Being a conservative in America means conserving the principles of the American revolution… It means fighting to uphold the classical liberalism of the founding from assault by liberalism of a different sort.
Liberals love to think of themselves as intellectual and nuanced, but liberalism is incredibly simplistic. It’s nothing more than “childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues.” Very seldom does any issue that doesn’t involve pandering to their supporters boil down at its core level to more than feeling “nice” or “mean” to liberals. This makes liberals ill equipped to deal with complex issues.
Since liberals tend to support or oppose policies based on how those policies make them feel about themselves, they do very little intellectual examination of whether the policies they advocate work or not. That’s because it doesn’t matter to them whether the policy is effective or not; it matters whether advocating the policy makes them feel “good” or “bad,” “compassionate” or “stingy,” “nice” or “mean.”
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* Why are so many liberals hostile to religion? Because religion sets rules and tells people that if they break those rules, they’re sinning! That keeps people from doing things that make them feel good and telling people that they’re sinning makes them feel bad.
* Why are so many liberals hostile to the troops? Because the troops tend to be conservative (evil) and because they’re out killing people and breaking things (which would make most liberals feel like bad people).
* Why are so many liberals unpatriotic? It makes liberals feel morally superior to rant about what’s wrong with their own country. Plus, as an added bonus, people from other nations agree with them and that makes them feel good as well.
* Why do so many liberals have so much confidence in the government? With liberals, it’s not about whether something works or not, it’s about how it makes them feel.
So, they can look at the IRS, post office, airport security, FEMA, and ICE and then say, “These are the same people we want handling our health care” — because it’s about making themselves feel good that they got people insured, not about getting the best system of health care for everyone.
* Why do so many liberals have so much confidence in the UN? See the previous answer and apply it on a global scale. The UN may be corrupt, anti-American, and utterly incompetent, but it makes liberals feel good to think that they’re sending money to the poor in some godforsaken country (sure, it’s not their money and almost all the money may be wasted or stolen, but it’s the thought that counts).
* Why are liberals so hostile to successful people who don’t happen to be celebrities, trial lawyers, or big donors to the Democratic Party? Again, this is another great opportunity for them to feel morally superior. They can feel like good people because they want to give money to the poor — granted, not their money, but rich people’s money. The rich have so much and the poor have so little, so why shouldn’t liberals take it from them and then pat themselves on the back for their compassion?
Once you understand the basics of how liberals think, you can understand everything that they do. Granted, there will be a few exceptions, but if the vast herd of liberals is doing something that doesn’t seem to fit the template, it’s either because there’s money or sex involved, they’re doing what they have to do to win politically, they’re taking that position because they refuse to be on the same side as conservatives, or there’s something going on you don’t know about and it’s not really an exception.
“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” –Obama friend William Ayers
The problem of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told The New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.” Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.
Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it’s dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it…
[I]t was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.
Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory”…
Obama and Democrats on the Hill think even more regulation and more interference in the market will solve the problem their policies helped cause. For now, unarmed by the historic record, conventional wisdom is buying into their blame-business-first rhetoric and bigger-government solutions.
While government arguably has a role in helping low-income folks buy a home, Clinton went overboard by strong-arming lenders with tougher and tougher regulations, which only led to lenders taking on hundreds of billions in subprime bilge.
Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government’s fingerprints all over it.
Now we see what happens when political “wisdom” supplants good loan underwriting. When private financial institutions are virtually forced to make loans to people with a bad credit and job history .. this is what you get. Enjoy it.
Barack Obama knows it. The election he had in the bag is slipping away…
Democrats know something, and desperation is setting in. They have a novice campaigner who wanders off message. With every advantage in the primaries, Obama couldn’t win the big states — New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania — against Hillary Clinton, even when he got to define the rules for running against him. She could never risk alienating the base she’ll need in 2012; John McCain and Sarah Palin have no such constraints — hence the panic.
For a “change” candidate, Obama appears to be a man locked in time, unable to move past criticism, unable to move from the grip of the Democratic left, unable to adapt to the changed reality that the campaign is not the referendum on the war in Iraq or on the administration of George W. Bush that he’d envisioned…
Obama will lose because with less than two months remaining voters won’t be able to get comfortable with him. He can’t stay on message and he can’t avoid sending signals that interfere with the message when he does.
McCain, on the other hand, has been superb going back at least to Obama’s European tour. Mainstream America is comfortable with him and, with Palin’s selection, conservatives who had their doubts are onboard. The GOP is energized and suddenly an unwinnable election is reversed.
“The public’s right to know” is often invoked by the mainstream media, when what they are really talking about is the media’s right to smear those that they disagree with politically.
It is doubtful whether the public is half as obsessed with Sarah Palin’s daughter as CNN obviously is. Even before this particular story was hyped, CNN was among those in the media who had become something of a laughingstock for how they had gone overboard in favor of Barack Obama.
Increasingly, over the years, CNN has become less of a news reporting organization and more of a propaganda machine for liberal-left politics. Unfortunately, CNN is not alone.
It was not the newsworthiness of young Bristol Palin’s pregnancy that put it on the front page of the New York Times or interminably on the bottom of the screen at CNN. It was an opportunity for them to try to damage the political career of someone they disagreed with politically.
But how much damage is this story likely to do? Only time will tell but it seems doubtful whether a lot of votes will be changed by it. The public does not always echo the media’s obsessions.
Conservatives were apparently expected to be shocked but the media’s perceptions of conservatives often bear no resemblance to reality. Rush Limbaugh, for example, remained supportive of Governor Palin– and disgusted with the liberal scandal-mongers.
There is even a positive aspect to this. How many of us could have the history of our lives, and the lives of our whole families– going back for decades– picked over with a fine-tooth comb by investigative reporters, backed by the resources of a television network or a major newspaper, and have them come up with nothing worse than this?
There are people who are near and dear to me who have made some very bad mistakes in their lives. Would that disqualify me as a candidate for political office?
It certainly would not if I were running as a liberal Democrat. The media would say, “get over it” and “move on.”
The Democrats have titled their party platform, “Renewing America’s Promise.”
A more honest and accurate title would be, “We’ll Give You More.”
The soul of the Democratic philosophy is summed up in this passage from the platform: “For decades, Americans have been told to act for ourselves, by ourselves, on our own. Democrats reject this recipe for division and failure.”
Note the disdain for the ethos of self-responsibility. Democrats do not merely regard it as insufficient. Instead they regard the idea that people should provide for themselves as divisive.
Even more significantly, Democrats regard self-responsibility as a “recipe for failure.” In other words, Democrats don’t think the American people are capable of making it on their own.
And so, Democrats have a government program for, well, everything.
Democrats want government to help you raise your kids, send them to college, train and retrain for a job, buy a home and save for retirement.
They must be saving the burial assistance program for 2012.
If you want an abortion or want to keep the child, it doesn’t matter.
Democrats want taxpayers to help pay for it either way.
Democrats are also big on “investment” in “infrastructure.” Of course, in the Democratic view, everything is infrastructure. It is paradoxical that the Democrats are stressing the need for public investment at the same time that their tax policies will shrink private investment.
Simply put, Democrats say they will give you more than Republicans, and that’s why you should vote for them.
BEIJING — For a few brief moments, it was as if a curtain had parted. We had one of China’s young — perhaps too young — Olympic gymnasts alone.
Yang Yilin, through no fault of her own, has been one of the stories of these games because of questions about whether she and two other gymnasts on the Chinese team are old enough to compete. China insists they are, but that hasn’t erased the doubts that they may be under the minimum age of 16.
Now we had our chance to find out more, to get a close-up look at this 4-foot, 11-inch figure of controversy, as she waited for her medal-winners’ news conference to begin.
How fragile she looked, like a baby deer in the headlights of an oncoming SUV. Little pink hearts and the word “love” in blue letters decorated her hair clips. The glitter on her forehead twinkled under the lights. Chalk was encrusted where the skin met her slender fingernails. So thin, so uneasy, so out of place she seemed, in a downstairs room in Beijing’s National Indoor Stadium. She’d just won an Olympic bronze medal in all-around gymnastics, one of the toughest sporting tests there is.
Two Americans had stood with her on the podium. Nastia Liukin got the gold, Shawn Johnson the silver, and they were late. As minutes passed, reporters crowded around Yang, scrutinizing, asking questions.
Unlike Johnson, who arrived later, obviously delighted with her medal, Yang displayed little outward emotion. She smiled obediently, all small teeth, when reporters asked her to pose for photos. Her little mouth pursed again when the lenses were turned away.
Perhaps Yang is shy by nature. But, really, she just seems to have been sheltered by the Chinese coaches who direct her life.
“For the drug test,” coach Liu Qunlin said, passing Yang a bottle of water so she would be able to provide a sample for the dope-testers.
Then, a little hesitantly, Yang started to answer the questions. And the more she said, the more shocking it was. The answers were brief, spoken without heart. What emerged was a picture of a young girl who has been kept largely cut off from family and the outside world for more than a year, so she could be intensely trained to win medals for China at its own Olympics.
Were your parents here to see you compete, among the cheering crowds?
“I don’t know.”
When was the last time you went home?”
“Ummm … before I joined the national team,” Yang said, her small voice hard to hear.
When was that?
“More than a year ago.”
Will you go on holiday after the games?
“I don’t know.”
How many holidays do you get a year?
“I have not had a holiday since I joined the national team.”
Beijing’s ruthless demand for perfection was highlighted when Tan Zongliang was made to squirm on China Central Television after missing out in the men’s 50m pistol competition.
Even though it was his first ever Olympic medal, he was harried until he bowed his head and admitted he had “let his country down” for not getting gold.
His grilling goes against the central belief of International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin, who stated: “The important thing is not to win, but to take part.”
…In the interview, a CCTV journalist asked Tan: “In your first shot you only got 7.9 points. What is the reason for this?”
“I was maybe a little bit anxious,” the 36-year-old replied, before adding: “Overall my performance was fine.”
“But you came into the finals leading on points,” the reporter chipped away. “The result really is a shame. Feel bad?”
The reporter continued the grilling until Tan lowered his head and apologised to his motherland.
