened in Asia.
Perhaps it’s time to show the reds just who do have the guns. When SIEU thugs trespass on a banker’s property and intimidate his children, it’s time for a few patriots to help him out a bit with a counter demonstration in which they reaffirm their allegiance to the Second Amendment.
Let’s clear up one thing, there haven’t been liberals in the Dem party since JFK died and his brothers went progressive. All the liberals, in the real sense of the word, became libertarians or neoconservatives.
But Pelaut is correct even without recourse to totalitarian lefty regimes. Immediate-post-war England decided to impose central planning for people’s jobs, and, if I remember correctly, in the ensuing protests, the Labour government briefly called in armed militias to enforce citizens having to work the jobs assigned them.
Mr. Simon:
“With the welfare state unsustainable, it has nowhere to turn and its adherents are turning tail in every direction. They are mad and they are, in many cases, unmoored. Lifetime ideologies are beginning to crumble. Personality constructs are at risk.”
I’ll play the part of the cynic here and offer that what is really happening is that the dummies are finally waking up to the fact that the socialist state that they have all joyously constructed has ,Golem-like, reached the point where it is going to directly and negatively affect THEIR personal bottom lines.
That was NEVER supposed to happen! Taxes and government wealth-transfer mechanisms were supposed to be for the LITTLE PEOPLE.
Of course, the fact that once government gets big enough, then EVERYONE becomes a “little person” was long dismissed and shouted down among such bourgeois radicals.
Just desserts…personally, I have already volunteered to help staff whatever moonbat re-education camps are established by the Palin Administration.
I figure that a comprehensive dose of Parris Island-style dictatorial reality is just the tonic for the likes of Woody Allen and Thomas Friedman.
And even if it isn’t, then at least it will be amusing making them run around in the heat with a telephone pole on their shoulders until they vomit…
This is off topic, but thank you for saying that this oil spill should be something that we can rise above partisanship over. While it exemplifies the philosophy that big government simply can’t be efficient government, playing the Bush v Obama game is ridiculous.
Here’s to looking back and laughing at the short, hateful, and very revealing renaissance of American Progressivism under Prince Barry.
Unfortunately it will be a backwards glance that we won’t get to appreciate because of the giant mountain of debt that they will have piled on us and our children.
Our immediate task will be to burn into the memory of our country their names, and their deeds, so that they cannot be rehabilitated.
This will be a “never forget” moment, when we get to speak in the past tense about an administration that had actual Communists in their ranks.
Our next task will be to use the austerity that will be forced on us as a cleansing blowtorch, forbidding public monies to ever, ever, fall into the hands of these people again.
My recommendation; start with academia. It is a disgusting travesty that these people are paid out of our pockets to spout anti americanism and historical revisionism from the bully pulpit of the University lectern. I’m not talking about punitive measures–I’m talking about preventative measures–just as we should never be expected to pay for abortions with public money, we should not be expected to pay for the metal, spiritual, and psychological national abortion of mandatory anti american leftist indoctrination.
I never want my taxpayer dollars to ever pay the likes of nearly every government, philosophy, humanities, liberal arts etc teacher that I was mandated to endure.
I am an educator who has seen this garbage being taught in the public schools all the way from K through graduate school. You wonder how so many Americans could be so deluded as to vote for Obama? They are products of government schools. If we don’t begin to take back the schools, we will continue to have the same, ill-informed citizens going forward. The teachers are themselves products of far left instructors. We MUST change this if our country is going to survive as a republic.
Paul Hollander wrote several books that help explain this trend among Western intellectuals who become enamored with totalitarianism:
~ “The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, revolutionaries, and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century”
~ Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society”
~ Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad”
The titles are self-explanatory. Hollander was writing in the last century, about the double-faced evils of fascism and communism. But it’s frightening how that old cliche is still true: that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
As I have often written in PJM:SCRATCH A LIBERAL;FIND A STALINIST!Thesetwo examples of totalitarian cultural rot would eagerly put every PJM blogger in a concentration camp, so they could lickspittle their chosen would be dictator (Obama),and help him turn the US into a North American Cuba. What VERMIN!
We’re witnessing the results of the New Media Revolution.
No longer only being spoon fed information by special interest media types, we are learning that we can discern, and distribute truthful information on the internet.
Climategate exposed the source of the global warming hype. It was going nowhere until internet bloggers exposed it.
Liberalism is the same hype. It only exists in irresponsibility and the truth is reaching more people via the internet than by the MSM.
Soon the rich, corrupt and irresponsible won’t be able to bribe the MSM into keeping their secrets.
They will try to restrict free speech. Then we will once again see the true fascist face of liberalism.
When would the politicians and media pundits ever admit that the general public, common ordinary man and women, are much wiser and sensible than them. These guys live in a fantasy world devoid of any reality – the sooner they come crashing out of it better it is for everybody.
Just watch and listen to common man and you may learn something about the real world.
Interesting post. The American political pendulum swings again leaving yesterday’s know-it-alls behind.
My take is that people like Tom Friedman and Woody Allen are essentially shallow and traffic in political fashion rather than political ideas. Men’s hair is worn short today and three button single breasted suits with narrow lapels are back and the Friedmans and the Allens are feeling passe.
The time to march with African Americans for civil rights was when Blacks couldn’t use a Whites-only bathroom or a Whites-only fountain and were barred from any opportunity for economic and social advancement. The time for supporting homosexual rights was when cops could arrest adults for engaging in consensual sex and homosexuals were openly mocked and degraded and regularly cast as the villain in in novels.
But times have changed. Al Sharpton ain’t Martin Luther King and Jeremiah Wright ain’t Ralph Abernathy. When a Black attorney general, appointed and closely guided by a Black president, refuses to prosecute Black Panthers intimidating voters at a polling place, an ordinary citizen has a right to remark that a dark shadow fallen over American democracy.
And when a northern city dweller’s experience of lazy, rude, stupid and inefficient government all but inevitably has a black face, can he be blamed for making comments about the high welfare factor in government employment or wondering why contemporary life in the north should resonate so of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the south?
When a gay senator on the banking committee and gay bureaucrat at Fannie Mae, sharing all their deepest intimacies in a long term affair, help set the stage for nationwide bank failure and economic depression any citizen has a right to holler loud and clear that the United States is a young vibrant democracy in the Twenty-first Christian Century and not Pagan Rome in latter day degeneracy and decline.
And in the unlikely event that Roe vs Wade is ever seriously threatened, it would become the right of every citizen to demand his Catholic nieghbor do a proper scientific poll and come clean about how many in the Catholic clergy, male and female, are practicing homosexuals as national policy on marriage and procreation should not be skewed, nor womens’ rights compromised, by a tiny homosexual minority amplifying its views via a loyal, overwhelmingly heterosexual Catholic laity.
“Men’s hair is worn short today and three button single breasted suits with narrow lapels are back ”
Thank God for THAT!
Well said!
‘LeighB’ states: Sincerest apologies, that should be “radical islam”.
No, ‘LeighB’, that should be just “Islam”.
~The Infidel Alliance
Just don’t expect contemporary Republican neo-conservatism to replace the Marxists, whose rule we currently enjoy.
Most people still haven’t grasped the idea that everything they know is about to change – forever. This happened during and after the Civil War, during and after WWI, during and after the Great Depression and during and after WWII. This time will be no different in that respect.
My prediction is that the -eventual – outcome will be more like the Founders of this nation envisioned. (A government that is 75% smaller than it is currently, no foreign military ‘adventurism,’ and forget about Social Security and welfare, let alone anyone winking at political corruption, as long as they get their share.)
see also:
‘News Kontent: A Reader’s Resources on Systemic Collapse.’
Can you post a link to that article on Systemic Collapse?
http://news.kontentkonsult.com/2009/02/readers-resources-on-systemic-collapse.html
I had this idea that the correct analogy is the parasite /host relationship. The end result of course is the death of the host and the subsequent abandonment of the carcass.
The parasites may be going mad as the host nears the end.
But there are two other ways it can end- the host could die and the parasites die with it, or the host’s immune system could fend off the parasites.
I read two columns this morning that brought tears to my eyes. One was on the lack of self in young black girls, who identified white dolls as good and black dolls as bad. This is as sad a story as I have read in a long time. The other was a letter to the editor remarking on the use of the word “catawampus” in a story. The writer told of using that word and “gollygee” and others as a child in North Carolina. We have come a long way, what with the common use of the f bomb and m…f. I long for the days of my youth when we, too, used soft words instead of blast.
I know of no study where black children were asked to rate dolls as good or bad.
There was one study where children were given two dolls and allowed to pick the one they wanted to play with. Choosing the doll that is more familiar, is not the same as saying the other doll is bad.
I think maybe the study referred to is
this one.
The truly sad thing is that the report emphasises the horrible, shocking, evil racism of the poor little white girl who prefers the doll that “looks like her”, and then mentions in passing that the black girls also preferred the lighter dolls. Don’t worry, that wicked honky kid is gonna get punished.
Your comment made me smile. How about Jeepers! It’s on the license plate of my Jeep…makes others smile,too….a wonderful thing these days.
Maybe part of the awakening is due to the cap and trade fiasco. Developing a market, in Chicago no less, for a product that you can’t see, can’t smell, can’t taste and that costs energy users (all of us) bushels of bucks is now seen as simply theft.
The american left is not off its game, scared, or loosing grip as the author claims. None of you seem to get it. They like all progressives take incremental steps and slowly introduce their radical agendas always finding justification through created cisis and the right wing myth. Thier arrogance and confidence knows no bounds. This is a political religion. Stop evaluating them by your standards and judging them by rational analysis.
We are at the moment when the leader and his lackeys realize that citizens have caught on to the game. Now the Obama clique has to sort out how to impose its will regardless. It should be clear that this clique is not too rooted in lawful behavior, so watch out!
Wise words, Bob.
It only cost us several trillion dollars and the responsibility of superpower to discover that the progressives are better at conjecturing ideals than to administer their ideals. They are a much better service at complaining than doing. Progressive means progressive taxes and liberal means the liberal use of someone else’s money, with the concurrent objective of yeilding and enforcing decadence. It was culture that allowed the underdog complainers to have their turn at running the show and trying to live up to utopia. Reality has a way of setting in when one max’s the credit cards of money, trust, and peacekeeping authority. The constitution will endure even the creative intentions of populist idiots, because the rule of law is what equals a people. Marxists, Radical Muslims, columnists, and rockstars offer only equality by tearing down a system.
I used to wonder how the people of Germany fell in love with Hitler and so readily allowed him to obtain such power. But Friedman’s and Allen’s remarks make it crystal clear. Thank God a majority of Americans have seen the light – even those who were duped initially – and will jerk us back to a more sane path.
Yes the times are surely changing. I just hope that the terrible mistakes Obama has made in defense and foreign policy do not result in an ending resembling the similarly tumultuous 1930s, to wit, a war. Dangerous enemies of ours now perceive us to be weak and our commitment to our friends to be tenuous. Looking like prey has never restrained the jackals.
That war you’re worried may happen is here already, and been going on for a while. Obama’s “mistakes” are accidentally on purpose weakening our defenses, making it harder for us to fight it and win it, and if he’s able to get away with his actions much longer, you’re right, we’ll be prey for the jackals, no doubt about it.
Watch out. Intellectual liberalism is dead, but it has wandered of in to fascism as Woody comment clearly shows. Even if the idea is dead we are still stuck with the pigs at the public trough. They are not going to be got rid off easily.
We will not win the culture wars until we take back academia.
We need a concerted effort to do so. And fast.
A good place to start may well be:
CampusReform.org
Liberalism is the answer when your neighbor loses his padded expense account.
Conservatism comes when you lose yours.
I think the collapse of the publishing industry will create more conservatism in the “elite” than the collapse of the Euro.
Upset, flailing left/libtards? Like Sly Stallone said in Rambo III: “F*ck ‘em!”
Precisely, the left will continue to be increasingly unhinged, not that they had a firm grasp on reality in the first place. Unfortunately it will really start to suck before all of their ideas are discredited. My plan is to hunker down and keep my powder dry.
In this long video Melanie Phillips nails it, the first part is the best.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293656-1
Faster please!
I thought it was really on the mark that the author brought up “Nostalgie de la boue”, which I have regarded as the delusional hallmark of liberalism in America for many years as well as part of the pure essence of the plague in America known as ‘political correctness’.
As a photographer, I don’t know how many times I have seen photos of native Americans in the US or Nicaragua, etc., where the caption speaks to the nobility and spirituality inherent in the features. No one would write such a caption beneath the photo of an Ohio truck driver. And yet they are one and the same thing.
This is just a more subtle and nuanced form of racism that liberals are unwittingly in love with. It is why they love the concept of multiculturalism which is a bankrupt idea in reality but which the Left in America adore as inarguable and self-evident. Liberals assign the same “Nostalgie de la boue” to black Americans as well which black American ‘intellectuals’ eat up with a spoon, little realizing or caring about the double-edge nature of racism and how the concept of “Nostalgie de la boue” can work against them.
The idea that people in India or Asia are more spiritual or less debauched than an American is laughable but taken as faith by liberals because it is what they have been taught and what they want to see. One need only look at the amount of garbage thrown into the Ganges at the holy Hindu city of Varanasi where I spent 2 weeks this winter as an example of how stupid the idea is; space does not allow me to cite many more in my 5 years in Third World countries.
To liberals, Haitians are noble and held back only by a generational hangover as a result of white racism and colonialism. In this view, it is little noted how the Jews came out of concentration camps with 1,000 years of on again, off again, murder and bigotry arrayed against them but created Israel in 3 years. Where was this generational hangover for the Jews and why is this phenomena taken as fact to describe the continual lack of achievement in black and Latino communities across America?
“Nostalgie de la boue” and the photographic example I have used is a nearly perfect example of Orwellian ‘doublethink’ in that it shows how Left leaning world views can literally overwhelm one’s ability to reason fairly and enable a person to see what they want to see and ignore what does not fit into their world view. It’s why the Left loves immigration, illegal and otherwise aside from the gerrymandering.
Political Correctness has evolved from the hippie movement of the 60′s into a terrible, terrible blight on America and it’s ability to move forward into a future not overwhelmed by excuse after excuse for lack of achievement, as if Mexicans and Somalians only need to be given a chance to add innovations to string theory and black Americans given just a few hundred more years to shake off the effects of slavery and Jim Crow.
The Left would have you believe that what I have written is just code to hide my own racism, unwitting or otherwise but I see it as common sense and observation. If half of America were left to black Americans and the other to a Latino dreamworld of Aztlan, you would have a giant version of Haiti next to a slow return to the “Copper Age” and a culture that didn’t even have the wheel. In regard to this, the American Left has now taken up the cultural imperialism of the ‘white man’s burden’ in a manner that is patronizing and makes it the job of a forklift driver in Kansas or a barber in Florida to allow his own culture to be overwhelmed by Third World immigrants.
If a culture can do a thing, it will have done it and you can’t keep a good man down. European Americans have constantly innovated and invented with no blueprint in front of them but in Latin America, even with technologies and the US Constitution written on paper, they cannot emulate them. Liberal views of Third World countries are their own form of racist code as the Left treats anyone who is not white as spiritual and oppressed and whites themselves and endemic racists and so assigning characteristics by skin color. The true difference between these cultures and peoples are values and not skin color but a liberal can look at a photo and tell you differently.
My south-Asian born wife was once told by a white “progressive”, with all sincerity, that she could not be racist because she isn’t white.
I’ve had non-white progressives make the same claim regarding themselves.
Even while they blame all whites for every problem in their lives.
Very well-written post.
Between Roger’s article and your post, I’m a happy woman. Great writing both of you.
I know a man whose favorite movie is “Dances With Wolves,” and who cheers every time he drives to the (native American) casino. To him, white = bad/oppressor, and anything-not-white = noble. It’s craziness.
We can go all the way back to that fatuous idiot Rousseau. He is in my pantheon of Really Bad Idea Guys, people whose thoughts should be dismissed as irrevocably goofy but who nonetheless caused incredible misery.
@James May
As a example of projection of the negative try an image search on Google for George W Bush. The last time I looked, other than official portraits, they were just about exclusively negative – certainly nowhere near the 25-30% approval rating he had in the later part of his presidency. I can’t explain it other than to say that when someone is not merely unpopular but really upsets people it energizes visual opposition. Which is also to say that even the most passionate of his supporters were unlikely to be motivated to create positive images of him. It’s either something like that or Google’s search bots are liberal.
As a fellow photographer I have to say bravo! People just don’t seem to have any concept that they project like mad onto photographs. I think as photographers we become conscious of the process because a big part of our critical judgement of our own work is a constant estimation of whether a particular photo will efficiently catch collective projections. And of course our projection process becomes a little more conscious in the process.
WAPO calls Schumer a “monster?” Not exactly.
“During his three-decade legislative career, Schumer, 59, has developed a reputation as a razor-elbowed, shamelessly self-serving, media-addicted political monster. He is also arguably the single most effective lawmaker of his generation.”
Friendly audiences? Obambi’s are hand picked.
Does anyone even read Thomas Friedman any more? Seriously, who cares?
It makes you wonder what the liberals will do to retain power in November. It also makes you wonder, that if they lose in November, will they go quietly.
Kipling-one thing Ive long said is that communists NEVER give up power easily. Remember Rahm Emanuels”never let a crisis go to waste” quote. When the communist demobrat party loses this fall, I will not be surprised if the Obama POS tries to declare some form of national emergency and impose a form of martial law. Personally,I say let him try, that WILL finish the commie scum forever. No way I can see someone like Gen Petraeus or a Gen Mathis with the marines supporting that in any way, not to mention there are millions of us gun owners out here who would be justified in fighting back. Like most, I pray it doesnt come to that, but Obama is different than any pol in my lifetime. Clinton is a jerk, but he wanted to say on AF one more than anything, and he would be practical if necessary(look at his own advisors-Morris and Davis , for example, were practicians more than ideologues). Obama , on the other hand , is a hardcore ideologue and so are all his advisors. Be prepared when Obama loses Congress-I cant see this guy ever being practical.
Excellent post. I would object only slightly to the statement that we’re living in an “extreme version of the Chinese curse”: may you live in interesting times. These are certainly interesting times. But I continue to pray that they don’t get any MORE interesting – because they certainly could. War with Korea and/or Iran, total collapse of the financial markets, and other quite real scenarios would make things much more “interesting”. The funny thing is, Mr Obama himself is such a complete bore.
Sir;
You do malign President Johnson too readily. His Secretary of State, William Seward, was able to purchase Alaska for a pittance. While reviled for doing so at the time, it now is seen as a prescient move in hindsight. Johnson also forced the French out of Mexico, and attempted to purchase the Danish West Indies, which were finally acquired in 1917.
For a more apt comparison, one might have to venture offshore. Nicholas II of Russia might be one comparison. Louis Napoleon might be another. In fiction, one might compare Mr. Obama to the Emperor with no clothes…..
I agree with the ‘who cares.’ Woody sleeps with his daughter and defends Polanski, along with ‘intellectual’ artists like Debra Winger. Friedman the ‘deep and calm intellectual’ – so NPR and he would have you believe – became completely hysterical over Sabra and Shatila, not because Sharon might have been implicated (he was not, only slandered), but because as Tom wrote in ‘To Beirut, To My Super-Ego and Back’ (more or less) “I felt like I was the only Jew left in Beirut and Sharon had done this to me.”
I believe that’s nearly an exact quote.
Who cares?
Can we take the cue and ** STOP CALLING SOCIAL DEMOCRACTS “LIBERALS” **?? I want my word back. It is time.
Can we stop calling the radical marxists, black supremacists, filo-jihadists “socialdemocrats” ?
Not sure exactly when they are going to get a clue that aborting their babies decreases their numbers.
Seen any Shakers lately? Quakers, maybe, but not Shakers. They didn’t believe in reproduction.
“one might compare Mr. Obama to the Emperor with no clothes…..”
That would be “The clothes with no Emperor.”
The worm is turning. Human behavior is such that when the circumstances change some begin to eat their own. Maybe that’s happening now – too early to tell. Regarding Obama and the oil spill he has yet to assert any leadership at all. He is a “no fingerprint” type of president. Has he even flown over the spill and the wetlands?
With the sole exception of bashing anyone who dares to disagree with him, I have never seen Obama exhibit any characteristic that I would call “leadership”.
gordo:
Glad you brought up the still spilling oil spill. Obama’s doing something by doing nothing. The spill’s doing us great harm the more it keeps gushing. He sees that, knows that, so he’s just letting it happen. The more it spills, the merrier, as far as he’s concerned. He’s one big happy camper. He’ll gladly take the blame for the spill, too, and give you the finger besides. It’s all good, Good, GOOD.
With that ‘times they are a changin’reference, I couldn’t resist putting out this Youtuve I did a while back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSVyFJdaGAI
Went out to dinner with just this past weekend with another couple. The husband leans left and seemed agitated about repeated emails he gets from a mutual friend. The emails are critical of Obama and company. He huffed that our mutual friend should just “get over it, Obama won.” I merely shrugged and said that the elections would come soon enough. That seemed to really irritate him. It amused me.
Did your friend take that same attitude while Bush was in office?
Precisely the line I used recently on a group of Lefties in a “discussion” of ObamaCare at a bar.
After I dispensed with their Argumentum Soundbitium “arguments”, one of them finally threw out the Bandwagon Argument: “Well, the country voted for a Democrat President and a Democrat government. It’s time for you guys to just accept that and get over it”. To which I replied: “And I’m sure that’s exactly the same stance you took over the Iraq War, right?”
The phrase “stunned silence” doesn’t come near to describing the look on their faces.
The totalitarians were doomed when I began publishing my blog.
PS And I mean it, at least in the sense that we shouldn’t take the totalitarians seriously. They are done, they were done a long time ago, now they just stink.
PPS The miserable posts of the trolls on PJM are proof of that.
PPPS I agree with too many of the posts above to thank them one by one. Great comments !
I ran into Schumer in a men’s room at Cafe Annie’s in Houston 9 years ago. As I walked up to do my business at the adjacent facility (there were only two) he looked over at me with a slightly too long glance; hoping to be recognized. Though I did recognize him immediately, I didn’t let on or even acknowledge him. During the 30 seconds or so that we were standing next to each other, he must have glanced over at me 5 times; each like the first, a little too long. If this had happened after the Larry Craig incident it would have been downright creepy.
Chuck Schumer was, and no doubt still is, so hungry for attention that he even wants to be noticed while taking a leak.
He expected to be recognized by being looked at… *there*??? Something is seriously wrong with that guy!!!
You have it all wrong! He just wants to be recognized for practicing the principles of trickle-down economics.
Roger, your basic point is correct – the ideological foundation for being an insufferable progressive is crumbling and the believers are coming apart at the seams. They are about as comfortable as a sword-swallower with the hiccups. This part is fun, but when socialism fails beware what follows.
Failed socialist states are likely to end up with nasty rulers. Europe has been a major source of nastiness for the past 100 years. When it wrecks, expect something far more vicious than goofy Greek riots. In the USA I understand that 60% of Americans take more from government and government services than what they give in taxes. When that wrecks?? A test of American democracy is just around the corner.
I’ve just returned from a visit to Ohio. The mixed hardwood forest is fantastic but the rest may be an illusion. Great apparent wealth but when you start talking net worth to people – not so much.
America is most definitely not Europe, but the problem isn’t what discredited progressives say – it’s what they might try to do. Stay friends with SE Asia – the way they responded to the Asian currency crisis in the 90′s is a model for the US when the bovine excrement finally hits the electric cooling device.
Just as 1989 saw the fall of Soviet communism, 2010 is the year that political and economic socialism will fall from its perch.
It won’t go away, of course. Like an evil bacillus, it will mutate and survive in some form. Probably as a new kind of lit-crit theory.
We need to make sure that their agenda fails so badly that it’s never attempted again.
But it’s already done that! The USSR, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Laos, and now Europe.
Time to dust off your old copies of “The Conservative Mind” and start reading!
DOn’t forget, Bill Maher said a year or two ago that he ‘envied’ China, because its government can just get things done without having to struggle with politics.
This is a COMMON SENTIMENT on the left. They are not ‘liberals’ in the classical sense, straining and struggling for reform in favor of more personal freedoms and more of a voice for the common man. No, they are LEFTISTS, with a hard line ideology that in the end has no ROOM for the common man. He can either go along with the lefty train or get run over and cut in two. And these elitists really don’t care which fate the common man chooses. He simply does not MATTER to leftists.
Given that leftists have no problem with taxing away 70% of the wealth created by the productive there is a long way to go before they run out of other people’s money. Yes, I know that in reality there is no money now, but when did that ever stop a statist? The zeitgeist has shifted? F**k the zeitgeist is the hard left’s response. Whatever internal doubts they have, whatever chinks in their armor, leftists will quickly regroup and then go full speed ahead. Where are they taking us? Right over the cliff.
Raising taxes does not always mean raising revenue. As the last few tax cuts and tax raises have proven, the US tax rate is at the point where higher taxes means less revenue.
I don’t think there is enough collective intelligence in the mainstream media to even know when their core beliefs are being exposed as being misplaced. Roger gives these lazy collectivists way too much credit.
Look how they have blithely continued the global warming narrative despite the complete lack of evidence that the theory is correct.
They’re not blithely, but brazenly going ahead with it. They know it’s bullshit.
As slow witted as the current crop of Senate Republicans are they seem to ‘get it’ as far as the waning of Obama’s powers are concerned. There was a very interesting exchange in a meeting between them today.
#1PERTO: Please tell your special needs teacher, that in Spanish,your name is spelled P-E-R-R-0, not perto.Paul does not need the approval of the moribund, Obama lickspittle media to win election to the senate;when he does, you’ll need a rabies shot,though I fear it may be too late!
The democrat party has been systematically reviving the Nazi Party ever since the Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act that eliminated traditional democrat racist policies not in the South and the major cities that were long controlled by the democrat party. Let’s see, nationalization of industry, Federal eugenics boards in control of health care, and an open admiration for not just one party rule but one party rule with a Fuhrer at the head the party. Just what else does it take before people recognize the democrat party as the reincarnation of the Nazi Party? Are people waiting for the anti-Semitic cheerleading from the democrat party to become anti-Semitic pogroms or what?
It’ll be interesting to see just what sort of “national emergency” gets pulled out of the lefty backpack just in time for the elections this fall.
Dear Roger Simon:
There have also been little voices against ’0′ too including one woman who is of 3 ‘victim status’ groups because she’s a woman, she’s gay and she’s black and she takes plenty of heat for it but stands strong against 0bama and sees right through him:
Sandra Rose on Barack O
I would LOVE to see a guest article written by Sandra for PJM! She really nails him.
The Dems think they are pulling ahead. Oh, well. Let them!
With these comments they are revealing who they, and the left really are and where their world vision eventually leads.
Friedman seems to be unaware of the poverty outside China’s cities, the widespread pollution, and the corruption that leads to poor quality goods and even dangerous goods being exported legally or illegally, a practice that exists because of bribery and widespread corruption.
Lastest US Scare: cadmium in “disney” pendants for young girls. In China it is worse: earthquake that showed poorly built schools that collapsed and killed kids, milk scare…and probably many more that didn’t get publicity.
China’s cheap but shoddy goods is undermining the local economy in many countries: here in the Philippines it’s cheaper to import cheap goods from there than to manufacture locally…the rich buy at upscale shops but the poor locals can’t complain or return the goods when they fall apart of course.
In Africa, similar complaints have surfaced…
And in third world countries, it is estimated that one third of our generic drugs are counterfeit (imitating brand names) adulterated or outright “fake” drugs leading to many deaths. Most of these come from China (some from India) and are the result of criminal, not accidental, manufacturing lapses.
Forget about the November champagne on 11/3.
We’ll still be screwed, including later in 2012:
People who get government paychecks now outnumber
those of us who produce.
There’s no way tax recipients will ever let that end.
Obama knows this.
Not a good time to have a community organizing marxist hack in the oval office. This guy is so in over his head it’s beyond comical.
Ahh, Roger, the problem with Obama’s response to the oil spill is that he’s revealed what the Feds can actually do in a clutch – and that is, little more than flail about and try to pin the blame on Bush. Actually stopping an oil leak, the Feds are obviously not so good at. And that is one of the big arguments against the centralized, all-powerful Mussolinian state of the Progressive dream – it’s simply not up to the job, and all it took was a bit of trouble with an oil pipe to reveal it to even those hammerheads in the press.
But I don’t really see an overall paradigm shift of any useful degree. States and cultures die according to set patterns. The only real question is, where exactly in any of those patterns are we right now? Generally, modern “liberalism” of one sort or another kills states and cultures off, or, if it doesn’t kill them outright, it leaves them more vulnerable to internal crises or outside pressures. Consider some “liberal” trends. With universal suffrage, states also impose prohibition laws. Historically, we know that the two go hand-in-hand. States succumb to the convenient fantasy that society can be forced by a blizzard of legislation to straighten out and fly right. It rarely succeeds in reforming society, but it does increase the size and expense of government, and finances criminal organizations which eventually rival the government itself in size and power. Not good. Also, with “women’s rights,” birth rates plummet, always, soon reaching a point at which no culture can survive, let alone pay for its own retirement. And with the rise of liberalism, solutions to the simplest and most obvious problems prove evasive. A good example is the modern problem of piracy off Africa. Even the Chinese and Russians, the major states farthest from Western liberalism, are unable to deal with a straightforward issue which, say, an Englishman of the Georgian period wouldn’t have wasted two seconds agonizing about.
So what can delay this tailspin? We have a few historical examples. The opening of a physical frontier tends to delay it; contact with aggressive invaders tends to accelerate it. I don’t see any frontiers opening any time soon, but we do have some promising aggressive invaders waiting impatiently in the wings at this very moment.
In the meantime, let’s knock it off with the “interesting times” stuff, until someone can show that there is in fact such a Chinese saying. Those I know who have looked into it have not yet found a Chinese who is familiar with this little homily.
Bye bye to the policies of the traitorous-cowardly-inept – Oba-Mao.
Come November – Oba-Mao castrated – and America on the rebound!
Perhaps he can leave the USA for that scum-hole called … Mexico!
Oh, did we do that whole socialism thing wrong again?! When, oh when will somebody get it right.
Re the oil spill, did you hear/see Chris Dodd on Imus? Hilarious.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/25/sen_chris_dodd_blames_bush_for_oil_spill.html
(via RealClearPolitics)
The comical thing about Friedman is that he assumes that he will be among those in charge when “we could just be China for a day” comes to pass.
History shows that a Mao will be in charge and that one of his first orders of business will be to shoot all the loudmouths like Friedman.
Useful idiot, indeed.
GET OUT!!! CHUCKIE SCHUMER WAS CALLED THAAAAAAT BY THE WP???? GET ME THE SMELLING SALTS SOMEBODY!!! BEFORE I FAIN..T……
The Communists have taken over the world, the USA included. You are lying to yourself if you think the liar Republicans are going to do anything about it even if they get elected. They have lied for 50 years about smaller government, stopping abortion, a race neutral society, workfare, the border, being a friend of Israel, reforming Liberal programs, and on an on. Republicans are greedy liars who will run the Communist government for a few years, corrupt themselves and get thrown out to let the Dems continue to ruin the half of this country that is still moral, upwardly mobile and Christian.
what is the difference with Freidman’s comments and Marge Schott’s comments on Hitler? About we send a message to Friedman…
It only makes sense to remove obstructions caused by Republicans. Woody is right, but does not go far enough. We should lobotomize all radical opponents of the President Barack Obama.
Electro-shock therapy will work for the rest.
We cannot afford the trouble caused by these haters.
We need to focus on Hope and Change.
Obama’s friend Bill Ayers wanted govt to just go ahead and kill anyone who didn’t get with the program. He estimated that the govt would have to kill about 25 million, then the rest would get the message.
Obama must have really been stung by the recent visit of Calderon and the McClintock retort. Everything he did just emphasized his failure on the illegal immigration problem. He just dispatched 1200 National Guardsmen to the Southern border to halt the problem. Let’s see, thats about one soldier for every two miles. Yep, that should solve the problem! However, now he can say that he was tough on illegal immigration. What a joke! Let’s see how this resonates with the Latino voters. There is a new attack planned on people who employ illegals. It is to confiscate all property owned by the employer. Let me emphasize that all property includes: business, bank accounts, other assets of the business, home, cars and personal property. I wonder if you are still allowed to ask the legal status of any applicant for a job. Arizona just won, but I wonder what the costs are going to be.
I suspect, that like his offshore drilling announcement from a few months back, when we finally get to read the fine print on this order, we will find that this too is nothing more than an empty gesture.
My whole life I was taught that Communism was undermining this country by infiltrating its media, its education system and its government. Yet it wasn’t until a few years ago that I read Whitaker Chambers’ Witness, and realized that he meant the book in the sense of his witness or testimony of God as well as his role in exposing all of what I had been taught about Communism in my youth.
What’s ironic is that the subversion seems to have outlived the Soviet Union, presuming that Putin won’t succeed in resurrecting that corpse, living and spreading among intellectuals like a low-grade infection, breaking out after a stress that lowers our immune responses. Barack Obama was supposed to be the ultimate triumph of their ideology, but has turned out to be as naive and foolish as he looked to people like me from the get-go. He now threatens to make them all look like suckers, and deservedly so, and they’re just too . . . er . . . smart to have backed a dummy.
They will fight like a cornered badger, all teeth and claws, to avoid having to admit that real freedom works and centrally planned societies don’t–in fact, they consume all their resources and implode like an aging star. Again, it’s ironic that those who see themselves as the intelligent ones fall for the theories from the 19th and 20th Centuries and miss the lessons of experience. Economic collapses make easy pickings for the radical intellectuals, at least in Europe they seem to. Whether that will happen here is less likely. What is more likely is that Americans will fall back on the history that we learned as kids, before the Education Departments gutted the curriculum. Our kids may have been indoctrinated, but we’re old enough to remember how things used to be and how this country’s biggest successes seem to have left us feeling guilty and embarrassed. And it turns out that Hope and Change and Smart Diplomacy reminds us what can go wrong when the managers are more interested in changing the nature of the company than in making things work as they are.
Oh how the ‘Progressive’(a misnomer if ever there was one) moonbats hate Rasmussen . Why well it has repeatedly shown that Obama has lost it with the American people and unfortunately for the moonbats Rasmussen is CONSISTENTLY ‘on the money’ and the most TRUSTWORTHY polling unit of them all. No wonder they try to diss it and belittle it.
By now I believe that it is pretty inescapable that (not-so-deep) inside the breast of every “progressive” is a totalitarian control freak just howling to be let out. Hats off to Tom Friedman, by the way, who doesn’t obfuscate on this. He is right out there and flatly stating that Western democracy “gets in the way” of doing “the right things” and that we would all be better off with the bracing black-leathered embrace of authoritarian one-party government. Friedman, Woody Allen et al speak for an increasing number of our “elites” in this. They have spent the couple of decades telling anyone and everyone how much “smarter” they are than everyone else and have had tnis conceit routinely reinforced in the MSM. They are falling into head-first into the historial trap of believing their own propoganda.
Rat vermin corrupted Boss Tweed-Obama and his corrupted Tammany Hall regime exposed.
Otraitor is a man child emperor with no clothes. He is a rat vermin traitor with a plummeting popularity rating because he hates America, hates freedom and hates liberty. He works for Goldman Sachs along with Dodd and Frank. He supports expanded wars – but is Soros funded Code Pink and media matters are silent for this baby-dictator Obama, he is weak and the world is destabilizing, he is an oligarchical colloquists and rules our population with an iron fist in a police state with a velvet glove, but he coddles terrorists, Iran, MS13, Mexican Narco-State Drug Czars. He cracks down on the middle class – the law abiding tax paying whom he considers subjects in his regime. His IRS has audited at a rate 300% above normal. His census is a Nazi-like info-gathering attempt. He has outspent all previous presidents in one year. He is big brother, he is a traitor and he is a little man child moron figurehead empty suit that acts childish and thin skinned because he is uneducated. Sure he was indoctrinated with progressive trash, but given what he says and thinks he is a stupid uneducated failure of a man that could not hunt, grow food for himself, even change his tire. He knows nothing of math, history, physics or chemistry, his ideas are idiot Alinsky eructations, his speech capabilities without a teleprompter is pathetic and he is one of the stupidest people to ever grace the Office of the President.
And this moron man child Otraitor looks like the thin skinned loser. He is a disgusting man and a communist rat that will rot in hell.
This Obama regime is the modern Boss Tweed Tammany Hall. The depraved nature of the Democrat party and its hidden progressive-marxist agenda has been a cancer on America for 100 years now, and today, the main stream media is controlled by the progressives so we don’t Thomas Nast drawings exposing what this rat vermin Obama is doing.
How do you really feel?
Interesting, observations – and a compelling insight, Roger. Crumbling times.
FYI, the “Chinese curse” turns out to be an English or American’s imagined version of a sagely Chinese curse.
Complete exegesis here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
There is no us-them culture war as portrayed: there is just more fragmentation all around. You have to look no further than the bitter philosophical infighting going on the Republican side to see that, but similar things have been going on on the Democratic side. In some respects, fiscal conservative/small government libertarians are likely to closest to old school Republicans, and progressives to true blue liberals, with everyone else either fuzzily in the middle or else on the far fringe, for better or worse.
The mystery is WHY does anyone pay any attention to anything that comes out of the “major media”. Its NOT NEWS or INFORMATION, except as gossip. It’s OLDS It’s SHOWBIZ. The “stars” are not serious or informed people, except as they play the script. And they will not, must not, cannot – and continue in their roles – depart from the script, because their parts clue other actors /”stars”.They must be therefore photogenic,,glamourous, loud-mouthed, outrageous in the manner of 4 year olds who say poo and other “naughty” things. WHAT REASONABLY SENSIBLE PERSON pays any attention to what 4 year-olds say about the world, or use what they say or do in household management? Ask yourselves why the “Founding Fathers” defined the legislative agency of the USA, the Congress, as the HOUSES OF COBNGRESS. Hmm.?
Congress. Bad proof – reading. But it does not change the point, does it?
One of the biggest problems of our Kultur wars is that most of its self-anointed high priests & priestesses are such damnable hypocrites…are individuals who only act and speak when they’ve determined there is some political or egotistical gain in doing so (see current head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson)
The pontifications of all these people (Thomas Friedman? Al Gore ?) necessarily fall on deaf ears. Are they unaware of the internal contradictions, the yawning gap between their words and their own actions & “lifestyles” ?
Do they not understand that people see straight through their self-righteous, self-serving “fashionable” blather ?
Woody Allen and Bill Maher seem to be going in the direction of George Soros, just plain nuts.
Could be a genetic thing, kicks in at a certain age.
Lifetime ideologies are beginning to crumble. Personality constructs are at risk.
Ah what a shame. Breaks my heart.
#83 PICNICSKUNK: Yes there is. It’s called revolution.
A thoughtful analysis. There is a growing sense of a society coming apart from the 60′s ‘philosophy’ of anything-goes. The challenge is ever more urgent for an alternative vision that stresses personal responsibility and what we share in common. The ‘E pluribus unum’ needs to emphasize the ‘unum’.
Wow. I’m a Liberal Progressive who is highly educated and has a lot of ties to pretty senior people in government and academia, partly due to the nature of my day job. (My small business that I also run is more blue collar in nature. Oh, I know you will marginalize my observation despite this, but I also served 3x in Vietnam. So, proud patriotic veteran and small business owner here.)
The descriptions of Liberals, Progressives – and their intent/feelings/attitude portrayed in these comments is so far off what I know and see daily that I have to consider it part of the Hatriotic Bubble – definitely not based in the real world which, as you know, has a strong liberal bias. I’d wonder how y’all got it so wrong, except . . . that’s obvious.
P.S. I even know a Communist. She’s a professor in Canada. Has a big, framed picture of Marx on her living room wall.
Oh, and for those of who hoping to participate in sedition:
SPLENDID ONE: do you consider what ALLEN said to be seditious ?? Please answer………….
Mr. Simon’s argument is almost on target. But I’m going to refer him to another article Friedman wrote a couple of weeks ago. It was an epiphany of sorts.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2010/05/09/tom-friedman-tells-the-truth-the-only-explanation-is-he-was-hit-by-a-rock-during-the-greek-riots/
Why the sudden reversal and why the sudden desire for Obama to seize control or be more like China?
Simple- fear. In my novel, REVOLT (www.revoltthebook.com) one of the characters is a senior Senator who goes along with the plot to seize control of the nation put forth by the rogue President not because he cared about his plans, but because he knew the system was crashing and he was afraid. Afraid the checks would quit coming, that people were going to get hungry and angry. Those people would seek out rich men like him for revenge and robbery. Given a choice between anarchy and tyranny, the Senator chose the security of tyranny.
Earlier this month on the Hannity radio show Juan Williams said the same thing out loud. He said we had to keep paying out the entitlements because if we didn’t our society would break down between those elites who had plenty and a hungry, angry lower class struggling to survive. He used Brazil as an example, saying the elites would end up behind guarded walls in enclaves while the masses sat outside looking in a la Rio. He scared him.
The left realizes they are running out of cash and soon all the lies they told will be exposed. Anger and desperation will rule and all the “we feel your pain” foolishness will carry no weight. It’s over and they know it.
We’ll all suffer the consequences of global socialism’s twisted theories. Even those of us who never believed them, but did allow the left to control far too much of our lives. That was our fault and when the time comes we’ll be setting that straight in short order.
Everyone needs to wake up and smell the roses.
To save western democracy and our beloved America from failed welfare socialism that is killing us:
We need to abolish all unions. All union contracts must be abrogated, and wages, benefits, health care and retirement ponzi schemes need to be “normalized” with the situation of private industry and ordinary American citizens.
Instead of arguing polls and perceptions I would like to ask the liberals , anyone one of you that commented would be fine, if you agree with Friedman and Allen . Your answer will be all that’s needed to determine what you really stand for………………