Leftist Jihad Unleashed on Rick Santorum

Now, you need to understand first of all that Rick Santorum is just an ordinary, Church-attending Catholic. He is no different in his beliefs, speech or actions than tens of millions of other Catholics in the demographic of weekly attenders. He is no more conservative than - oh, say roughly 100 million other American Christians. He is completely mainstream. He doesn't believe in abortion because it is the taking of a human life, he rejects artificial contraception because it separates sex from family and he believes that there is actually good and evil in the world.

But, you see, he has risen in the polls and now stands a very good chance of becoming President of the United States. So, the liberal jihad must be unleashed on him. Maureen Dowd, that lapsed-Catholic turned Catholic-hating bigot from the New York Times has a headline today "Rick Santorum's Religious Fanaticism." This is an example of liberal jihad. It is intolerance and visceral hatred of the Church, of Christ and of any deviation from the liberal fascist agenda.

If you are a serious Christian in politics you are a threat to the liberal fascist order. Chris Matthews yesterday called openly for a Franklin Graham to be blacklisted as a TV guest. This is new. Usually the blacklist is not made public. So this is a new development and portends evil days ahead. The media is all in a flap because Rick Santorum referred to Satan in a speech in 2008 at a Catholic university where everybody believes in Satan. Erick Erickson thinks it was likely a Romney camp leak to the media in an attempt to damage Santorum. By the way, if it was then if Romney wins using those tactics then he deserves merciless mocking about Morman underwear and so forth for the next nine months. And, if he gets the nomination, that is what he will get from the liberal media. It will serve him right. Live by bigotry, die by bigotry.

But the real story here is how ignorant the media is about religion. Honestly, as Sarah Palin said yesterday, didn't any of them ever go to Sunday School? Well, the problem is that none of the leftist media every did get any religious training. They have been brought up in a little secular bubble and they have very little experience of the lives of the majority of their fellow-citizens, except in crude, comic-book style caricatures.

By the way, Chris Matthews tried to make himself look balanced, rather than fascist, (nice try!) by contrasting Franklin Graham (bad) with his father Billy Graham (good). The take-away is that leftists believe that the only good conservative is a dead conservative. It is safe to pretend that you respect Billy Graham because he is not around to denounce your fascism. It is the same with Barack Obama's obscene pretense of having respect for Ronald Reagan. Obama hates with a passion every single thing Reagan stood for and cared about but he tries to pretend to be a "Reaganesque" figure. Sadly, he just comes off as a phoney and a hypocrite.

Coming back to Santorum; you knew that all this was coming. It was as predictable as the sun rising. Rick Santorum is no more scary this week than he was before he won Colorado, but now he threatens the left-wing's anointed Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. Speaking of Romney, why does the left want him to be the Republican nominee so badly? There are three reasons I can think of off the top of my head. First, they know he can't attack Obama on the main issue in Obama's record: Obamacare. So that is a relief to the Obama campaign. Second, they are just salivating about the opportunity to run against a rich guy. The dogs of Occupy are straining at the leash waiting to be released on on him. Third, Romney will depress the conservative base and that is the way Obama won the first time.

Rick Santorum is a normal, decent, family man and a believing Christian. I think he will make a wonderful president. One thing you have to give him; he has all the right enemies.

Lazy, Self-indulgent Moralism: That is What it Means to Be Left-wing Today

By now you may have heard of the protest in New York: Occupy Wall Street. In reading about this phenomenon I was reminded of the recent George W. Bush fiasco at Tyndale. Why? Because both protests are juvenile, shallow and purely destructive rather than constructive. Such "protests for protest's sake" cost nothing, solve nothing and mean nothing.

Kelly McParland of the National Post captures the cheerful nihilism of the protesters when he writes:

The biggest challenge for “Occupy Wall Street,” the nascent protest organization that is trying its best to create some trouble somewhere, anywhere, may be to figure out what they’re against. Or what they’re for. If anything.

The Toronto Star reports that the protests are spreading to Canada. Oh goody.

Organizers from a group called Occupy Toronto plan to descend on the city’s financial district on Oct. 15 at 10 a.m. The event is inspired by Occupy Wall Street, a group of demonstrators which has camped out near New York’s Financial District for two weeks. . . .

Like Occupy Wall Street, the group has yet to spell out a clear objective. Protesters in New York have spoken out against corporate greed, social inequality, global climate change and other concerns.

“We have a lot of critics and skeptics about the fact that currently, there are no goals,” spokesperson Bryan Batty said. “But it comes down to corporate greed. That’s the one thing that everyone is unified on right now,” he said, adding that the group’s democratic process will elicit more specific goals.

Aren't those critics harsh? Who needs details like "specific goals" when you have a chance to change the world? (By the way, is that last name for real? Batty?)

Tim Stanley writes a post at the Daily Telegraph entitled: "If the Wall Street protesters really want to reform capitalism they should join the Tea Party."

After a few days of banging drums and annoying locals, the Wall Street protests have finally incurred the wrath of New York City. Around seven hundred were arrested over the weekend and Mayor Bloomberg has spoken ominously about clearing the streets. They’ve put on a good show but the general feeling is that they’ve failed to engage a sceptical public. Given the scale of America’s economic and political crises, this is surprising. But then the protesters and their message are doomed to fail. There’s something oddly un-American about both.

Polls show that more than two-thirds of Americans think corporations and banks have too much power. They are correct. For example, liberal commentator Sally Kohn points out that “members of the congressional supercommittee charged with reaching a bipartisan deficit reduction solution have received $41 million from the financial sector during their time in Congress … At least 27 current or former aides to supercommittee members have worked as lobbyists for financial sector interests.” Congress has become a trading floor upon which influence is bought and sold for the price of a campaign donation. It’s about time someone kick started a revolt.

But the Wall Street protesters are the wrong crowd to do it. This photo, of a lady sitting next to a sign titled “Corporate Freeloaders!” while having her photograph taken with an IPad, goes to the heart of the problem. Never trust the political rhetoric of young white hippies: it is undermined by their fabulous wealth and their complete detachment from reality. They travel the world from riot to riot – a cause on every continent, a ring in every orifice. They might have the diet of a North African peasant, but these spoiled brats are professional agitators financed by a generous trust fund.

They may yet join the Tea Party. But first they will have to grow up.

This view of the protesters as self-indulgent, moralistic, self-righteous and profoundly ignorant of the real issues is echoed by another Daily Telegraph blogger who self-identifies as a left-winger, Brenden O'Neill. He writes in a post entitled: "The teenage moralism of the Occupy Wall Street hipsters almost makes me ashamed to be Left-wing:"

Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public.

Occupy Wall Street claims to be a mass workers’ movement, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is in fact a tiny, self-selected group of self-righteous, mostly middle-class activists who have failed to win over large sections of the American public to their “cause” – which isn’t surprising when you consider that on the rare occasion that these trendy banker-bashers talk about the American public, they do so with a metaphorical peg on their snouts. An article on the Occupy Wall Street website claims “the working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News and the Right-wing propaganda machine”. It says everyday Americans, being stupid, do not understand what socialism is, because “they have been emotionally brainwashed against it”. And so it falls to the cool, fashionable, oh-so-enlightened activists of Occupy Wall Street to help “de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced”. That is, the oiks must be re-educated by the hipsters. The little people must have their minds cleaned out by their moral and fashion superiors. Occupy Wall Street mashes together the outlook of Kim Jong-Il with the politics of Susan Sarandon, giving rise to a weirdly hippyish yet authoritarian gathering of slackers-cum-elitists.

Hippy authoritarianism indeed. It reminds me of the phrase invented to describe the New Left that arose in the 1960s: "Libertarian Socialism." That is the best possible description of the kind of society described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

But I would bet that there is not one protester on Wall Street today who has the nerve and will to be a Mustapha Mond. They would all dutifully trot off to work at government assigned jobs, go to the feelies at night and chant "Community, Identity, Solidarity."

Protesters? Give me a break - they are more like spoiled sheep bleating indignantly.

If you really want to be counter-cultural, stand up and tell the government to back off and get out of the business of controlling our lives. Stand on your own two feet and begin to build a life starting with building a family. (I am really encouraged to see so many of my students embrace the discipline of marriage at an early age and act as if they were responsible to shape the future instead of passively waiting for life to happen to them.) Drifting downstream with the big government, high-tax welfare state is not an admirable human life; it is a degrading form of voluntary serfdom.

To be counter-cultural today means being able to distinguish between real capitalism and the phoney, crony-capitalism practiced by both Republicans and Democrats. The Tea Party is as much a threat to the Republican establishment as it is to the Democrats because it views big business as being in bed with big government and as complicit in the betrayal of free enterprise. That is why anti-regulation sentiment is as high as anti-high tax sentiment. Regulation, written by big business in cooperation with big government, is a sneaky, back-door way of stifling competition from up and coming companies. It is a conspiracy against small business clothed in preachy moralism.

Capitalism is about small businesses becoming big businesses but is it antithetical to the "too big to fail" philosophy of the Obama administration. The fact that GM and Chrysler are still in business is a moral scandal. They should have gone bankrupt long ago and been replaced by smaller, more competitive companies that would provide more jobs and create value for their shareholders. Instead, the federal government deemed them too big to fail and protected the interests of the unions over the interests of tax payers and shareholders. That is not free enterprise or capitalism; it is cronyism. The unions bought and paid for the Obama administration and the result is injustice and inefficiency. The end result will be the destruction of the American auto industry, but in the meantime the unions and their purchased politicians will party on.

If the protesters wanted to protest something and make a positive difference, they would protest the big-government and big-business alliance. If they had real vision they would advocate for free enterprise, real capitalism and allowing failing businesses to fail so that something better could emerge. If they were serious about making the world a better place they would be just as suspicious of big government as they are of banks and corporations. Ironically, the people they demonize frequently move back and forth between government and Wall Street. People like Bill Daley apparently cease to be demons and become saints overnight just by taking a government job!

The problem with the Wall Street protesters is not that they are too radical; they only think they are radical. The problem is that they are too gullible; they are like sheep.

What makes the Augustinian Christian vision of the world superior is that, unlike the shallow, unrealistic Marxist view, it sees the problem of sin in every individual heart as the root cause of injustice. Therefore, any social arrangement that would be better than the status quo has to take account of the propensity to selfishness built into every single one of us. Ultimately that is why the shallow narrative of "big government good - big business bad" will never lead to a better world.

Only a social order that takes account of original sin and seeks to discipline the individual through civilizing social institutions in civil society (like the traditional family, the church, free markets and freely-embraced moral absolutes) can make a tolerably good society out of bad people. Parliamentary democracy, free enterprise and limited government informed by and based upon a Christian worldview including the Ten Commandments as the heart of morality have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the best possible set of social institutions for a civilized and prosperous society.

And all these moralistic, self-indulgent, "protesters" want to do is tear down and destroy these institutions in the name of a romantic, unrealizable, shallow Utopian vision of "peace, justice and the environment."

The Left and the Truth

Bill Whittle explains why the so-called "progressive left" cannot make do without epistemological relativism. It is essential to their political ideology.



Why be conservative? The reason is that the facts and logic are stubbornly in favor of free enterprise and political liberalism and against socialism. If you want to be rational, you cannot embrace left-wing ideology. Bill Whittle does an excellent job of explaining how this is so.

Obama, Israel and the Spirit of 68: The Leftist Takeover of the American Presidency

Thomas Sowell is a great economist and a great thinker. Author of dozens of books, including the widely used Basic Economics, Sowell is expert at puncturing the pomposity and self-congratulatory smugness of the Left. In this article, Seductive Beliefs Part II, he puts Barack Obama's disdain for Israel in its wider context.

What makes Obama tick is not in any way unique or novel. He is just like the millions of white middle class left-wingers, the generation of '68, in his view of the world. That world view is one of of resentment, envy, class division, anti-colonialism, anti-patriarchalism, anti-Westernism and anti-capitalism. It is a worldview in which the world is divided neatly into victims and oppressors; everybody must be one or the other. Victims are hardly even moral agents; they are just passive absorbers of the actions of the oppressors. Those who hold this worldview see themselves as, in Dostoevesky's acid phrase, "saviors of mankind."

Sowell writes:

Obama's declaration that Israel must give up the land it acquired, after neighboring countries threatened its survival in 1967, is completely consistent with both his ideology of many years and his previous actions as President of the United States.

Whether as a radical student, community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama's ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. However complex the ramifications of this ideology, and however clever the means by which Obama has camouflaged it, that is what it has amounted to.

No wonder he was moved to tears when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright summarized that ideology in a thundering phrase-- "white folks' greed runs a world in need."

Israel is one of the Haves. Its neighbors remain among the Have Nots, despite their oil. No wonder that Barack Obama has bent over backward, in addition to bowing low forward, to support the side that his ideology favors.

Whether at home or abroad, Obama's ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback.

Israel is not simply to have its interests sacrificed and its security undermined. It is to be brought down a peg and-- to the extent politically possible-- insulted. Obama has already done all these things. His latest pronouncement is just more of the same.

One of the first acts of Barack Obama as president was to send money to the Palestinians, money that can be used to buy rockets to fire into Israel, irrespective of the rationale for the money.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A photograph that should tell us a lot about Barack Obama shows him on the phone, talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama was seated, leaning back in his chair, with his feet up on the desk, and the soles of his feet pointed directly at the camera. In the Middle East, showing the soles of your feet is an insult, as Obama undoubtedly knows.

This photograph was no accident. Photographers cannot roam around White House, willy-nilly, taking snapshots of the President of the United States as he talks to leaders of foreign nations.

It was a photograph with a message. No one would have known who was on the other end of the line, unless Obama wanted them to know -- and wanted to demonstrate his disdain.

Prime Minister Netanyahu's visits to the White House have been unlike previous Israeli leaders' visits to the White House, and certainly unlike the pomp and circumstance accompanying other nations' leaders' visits to the White House over the years.

After one of his meetings with Netanyahu, Barack Obama simply told the prime minister that he was going upstairs to have dinner. You wouldn't say that to an ordinary neighbor visiting in your home, without inviting him to join you.

Obama knew that. Netanyahu knew that. It was a calculated insult. And the American public would have heard about it, if so much of the media didn't have such a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil and speak-no-evil attitude in its coverage of Barack Obama.

Defenders of Obama have argued that Obama has not taken away all of America's aid to Israel and has maintained the America-Israel alliance - as if it were likely that Obama would be able, in two and a half years, to undo the ties between America and Israel that have grown up over more than half a century. But the American support for Israel is not something Obama created and it was not created by people like him. The Left has never supported Israel, even though, ironically, much of the intellectual leadership of Israel are themselves left-wing.

I would suggest that Obama's attitude is completely typical of those who have been educated in the humanities and social science departments of those Western universities that have been, in large part, taken over by 60s left-wing radicals. They share a set of prejudices, beliefs and perspectives which are cookie-cutter replicas of the worldview promulgated by the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Critical thinking is on the wane in contemporary universities and group think is on the increase.

Obama's worldview is the worldview of the academic establishment today. What we are seeing is the infiltration of the 60s leftists into yet another American institution: the presidency. Whether Obama or Hilary Clinton was nominated by the Democrats in 2008 is less important than the fact that the New Left, using Alinsky tactics instead of the old tactics of violence and confrontation, has come to control one of the two major parties in the United States.

The task for the Conservative movement in the US is to create the conditions necessary for the taking back of the Democratic Party by centrists and the way to do that is to make the leftist-controlled Democratic Party permanently unelectable. A giant step was taken toward that goal in November 2010. The string of defections from the Democratic to the Republican Party throughout the South was indicative of the fact that many local politicians perceived that the Democratic Party, as presently constituted, was finished in their area.

When enough Congressional districts are unwilling to elect anything but a conservative, the Democratic Party will be unable to gain a majority without a strong contingent of fiscal and social conservatives in its caucus. Then, when that contingent is big enough and finds a competent leader, it can drive the leftists to the fringes of the party and perhaps drive them out of the party. Only at that point will America be safe from leftist activism and only then will the cultural revolution that has been flowing for 50 years begin to ebb. And only then will America's finances be reformed in such a way that it will be safe from the economic collapse that threatens the European social democratic experiment.

A True Liberal Rejects Romantic Utopianism

Here is one more final quote from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. After the fascist revolution in which Buzz Windrip comes to absolute power, the hero Doremus Jessup is engaging some introspective musing about revolution.

"In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; dared even a little to doubt our two American revolutions - against England in 1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest criticism of these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality, the Inspiration of the Bible, and the ethical value of shouting Halelujah. Yet had it, Doremus queried nervously, been necessary to have four years of inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppression of the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and establish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to the Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little preparation, into full citizenship, that the Southern states, in what they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched them and lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and planned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually and competently educated, under federal guardianship, so that by 1890 they might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully into all the activities of the land? . . .

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the 'radicals' who had first advocated these American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as 'dangerous agitators' any man who menaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat like Debs, and blandly swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble rousers - chiefly to be detected by desire for their own personal power and noteriety - and the un-self-seeking fighters against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison, Doremus saw, there was the difference between a noisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himself against thieves. He had been brought up to revere the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe - although his father had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud at the marble statues of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in the fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men, might not have done the job better.

Is it just possible, he sighed, that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy than all the plumed souls have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on starving them?" (pp. 113-118, bolding is mine)

Lewis understood that there is nothing that stands so staunchly in the way of progress as "Progressivism." A true liberal is one who rejects romantic Utopianism. Who could doubt that he was a true liberal and not a leftist disguised as a liberal? Would he even be able to find a home in today's Democratic Party? And who could doubt that in a choice between Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, he would vote Ryan?

Alas, they don't make liberals like that anymore. Nowadays they are labelled "neocons."

The Left Keeps on Attacking Trig Palin and Proving How Depraved They Actually Are

Yet again, a left-wing website has attacked one of the Palin children. This time it is baby Trig, the Downs boy who recently turned one and the culprit was the left-wing site Wonkette, which mocked Trig hatefully and cruelly.

But this time outraged conservatives used Twitter and other forms of social media to turn up the heat on sponsors of this website. According to The Daily Beast:

Starting with Papa John’s Pizza, the companies began to run. It grew from there. As of Friday afternoon, the list was 30-some strong, and includes brands like Huggies, Vanguard Group, Nordstrom, Bob Evans, and StarKist Charlie—the tuna mascot. [See the list of Wonkette’s remaining advertisers.]

As the outrage gained steam on Wednesday afternoon, Stuef updated the original post with an apology, but later Wonkette’s Layne made the decision to pull the post entirely.

Both actions would come too late. The group wasn’t stopping until every one of Wonkette’s advertisers had left, and they were dedicated to posting the proof—screenshots of the company’s tweets like the pixilated scalps of fallen brands.

“I’m flabbergasted,” writes Nolte when asked about the effectiveness of the campaign over email. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Moe Lane at Red State has a good analysis of this whole incident:

It’s actually very entertaining to watch The Daily Beast try to offer a ‘balanced’ look at the Trig Palin situation. The short version of said [situation], for those who missed it: one of Wonkette’s more unhinged writers said a variety of disgusting things about Trig Palin; and in response, the Internet took Wonkette out into the alley and administered a curb-stomping made all the more entertaining by the obvious, nervous need of various liberals to join in. The Left is starting to realize just how bad Trig Trooferism looks, you see. The not totally brain-dead portions of it don’t want this issue getting any more press any more, particularly since it will complicate any sort of ‘look at the crazy Birthers’ narrative. So… suppress the Trig Troofers now, and keep them suppressed.

Which is the primary reason for The Daily Beast’s damage control efforts, of course. You see, The Daily Beast recently hired Andrew Sullivan away from Atlantic.com, and Andrew Sullivan is easily the most notorious Trig Troofer out there.

Read it all here.

Can you believe that the Left spent three weeks lecturing and hectoring conservatives about civility after the tragic shooting of Gaby Giffords? They were so sure that the key to avoiding violence was civility and maintaining an elevated "tone." I guess that three weeks was as long as they could keep up the pretense.

As of Apr. 16, Paul Krugman of the New York Times entitled his blog post: "Civility is the Last Refuge of Scoundrals." I'm reminded of the Communist Parties in various countries routinely doing 180 degree u-turns in the the Cold War era according to the latest orders from Moscow. The Left is capable of contradicting itself routinely in its propaganda. It doesn't seem to bother them since they have a view of truth that is, shall we say, flexible.

It is really funny except when it is disgusting.

Let's Be Honest: Barack Obama Makes George Bush Look Good

The speech Barack Obama gave on Lybia last night was pure Obama: brazen and utter hypocrisy. Look at how the Left crucified George Bush whose greatest crime in the eyes of the Left was that he did what he thought he had to do after 9/11 without being crippled by political correctness. (Mind you, the Bush administration had its own failures of nerve with regard to the "religion of peace.")

One lesson future GOP candidates for president should learn from George Bush's experience is that trying to be moderate and leaning to the center does nothing to moderate criticism from the Left. Bush's compassionate conservatism, high spending on education and the prescription drug plan should have endeared him to centrists but it did not. All it did was depress his core Republican constituency and prevent them from rallying to his defense. The way an American president has his approval ratings fall into the 30s is not by antagonizing the other party alone, but by losing both independents and also the enthusiasm of his own supporters. There is no way for a Republican ever to succeed as a centrist because the Democratic Party has become so extremely leftist.

The hypocrisy of the Left in giving tacit approval to Obama after savaging Bush is highlighted in this column in Politico by Joe Scarborough entitled: "The hypocrisy of the left."

Self-righteousness is a dangerous vice. It breeds arrogance and moral blind spots for those who come to believe they are superior to those who share different worldviews.

Televangelists have fallen prey to this feeling of superiority, until the time they are caught crawling on the ground outside a hooker’s hotel room. Politicians have also wallowed in the grandiosity of their moralistic worldview, until they too fall prey to the hypocrisy that eventually snags all self-righteous moralizers.

For a decade now, we have been told of George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s moral failings. They have been regularly compared to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and every other tyrant of the past century. Bush has been damned by the ministers of the far left as a war criminal, a fascist and a Nazi when labeling his policies as overly ideological and deeply flawed would have sufficed.

But that was never enough for the carnival barkers on cable news or the blogosphere. For the American left, Bush had to be condemned as an immoral beast who killed women and children to get his bloody hands on Iraqi oil.

That extremism required that the Bush years be filled with images of CODEPINK protesting on Capitol Hill, anti-war activists clogging the streets of New York City and left-wing commentators beating their chests with the self-righteous indignation of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

But in the morally murky afterglow of the Obama years, the certainty of these secular saints has melted away.

President Barack Obama bowed to his generals’ demands by tripling troops in an unending war. CODEPINK did nothing.

Obama backed down on Guantanamo Bay. Anti-war protesters stayed at home.

America invaded its third Muslim country in a decade. The American left meekly went along. Without the slightest hint of irony, liberals defended the president’s indefensible position by returning again to a pose of moral certainty.

Democrats streamed to the floors of the House and Senate to praise the president for invading Libya. It was, after all, a moral mission that would stop the slaughter of innocent civilians. Whether protesting for peace or calling for war, these liberals once again convinced themselves of the moral superiority of their positions.

I love it - comparing Code Pink to Jim and Tammy Faye. Perfect!

In the second part of the column Scarborough compares the invasion of Iraq to the bombing of Lybia. Iraq was far more justified, far more beneficial to the entire Middle East and far more well-considered. Even if the execution was not perfect, the general goal was clear and the purpose was far more noble. Scarborough writes:

How can the left call for the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi for the sin of killing hundreds of Libyans when it opposed the war waged against Saddam Hussein? During Saddam’s two decades in Iraq, he killed more Muslims than anyone in history and used chemical weapons against his own people and neighboring states.

With the help of his equally despicable sons, Uday and Qusay, Saddam devastated Iraq, terrorized his people and destroyed that country’s environment. By the time American troops deposed him in 2003, Saddam had killed at least 300,000 of his own people — and human rights groups say that tally does not even include the million-plus casualties his invasion of Iran caused.

No, George W. Bush was not perfect. But he was not Hitler either. I think an awful lot of Americans felt safer when he was in the White House than they do now. I know that as a Canadian I think the world is a more dangerous place with the current occupant of the White House. The Left does not recognize that and by not recognizing it they are demonstrating that they are hypocritical and their criticism of Bush should be dismissed as partisanship and sophistry.

Violent Rhetoric on the Left No Problem for the Left-wing Media

The left-wing media in America is utterly hypocritical and not to be trusted. That is the conclusion a rational, unbiased observer would have to draw based on media coverage of the events this weekend in Madison, Wisconsin as thousands of hateful, violent threats were uttered by left-wing union members against Governor Scott Walker and the media said nothing.

Just a few short weeks ago we were inundated with a constant barrage of stories, quotes, head-shaking and hand-wringing over the supposedly "violent" rhetoric of conservatives in the wake of the shooting rampage by a deranged individual in Arizona. The tone of public debate had created an environment in which such individuals were encouraged to act. Sarah Palin was excoriated because she put targets on winnable seats in the last election on a graphic.

Now we know they were not serious. Of course we actually knew that all along, but now we have empirical, irrefutable proof. Watch this:



Remember, when conservatives start winning the political argument the Left immediately pull the "let's shut them up by attacking them" tactic. Who wants to talk about immigration when the facts are against the Left? Who wants to talk about the deficit when the facts are against the Left? Who wants to talk about public sector unions spending millions to elect friendly public officials who then let them raid the treasury? Who wants to talk about declining American prestige abroad due to a dangerous, incoherent foreign policy that scorns friends and bows and scrapes before enemies and dictators? Better to attack the rhetoric of conservatives.

It is insincere. It is dishonest. It is slimey. But, best of all, it is not working any more. The November midterm elections showed that.

The Liberal Narrative: Its Deja Vu All Over Again

The media reaction to the Giffords shooting last week followed a predictable and tired old script. As Yogi Berra, the most famous mangler of the English language prior to George W. Bush, said: "It's deja vu all over again." Jonathan Kay's terrific piece in today's National Post makes this point forcefully:

"An American politician takes a bullet to the head in broad daylight. Three days later, under the headline “The spiral of hate,” The New York Times editorial board has this to say about it: “None of us can escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence that has now found expression in [gunfire].” In the same spirit, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court blames the act on “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” A leading Christian leader adds that the shooting stemmed from a “sin in the hearts of man not only in this country, but the world over. That is, the sin of prejudice.”

Unreason. Hatred. Bitterness. Prejudice. This more or less summarizes the liberal chorus heard in the days after the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. But all of the words quoted in the paragraph above were spoken or printed in 1963, in the days immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Then, just as now, the American intelligentsia felt a reflexive certainty that what they’d witnessed was not an act perpetrated by just one man, but rather a mere symptom of a great body of societal evil.

Just as initial media commentaries about Jared Lee Loughner’s crazed act focused on right-wing opposition to health-care reform and immigration, many 1963-era journalists assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s act of murder was, in some vague way, connected to the Civil Rights Act. The day after JFK’s death, the Times printed an article entitled “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought To Curb In Nation,” promoting the idea that JFK’s killer somehow stood in moral solidarity with “those who wanted to be more violent in the racial war.” Playing on this notion, President Lyndon Johnson would tell Congress, two days after JFK’s funeral, “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honour President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.”

All of this was nonsense. Just as Loughner is a clinical lunatic whose views have nothing to do with politics or race relations (he once told his community-college professor that the numbers 6 and 18 are actually the same), so too was Oswald a devout Marxist whose views had nothing to do with right-wing politics."

Read the rest here.

The official liberal narrative is that the Right is made up of ignorant yahoos from the South who are angry and always ready to lash out against anybody who challenges the status quo in the name of justice. Liberals, on the other hand, are thoughtful, urban, educated people who are never angry, just sad at the conservative tendency to "over-simplify" and "over-react." This narrative is very appealing because it relieves the individual of the need to think for himself in that it allows one to function efficiently within the bubble of the liberal environment of academia without worrying that the party line might be wrong on this or that point.

I had a frustrating conversation the other day with a person whose liberal prejudices forced him to think out of this narrative so totally that he could not quite get his head around the fact that I was an intellectual, well-read, thinking person who had lost my liberal faith. Liberals seldom meet people like me and find it hard to quite believe we exist.

Kay is right to see the parallels between the Kennedy assassination and the Giffords shooting, although there is actually one crucially important difference. The best evidence we have is that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist and ideologically motivated, whereas Loughner is just mentally ill. While Loughner is not an example of the truth of the liberal narrative, Oswald actually contradicts it. He is an example of unreasoning, hateful, left-wing violence.

Yet Kay is right to observe that:

Even after all the reporting that’s been done on Loughner’s past, the myth that he is in some way emblematic of Tea Party culture likely will remain embedded in American political lore, just as left-wing conspiracy theorists still claim Oswald was a front man for the CIA and the military-industrial complex. As the JFK example shows, the modern, politically engaged mind is drawn to interpret every fresh tragedy through the lens of their pre-existing dogmas.

The damage was done in the first 48-72 hours after the shooting. The lies were spread and the narrative constructed before anyone even knew the facts about who Loughner was one way or the other. This was deliberate. As the old saying goes, "a lie gets half way around the world before the truth gets its pants on." In this case, there will always be a subliminal link in the public consciousness between Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party, and this tragic act of violence. This lie will not be overturned by the facts because the pre-existing narrative embraced by liberals is stronger than facts and evidence. The lie fits the paradigm but the facts do not; so much the worse for the facts. Philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, explained the power of the paradigm in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Of course, there are other inconvenient truths about this incident. One is the way the attempt to tie Sarah Palin to murder has contributed to an unleashing of hatred against her. It is so bad that it would not be a surprise if some left-wing nut went after her with a gun or a knife. Here is a story about the filth and violent talk recently observed on Twitter. The Left is quite calm about violence against conservatives. Whatever they may say for public consumption the truth is that hard core leftists consider revolutionary violence to be justifiable and the more squishy liberals just keep their mouths shut when violence against conservatives occurs.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking; the leftist narrative marches on. And it's deja vu all over again and again.

Leftist Hate Speech Compounds the Arizona Tragedy

Charles Krauthammer has the definitive statement on the reaction to the Tuscon shooting tragedy. He calmly dissects the true haters.

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

It should be noted in this connection that Krauthammer is a psychiatrist. Read the rest here.

Sarah Palin's statement on the topic was dignified, heartfelt, sober and articulate. Clearly she is one of the few adults in the room at this moment. Leaders show their true colors under stress and good leaders grow in stature when attacked. She says:

Like millions of Americans I learned of the tragic events in Arizona on Saturday, and my heart broke for the innocent victims. No words can fill the hole left by the death of an innocent, but we do mourn for the victims’ families as we express our sympathy.

I agree with the sentiments shared yesterday at the beautiful Catholic mass held in honor of the victims. The mass will hopefully help begin a healing process for the families touched by this tragedy and for our country.

Our exceptional nation, so vibrant with ideas and the passionate exchange and debate of ideas, is a light to the rest of the world. Congresswoman Giffords and her constituents were exercising their right to exchange ideas that day, to celebrate our Republic’s core values and peacefully assemble to petition our government. It’s inexcusable and incomprehensible why a single evil man took the lives of peaceful citizens that day.

There is a bittersweet irony that the strength of the American spirit shines brightest in times of tragedy. We saw that in Arizona. We saw the tenacity of those clinging to life, the compassion of those who kept the victims alive, and the heroism of those who overpowered a deranged gunman.

Like many, I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on what happened and praying for guidance. After this shocking tragedy, I listened at first puzzled, then with concern, and now with sadness, to the irresponsible statements from people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.

President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election.

The last election was all about taking responsibility for our country’s future. President Obama and I may not agree on everything, but I know he would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process. Two years ago his party was victorious. Last November, the other party won. In both elections the will of the American people was heard, and the peaceful transition of power proved yet again the enduring strength of our Republic.

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Martin Knight points out that by their own standards, the Left is apparently trying to have Sarah Palin killed:

But from Paul Krugman of the New York Times drawing a direct causal link between Sarah Palin’s innocuous graphic targeting vulnerable Democrats (including Giffords) to defeat at the polls and the shooting, to Michael Daly of the NY Daily News asserting in his article headline that “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ blood Is On Sarah Palin’s Hands …“ to Markos Moulitsas’ obviously gleeful “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin” tweet, and Wolf Blitzer giving serious air time on CNN to the idea that the attack on Gabrielle Giffords was as a direct result of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric in opposition to the Obama agenda, there seems to be a concerted effort in the “mainstream” media to try and convict Sarah Palin of Jared Loughner’s actions.

Already, in the comments sections of the New York Times, New York Daily News and numerous other “mainstream” newsmedia outlets’ websites, liberal commenters are calling for Sarah Palin’s arrest and the seizure of her assets. Others are darkly hinting that she should be made to “suffer” the same fate as Rep. Giffords - for which they hold Palin responsible - with not much condemnation from other liberal commenters.

Which is what leads me to believe that this isn’t the typical liberal leap to reap a political benefit from others’ personal tragedy, but using the same logic as used by Markos Moulitsas, Paul Krugman, Michael Daly et al. an attempt to pre-justify an attack on the lives of Sarah Palin and members of her family. According to liberal journalists and bloggers, Sarah Palin - via her uniquely incendiary murder-inducing rhetoric - is personally responsible for Jared Loughner’s attack on Rep. Giffords.

Well then, what could be more incendiary than asserting that one is directly responsible for the death of a 9 year old girl, the death of a Federal Judge and the shooting of a Congresswoman in the head? By their own logic, this would certainly lead to an individual - convinced by Daly, Moulitsas et al that Sarah Palin has gotten away with murder - purchasing a gun, leveling it at Sarah Palin, perhaps when she’s at a book signing, or lounging at the pool with her husband and children, and opening fire.

I would certainly hope that this is not what Michael Daly, Markos Moulitsas, Paul Krugman, Jane Fonda, etc. are hoping for deep down. But given their own presumably sincere belief that “reckless” political speech leads to violence, and given the unseemly speed with which they have recklessly decided to heap responsibility on Sarah Palin with no facts to back them up and many to count against them, I am forced to conclude that they are, at best, neutral, and at worst, desirous of Sarah Palin being subjected to serious (even fatal) bodily harm.

Fortunately, it appears that the Left's attempt to politicize this tragic event is not working. Less than a third of Americans are buying the left-wing spin that it is the fault of conservatives for opposing the left-wing agenda for the country. The Left would exploit this event for its agenda on limiting free speech, demonizing the right, pushing gun control and diminishing the political threat they clearly see Sarah Palin as posing to their agenda. But thankfully the public is not buying what the Left is peddling.

Liberal Cynicism and Hypocrisy Has Perhaps Gone Too Far This Time

Maybe the liberal media and liberal politicians are over-reaching with their reaction to the Arizona shooting tragedy. Maybe they have reached the point where they just plain look ridiculous to the vast majority of the voters. Maybe they are only hurting themselves by their attempts to exploit this tragedy for political purposes.

The Washington Post has an opinion piece by Glenn Reynolds this morning entitled: "The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel," which asks the obvious question: "How, exactly, does seizing on every flimsy pretext to accuse the Tea Party and Sarah Palin of being an accomplice to murder contribute to the civility of public discourse?" Reynolds writes:

Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing. To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill.

With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."

The critics were a bit short on particulars as to what that meant. Mrs. Palin has used some martial metaphors—"lock and load"—and talked about "targeting" opponents. But as media writer Howard Kurtz noted in The Daily Beast, such metaphors are common in politics. Palin critic Markos Moulitsas, on his Daily Kos blog, had even included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district on a list of congressional districts "bullseyed" for primary challenges. When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"—it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

Read the rest here.

John Hayward at Human Events chronicles liberal hate speech and documents the hypocrisy:

Krugman wraps up his piece by asking, “Will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?” I wouldn’t pretend to be a big fan of the Times under the best of circumstances, but this kind of irresponsible, degenerate slander is simply beneath the standards that should be expected of a major media outlet, liberal or conservative. The insinuation that GOP leaders are somehow responsible for the murderous insanity of Jared Loughner is an unforgivable insult, and expresses a philosophy best described as totalitarianism.

The New York Times website editors made absolute fools of themselves by allowing Krugman’s piece to run. Readers who are content to be insulted by his absurd and dishonest brand of “economics” should look within themselves and ask if they can stomach this affront to the very liberty and humanity of their fellow citizens on the Right. You can disagree with someone’s politics, and even express personal dislike for them, without blaming them for murder. If you agree with Krugman’s idea that every lunatic with a gun is an agent of whatever ideology he endorses, you are starting down a very dark road, which invariably ends with the use of force to suppress unacceptable dissent.

Even someone as senseless and ignorant as Paul Krugman shouldn’t want to take a single step down that road. After all, we’ve learned over the weekend that every kid who knew Jared Loughner described him as a far-left liberal. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, who recently published a hate screed that damned the entire conservative movement as the “American Taliban,” declared Gabrielle Giffords was “dead to him” after she voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and that was just a couple of days ago. We have learned that Loughner was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist – a liberal movement that claimed something like 40% support from Democrats in opinion polls, at its high-water mark. Maybe we should be taking a closer look at that “climate of hate” on the Left.

Read it all here.

The hate-mongering done by the Left here is hypocritical for sure, but the indictment is even deeper. Gabrielle Giffords is being used by the Left for cheap, ideological purposes. The grief of her family and friends is being exploited to push the Democratic Party up a point or two in the public opinion polls. In the wake of this tragedy, the concern of Republicans was for Giffords, her family and the grieving, shocked public and their response was compassionate, mature and non-political. But the response of the Left was immediately to seize on this as an "opportunity."

The Left does not care about individuals; it is built into their creed. The individual is nothing; the collective is everything. They accuse conservatives of not being compassionate despite the fact that conservatives are as eager (actually more eager) to help those in need. Where the two sides differ is whether or not it is a good idea to make the huge middle class dependent on government handouts to compensate them for debilitating taxation. That is a power grab and has nothing to do with compassion. It is the naked will to power disguised as compassion and it was decisively and thunderingly rejected by the American people in November.

What the Left wants is power and it is even willing to exploit human tragedy to advance this fanatical and ultimately totalitarian agenda. But maybe this time they exposed their true motives unintentionally by jumping too quickly for the quick and cheap political score. Let us hope that it plays out that way - for sake of civility in political discourse in America.

Conservatives Accused of Wanting to Take Society Back to the 19th Century: Oh the Horror!

In a window into the weird and wonderful workings of the progressive mind, Chuck Schumer hurls a thunderbolt at the conservatives. They actually (gasp!) want to take us back to the 19th century. Actually, most conservatives would happily settle for the 1950s, but 19th century morality with 21st century prosperity works too.

He says in an interview on Good Morning America as reported in the Daily Caller:

On “Good Morning America” Monday, host George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. Charles Schumer how well he thought Barack Obama is working with Congress and what advice he’d give the president.

Schumer advised Obama against dealing with the “hard right,” arguing conservative Republicans aim to set the nation back centuries.

“My advice to the president is compromise when you can, but when people are being unreasonable, and we have hard right people who seem to be wanting to move us back to the 19th century, draw some lines in the sand and fight,”

Note: only members of the "hard left" call conservatives the "hard right." But hey, Chuck, we'll take the 19th century. To you that just means reversing the sexual revolution and getting rid of Marxism and that works for us.

Anything to get free of the mind-numbing, debauchery (both physical and intellectual) that scarred the 1960s and 70s. The cultural Marxism of the New Left and the ever-expanding welfare state would be gone. No more political correctness, second wave Feminism, mainstream porn, no-fault divorce, normalized homosexuality, leftist sex education in schools or crumbling inner cities devastated by welfare. No Holocaust, no Hiroshima, no Soviet Union, no Mao, no eugenics, no abortion on demand, no euthanasia - I'll take it any day.

You will have come up with a better doomsday scenario than that if you want to scare me, Chuck old boy.

The Inner Contradictions of the Left or "Gay Rights" For All - As Long as You're Not Israeli

The annual Toronto "Gay Pride Parade" is a celebration of individualism, hedonism, revolution and perversion. But just to prove that it is always possible to sink lower into the swamp, this year's organizing committee has reversed field and bowed to Jew-hating, Sharia-loving types who wish to use the event as a platform to denounce Israel.

Jonathan Kay has an editorial in The National Post claiming that corporate sponsors will sully their names by being associated - not with a celebration of anti-family perversion - but by being associated with a celebration of anti-family perversion that is also anti-Israel.

TD. Bud Light. Via Rail. Pizza Pizza. Rogers. These companies are among those listed as sponsors for the upcoming Pride Week in Toronto, which will culminate in the city’s famous gay-pride Parade on July 4. Like all the other sponsors, they now risk having their corporate names tarnished when that parade twists through downtown Toronto, loudly spewing hatred against the state of Israel.

Last month, Pride organizers sensibly decided to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), a group of one-issue activists who have cynically traded on Pride’s goodwill to get an audience for their shrill chants. But on Wednesday, organizers backtracked. Under a newly announced policy, parade marchers will simply have to declare themselves in compliance with City of Toronto anti-discrimination policies, and then police their own behaviour. As a result, QuAIA will no doubt be back with the same shrill messaging, once again making many Jews feel unwelcome at an event that is supposed to celebrate diversity.

This is slightly surreal - as if the companies who sponsor "Gay Pride Parades" have any reputations left to lose. Actually it's kind of funny when you think about it. It is like the "respectable" prostitutes looking down their noses at the less respectable ones or the pregnant unwed girl protesting that "I'm not that kind of girl!" But I digress.

My serious point is that an irreconcilable contradiction has now entered the coalition of labor, feminist, anarchist, environmental and other movements that make up the Left in Western countries. On the one hand is the bedrock commitment to extending and entrenching the sexual revolution and individualism in sexuality. But on the other hand there is the entrenched orthodoxy that Islam is a third world religion that has suffered from colonialism and globalization and therefore Muslims are victims whose acts of terrorism are understandable just as are those of Marxist liberation movements around the world.

So the champions of free sex are also champions of an ideology that engages in female genital mutilation, treats women as possessions of men and hangs homosexuals when it gets a chance to do so. One could pardon the homosexuals for being a little nervous about this situation.

If the Left wins, then the patriarchal, capitalist, male-dominated, Judeo-Christian foundations of the West will be completely destroyed once and for all. So that is good, from their perspective; it's party time! Good-bye guilt and hang-ups!

But once these cultural foundations are eroded, does anybody seriously think that the bloated Western welfare states with their increasing pacifism, their aging populations and their relativistic ethics can stand up to the growing Muslim nations and their oil dollars? Look around at what is going on today. Yale University Press and Comedy Central bow to Islamic censorship. The President of the United States bans the use of the term "Islamist terrorism" in his administration lest Muslims be offended. Europe has become anti-Israel at the behest of Arabs who threaten to turn off the oil supply. The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks Sharia Law in Britain is "inevitable."

The Western Left split during the cold war against Communism in the middle of the 20th century. Some stuck to the party line and spied for Uncle Joe and the USSR. Others turned against Marxism and became real liberals. Many stayed on the fence hoping to jump on the socialist train just as it gathered enough steam to show that it was inevitably the winner.

What will the Left do now? Jew-hatred is taking over the Left leaving only conservatives to defend Israel and the right of the Jews to live in their ancient homeland without being ruled by bigots who plan to exterminate them. The irrational, fanatical commitment to sex without restraint never was a positive foundation for building or reforming a culture. It is simply a plan to destroy what exists in the blind faith that whatever rises in its place will inevitably be better. You can't build a culture on adolescent rebellion.

The inner contradictions of the left are leading it to betray the principles of liberalism and embrace fascism and anti-Semitism. Is everyone on the Left happy with this outcome? Or will there be a significant split in the movement?

Just wondering.

The Hypocrisy of Theological Liberals on Church-State Separation

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a liberal Catholic who demands that the Catholic Bishops support openly her liberal political agenda both where it is in harmony with Church teaching and where it openly conflicts with Church teaching. She is uninhibited in trying to get the Catholic Bishops behind the Democratic Party's legislative agenda.

Yet, every time we turn around liberals scream "Theocracy" when conservative Christians support a Republican initiative, even though conservatives are not as captive to the Republican agenda as liberals are to the Democratic agenda.

The hypocrisy of liberals on this issue is revolting. Every religion has the right to influence public policy in any way it can using the democratic process. No religion has the right to impose its own beliefs on anybody by force. But neither abolishing abortion or universal health care are policies based on any one denomination or religion. They both claim to be based on universal human rights recognized by everyone regardless of creed. So the attempt to dismiss conservative attempts to influence politics comes down to a biased belief that only liberals should have the right to be involved in politics and conservatives are second-class citizens with no democratic rights.

From CatholicVoteAction.org Thomas Peters has a summary of Pelosi's hypocrisy:

You know things are bad when Jay Leno thinks Nancy Pelosi’s Catholic faith is grounds for a good joke:

Nancy Pelosi told Catholic leaders they need to support the Democrat version of immigration reform. They need to preach the Democrat line from the pulpits. She would have said more to them but she had to leave to attend a big rally for the separation of Church and state.

Leno is referring to this speech Nancy Pelosi gave to a gathering of liberal catholycs in Washington DC some time ago (organized by the National Catholic Reporter, of course):

Specifically:

“The cardinals, the archbishops, the bishops that come to me and say, ‘We want you to pass immigration reform,’” disclosed Pelosi. “And I say, ‘But I want you to speak about it from the pulpit.’

Let’s rewind and play that back: she wanted the bishops to preach this from the pulpit.

So why do we not hear the ACLU screaming about separation of church and state when Pelosi makes statements like this? Why do columnists from the New York Times not wring their hands and murmur about Taliban-Democrats? Why does the Left not protest the imposition of Catholic views on a "secular" society when those views are left-wing?

Well, I think we know the answer, which can be summed up in two words: bias and hypocrisy.

Timothy Dalrymple on the Tea Parties and Social Justice

Timothy Dalrymple has a wonderful article on the Tea Party as a social justice movement. I want to quote a couple of passages but I urge you to read the whole thing here: "Is the Tea Party a 'Social Justice' Movement?"

First, he identifies correctly (in my opinion) the source of the passion directed against the Tea Party and conservatives by liberals: [my bolding]

What I witnessed in the Tea Partiers, however, were a moral, sensible, and patriotic people who had a justified concern that their representatives have grown disconnected from those they represent, and are perpetuating a dysfunctional political culture that will thrust our country back to the precipice of economic collapse. Washington cannot pour rivers of money we do not possess into thousands of programs we do not need, in exchange for the mountains of votes that will keep them in power, and complain when the taxpayers get upset. The Tea Partiers are not objecting because they would rather leave the poor to rot than surrender a little more of their money; polls show (as I will discuss in the next part of this series) that Tea Partiers are perfectly willing to accept the need for moderate taxation and social services. Rather, Tea Partiers are objecting because they fear that Washington is caught in a vicious circle of reckless spending and political payback that will cripple our economy and harm all Americans, rich and poor.

This led to the question on my mind that morning. Since it is intent on the formation of a more accountable and more restrained government that will better serve the interest of all Americans: Is the Tea Party movement a social justice movement?

When I asked this question of my beloved liberal friends, they were mortified. There may be no quicker way to help a food-poisoned progressive empty the contents of her stomach than to suggest that the Tea Party movement is just as much a "social justice" movement as are living wage or immigrants' rights movements.

The reason for their response is simple. For many religious progressives, "social justice" has eclipsed the old God in whom they no longer quite believe. The hope of a socially just world has not complemented and enriched (as it should) but impoverished and occluded their hope of eternity with God. Thus, for them, social justice is the final refuge of the transcendent, the one pure act that remains in a tarnished world, the last vision with the power to stir the graying embers of their religious devotion.

Even religious progressives who still believe in an eternal relationship with God tend to see social justice as holy in the Hebrew sense, as that which sets them apart -- apart from the fat cats and the country clubbers, to be sure, but also apart from those Christians, the Christians who live in "Jesusland," attend megachurches, and wear flags on their lapels: the very same conservative Christians who might be found at a Tea Party rally. Thus, to suggest that the Tea Partiers are engaged in a social justice movement is not only to soil their sacred ideal with the grubby fingers of the bigoted Tea Partiers, but to suggest that progressive Christians and conservative Christians are not separated so much by the presence or absence of love for the poor but by their sense of the policies that best serve the poor and the rest of society.

Darlymple goes on to discuss the meaning of the term "social justice" and while I cannot reproduce his whole discussion, here are some salient bits the whet your appetite:

Whether the Tea Party movement actually is a social justice movement obviously depends on how the term is defined. The irony is that one cannot exclude the Tea Party from the social justice category without betraying that "social justice" is a partisan political theory. . . .

When Glenn Beck condemned social justice as a "code word" for liberal political activism, the question that was presented to progressive activists like Jim Wallis was whether social justice is the sole province of left-wing political agitators. With apologies to Albert Einstein, we distinguish between general and special theories of social justice. The general theory is that "social justice is in fact a personal commitment to serve the poor and to attack the conditions that lead to poverty." That is how Jim Wallis defined the term in a Washington Post column. The special theory, by contrast, asserts that social justice is when one attacks "the conditions that lead to poverty" by advocating specifically the policies that liberals prefer. In other words, on the special theory, it is not enough to fight for the conditions that would allow the poor to prosper; one must do so through redistributionist policies, or living wage movements, or stronger unions, or etc. . . .

. . . when Wallis is pressed on whether he is merely anointing his own political preferences in religious rhetoric, he retreats to the general theory of social justice. People all over the spectrum, he says, are social justice Christians; what is important is simply "to stand up for the poor, even against wealth and power when necessary."

The Catholic theologian Michael Novak also offers a universal definition of social justice. After noting all the ambiguities in its history and meaning, Novak suggests that social justice is a joint, cooperative action (thus "social" in its form) for the good of the whole of society (and thus "social" in its end). By this definition, social justice is not an "ideological marker," but is "ideologically neutral." Social justice "is practiced both by those on the left and those on the right" because there is "more than one way to imagine the future good of society." If we adopt Novak's definition, or Wallis' universal definition, then the Tea Party movement is in fact a social justice movement. The great majority of those attending the rallies would tell you that the policies they advocate are for the common good of all, including the poor.

Yet Wallis does not actually hold to the universal theory of social justice. When Wallis actually uses social justice language amongst his supporters, it clearly means pressing for the systemic changes that Wallis and other leaders of "the faith community" prefer. I have never seen Wallis refer to a movement pressing for conservative policies, even when those policies are overtly intended to serve the poor and needy, as a social justice action.

One might respond that movements must press for a biblical vision of justice in order to qualify for the social justice category, and that conservative policies are simply not oriented toward the biblical ideal. To which the answer must be: According to whom? Countless thousands of conservative Christians vote the way they do, and press for the policies they do, precisely because they believe that they fulfill the biblical ideal of justice. . . .

Thus one must adopt the general, ideologically neutral theory of social justice, and then accept that all sorts of activities from soup kitchens to living wage demonstrations to, yes, Tea Party rallies, can count as social justice movements -- or else one must adopt the special, partisan theory of social justice and accept that Glenn Beck had a point. I leave it to my liberal friends to determine which is the more painful.

The dilemma for leftists articulated in that last paragraph is brilliant and true. Jim Wallis calls continually for a new conversation but what he really means is for letting left-wing rhetoric become dominant in places it has not previously been heard. Darlymple is asking for an actual debate between those advocating conservative and socialist methods for serving justice and fighting poverty.

This would require the Left to be willing to allow its left-wing theories to be placed in questioned without resorting to attacks on the character and motivations of conservatives. Are they willing to do that? In my experience most are not and therein lies the problem with having a new conversation.

Progressive Groups United Against Israel and in Alliance with Radical Islam

Andrew Marcus at Big Government has a highly informative article, "The Progressive Jihad Against Israel" that presents research on the background of the progressive organizations that are interlocked with radical Muslim terrorist organizations in an effort to overthrow the state of Israel. Here is the opening section:

The Gaza Flotilla incident, which would really be more aptly called the Hamas Flotilla incident, needs to be viewed from a wider perspective to be more fully understood and appreciated for what it represents – A Marxist-Progressive Jihad on Israel, and by proxy, the United States, wherein the American Progressive Left is engaged in an open and working relationship with Islamist radicals.

The Hamas Flotilla action was not an isolated event. It was but the latest in a carefully programmed series of actions that have been taking place since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a violent coup in 2007, designed by community organizations that have been operating in the region since at least the mid-1990s.

The umbrella organization of this recent series of actions is called the Free Gaza Movement, and represents several international organizations, as well as many prominent American Progressive organizations.

The international organizations include George Galloway’s Viva Palestina, IHH, and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

The American Progressive community is organized against Israel under the banner of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

The US Campaign to end the Israeli Occupation is a co-production of Global Exchange/CodePink/United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) (All founded by Medea Benjamin), and a group called the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR).

The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) has been organizing on the ground in Palestinian territories since 1996.

The rest of the article consists of a mass of detail about organizations such as

1. The Progressive Democrats of America
2. Global Exchange (includes Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Global Citizen Center)
3. Alliance of Community Trainers
4. International Solidarity Movement
5. Center for Economic and Social Rights
6. Movement for a Democratic Society (founded by SDS and Weather Underground leader Tom Hayden and friends)
7. The New Party/Working Families Party

These groups form a matrix of interlocking people, mailing lists, agendas, campaigns and direct actions. Some have ties to Hugo Chavez, others are in direct continuity with 60s radical leftist groups, and most are deeply imbued with Marxist ideology. They are fighting to overthrow the state of Israel and they view America as evil and worthy of being overthrown as well. They represent a fifth column in the 1400 year war of Islamofascism against the West.

Read the whole article to get details, web links, names, etc.