Posts Tagged ‘reality’

Normalizing Communism Deb is only slightly off

Posted: January 4, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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This article at Nice Deb yesterday caught my eye:

Russian TV covers the growing Marxist movement in America – it’s not often that a media outlet calls “progressives” what they really are, as RT America does, here.

I’m not going to embed the video as it’s Deb’s story, but both the story and Deb’s headline is off.

It hasn’t “begun” it has been going on for years.

It went on in the 60’s when college students found that they would not longer get the exemptions that the less fortunate had, joining with Marxists and Jane Fonda aiding enemies and directly leading to the death of millions in southeast Asia

It went on in the 70’s as Colleges veered left preaching moral equivalence between the Soviets and the US

It went on in the 80’s when pols like VP Biden and the late Ted Kennedy backed by the media opposed Reagan tooth and nail as he called the Soviet Union what it was and contained and rolled back communism in our own hemisphere.

We had a brief break in the 90’s as the soviets finally collapsed freeing hundreds of millions (while pols who had supported them and academics who considered them superior suddenly claimed they had been against them or expecting this all the time) but the green movement took over trying to advance the same Red system with a green veneer while ignoring the lack of “Green” in places like China and appeasing North Korea.

And this decade we had the left again blaming the US for the attacks on our soil, railing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring the excesses of regimes like North Korea the violence of Radical Islam, the Judenrein nature of the middle east and the actions of leaders like Chavez.

The reason why it is out in the open is the fear. Times are tough so a nation that has been taught by people who have never had to sign the front of a paycheck or actually understood the sacrifices that allowed them the freedom to goof find themselves confronted by the left once again trying to sell a repackaged bottle of the same “ism” that has slaughtered more people over the last hundred years than anyone or anything else ever. The times have emboldened them and they hope to take advantage of it.

The truth is this: This is the living of the far left and always has been. The left impulses have always been totalitarian, they don’t trust the people but they trust themselves to rule them and hope to be part of that privileged class that like Saddam’s relatives, and party members in the old Soviet Union will still have the privileges that the average person is discouraged from. They aspire to the comfort of the feudal lords of the middle ages while pretending to be the friend of the people that they would make serfs.

This is an old style being sold to a public that has forgotten.

Update: I would have included this Mike Barone article if I saw it before I hit post but here is the little secret that people don’t know:

In addition, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes in the American Interest, “The inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.” Bill Gates may have a bigger house than you do. But you have about the same access to good food, medical care and even to the Internet as he does.

Or consider something as prosaic as food. The supermarkets of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t come close to matching the amazing selection of produce, meats and exotic foods as you find in supermarkets today — and not just in high-income neighborhoods but in modest-income places all over the country.

Or clothing. Stores like Walmart, Target and Kohl’s sell good quality clothes at astonishingly low prices; you can outfit a kid in school clothes for $100 or so a year.

He also nails the elites who cry wolf:

I suspect that most Americans would be thrilled to get a 13th month of pay. But they’re not seething with envy at those who are better off.

So who does? One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.

Bingo!

A side thought about the military and the left

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in Afghanistan war, culture, media, opinion/news, war
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As I been reading the continuing commentary on the Washington Post piece that has really got the attention of bloggers and readers from the daily pundit

“DADT as the reason for ROTC’s banning was always a sham. Now the mask is finally off. The elite professoriat doesn’t hate ROTC because of DADT, they hate ROTC because they just can’t stand “the warrior ethic”. That’s code for courage, honor, and duty, ethics all anathema to Leftist indoctrinators. They prefer us supine, afraid, and dependent on them.”

an opinion I share to Vodkapundit

“See there, Mr. U.S. Marine Captain — McCarthy doesn’t hate you. Why, he thinks you’re every bit as respectable as a Taliban.

who adds a graphic that says it all to this post at Ace of Spades HQ that compares the course requirement for ROTC at Sienna College and woman and gender studies at Columbia guess which one is more challenging academically?

While all of these are first-rate there is a thought that hit me this morning that hasn’t been touched on. Namely that the McCarthy’s of the world actually bring about the results they claim to deplore.

Consider; our media tends to reflect the views of people like McCarthy and the movies and media we put out there tend to show our troops in a very poor light, particularly over the last 40 years that has been exported as American Cultural and elite opinion to foes all over the world that the Saddam’s, Bin Ladin’s and Chavez’s et/al have bought into. It is precisely believe they have bought into the weakness of American culture and the people opposition to the military and the troops as uneducated rabble that they have been bold enough to make war figuring we can’t defeat them or oppose them.

Hundreds of thousands of idiotic and fanatical followers of these fools have learned the hard way that this is not true (in fact it was the last thing they ever learned), yet their fanatical leaders who are not hiding in caves manage to convince them that America will simply roll over. Why don’t they believe the evidence of the empty chairs where their predecessors have been? Because men like McCarthy promote the idea of a military unwanted and supported, because our media is so focused on the number of our casualties in war that they ignored the losses of our foes that dwarf ours.

These men are the enablers of the very wars they claim to oppose, and even more ironically are only able to be such enablers because our military is precisely NOT like the Taliban or any of these guys.

The secret here is that the McCarthy’s on the left’s position is really less about their hatred of the military, but more about convincing themselves of their own moral superiority. They can’t match the courage or the honor or the sacrifice of these men and women so they denigrate them in a vain attempt to convince themselves that it is their words and good wishes, dare I say it their faith in their own love for their fellow-man that outweighs the works of the military in risking their own lives to save others.

That’s liberalism in a nutshell belief and good intention trump works and results every time.

Update: Oh Brother!

Hitler could have been waited out. He might have been overthrown by his own government. Who knows? To have 50 million people killed: Hitler would have died within 10 years no matter what he did.

Oh and Lincoln was wrong to fight the civil war too. Moe Lane nails it:

Whichever editor approved this Washington Post article should be ashamed of him- or herself. I do not expect shame, but it’s long past time that we started telling these people when they’ve done something foul.

He certainly has the right to free speech but did he have the right to a Washington Post op-ed?

I’m late to this Sarah Palin story

Posted: December 29, 2010 by datechguy in elections, opinion/news
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but the contrast is stunning. First Juan Williams

“‘There’s nobody out there, except for Sarah Palin, who can absolutely dominate the stage, and she can’t stand on the intellectual stage with Obama,’ Williams said.

“Palin, like Williams, is a Fox News contributor. And when Williams was fired by National Public Radio this year after saying he felt nervous when he sees Muslims on an airplane, Palin was among the conservative voices defending him.”

Allahpundit being allahpundit further quotes Williams

I think most Republicans now in the polls question whether or not she has the credibility to be president,’

There is just one problem with this line of thinking…the facts as Ian Lazaran notes:

Has any other potential Republican presidential candidate other than Palin been able to force the New York Times to concede that he or she put Obama on the defensive? Has any other potential Republican presidential candidate other than Palin destroyed a liberal policy to such an extent that the Democrat Party is afraid to publicize what it is doing and can only get it implemented through channels outside of the legislative arena?

And how many times has Sarah Palin led from the front while other GOP candidates have waited in the wings afraid to engage? This is what a leader does.

As for polls, forgetting that they are a snapshot in time people are forgetting that a presidential primary is in the works and the candidates running not named Palin need their supporters to attack her since they don’t dare to so on their own. There are plenty in the GOP how see Palin as a threat to their prerogatives and their power and will be happy to help the media along in trying to destroy her as long as they are not seen as doing so.

If only NY and Mass. had ended celibacy they would not have lost seats in redistricting

Posted: December 22, 2010 by datechguy in catholic, congress
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A few weeks ago a column by Bonnie Erbe to nobody’s surprise who is paying attention (PBS on their online site actually refers to her as “non-partisan” which says more about PBS than it does about her) noted church closing in the East and painted it as a result of the old church orthodoxy:

Dogmatic, dictatorial churches do not resound with today’s spirituality, and young people are not clamoring to join them. So sending a message that says, in essence, “Follow my rules or go to hell” might be a good way of retaining older parishioners used to such harsh boundaries. But as elderly parishioners die off, they take the church’s message with them.

I live in a city where 4 Catholic churches recently closed and it is a shame to see churches close in NY and other urban areas, yet lets look at Dave Weigel’s column today about redistricting which links to this rather good 8 decade chart at the NY Times and what do we see? We see a flight of people not from the church but in general from particular states.

More and more of the faithful youth are fleeing high tax liberal states and settling elsewhere as Michael Barone writes:

Texas’ diversified economy, business-friendly regulations and low taxes have attracted not only immigrants but substantial inflow from the other 49 states. As a result, the 2010 reapportionment gives Texas four additional House seats. In contrast, California gets no new House seats, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.

There’s a similar lesson in the fact that Florida gains two seats in the reapportionment and New York loses two.

This leads to a second point, which is that growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

I suspect that if you want to see where the church is growing and thriving just follow that electoral population.

My oldest son is a solid Catholic who is going to college on a full academic scholarship. As soon as he graduates he plans on getting out of this state and I can’t say as I blame him.

So Bonnie rather than your argument concerning the empty churches I would refer you to Stacy McCain’s explaining the demographic facts of life and Ed Driscoll who says this:

And it seems rather difficult to build an emerging Democratic majority when two of the most prominent “liberal” cities in America (very much in name only, given the mammoth regulatory mazes and bureaucratic armies these cities come equipped with) have such poor future demographics. Or as Mark Steyn, who inspired our headline above with this classic 2006 article, wrote about Europe’s similar (and not at all coincidental) demographic woes, “what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”

As even Illinois, which is among the democratic states losing a congressional seat, is learning you can’t vote the dead if you oppose them being born.

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