Posted on 11/04/2009 7:19:01 AM PST by opentalk
Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of "speaking truth to power." Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?
Simple: She's a liberal.
As a liberal she carries around in her head the liberal paradigm of how the world works and what needs to be done to make it work better. There's nothing wrong with that. We all use paradigms to make sense of what we see around us and couldn't get along without them. Unfortunately, the basic liberal paradigm hasn't shifted in a hundred years, while the world we live in has changed utterly since the late 19th century, when modern liberalism was born.
What is that paradigm? The basic premise is that the population is divided into three groups. By far the largest group consists of ordinary people. They are good, God fearing and hard working. But they are also often ignorant of their true self-interest ("What's the matter with Kansas?") and thus easily misled. They are also politically weak and thus need to be protected from the second group, which is politically strong.
...Thus the liberal paradigm divides the American body politic into sheep, wolves, and would-be shepherds. The shepherds must defeat the efforts of the wolves.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Her “speaking truth to power” comment left me with the impression she has no clue where she is, how she got there, and how things work. Out of Her League.
We cannot continue to think that the government can do everything for us and continue to be free citizens. We have to start learning to rely on our own God given abilities. If you read history, the roaring twenties was the prelude to the depression. The market was full of speculation, the over expansion of the money supply and unstable credit boom. It was also exasperated by the over spending of the government to drive consumer spending up and to restart the economy through public works programs. This was the democratic and Carl Marx redistribution of wealth theory. It was the hand of big government creating big deficits and micro-managing all facets of the economy. It was also the theory by the democrats to reduce international trade and put in place retaliatory trade tariffs (protectionism) which in turn caused the opposite affect and American exports declined extensively. I won’t go on with the history lesson but, does all this sound familiar? Herbert Hoover who was a Republican and Roosevelt the Democrat were the constructors of the “new deal” which tried to spend our way out which we now know did not work. Folks, we are repeating the past and we need to see that for what it is. Read about the great depression do your own home work it is now 1929.
Great article. Thanks for posting.
It took WWII to bring us out of the last depression.
Lets all pray it doesn’t take WWIII to bring us out of this one. We may not survive it.
Actually, it was during the Eisenhour administration when all the socialist programs of FDR were repealed.
If you count all those in the military as not doing civilian jobs, there was a great under-employment until the 1950s.
Was that between the Truemann administration and the Kenaddy administration?
Regards,
Actually, this is incorrect and inherent in it is the Keysian assumption that massive government spending (in the case of the Depression and WWII, military spending) can get the economy going; actually, it wasn't until years after the end of WWII and the beginning of the dismantling of FDR's socialism that the economy actually got going again. Ironically, progressives aka "liberals" like to use this assumption to justify massive government spending programs (just as long as it's for "social programs" and not for the military).
We do operate from paradigms. There is a liberal paradigm. There is a conservative paradigm. Both are based on historical realities (and perceptions) and are slow to catch up with reality. I’m hoping to see a good rebutal-ish piece to this, because I think this idea is interesting but misses the mark.... Most liberals simply do not think in terms quite this paired-down...it’s close..but off.
Oddly, the prefect lead-in for a piece on how out-of-touch conservatives are is found in the closing remarks: most Americans do NOT have college degrees! Most Americans that writers for newspapers know, yes....I believe the number is about 28%.
John Tantillo just published a piece on his marketing blog that links to this post and say’s it’s right-on: http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2009/11/09/tantillos-brand-winner-and-loser-the-republican-party-and-the-democratic-party.aspx
I at least agree with his assertion that both parties should be using Facts to Market (i.e. communicate) to their Target Market. (28% college grads is a fact..) This was my favorite part of the piece:
“Poli-marketing dictates that when you lose an election, you take the loss as some serious data collection and scour the data for everything that it is telling you about not meeting the needs of your Target Market. Well, if people like Paul Krugman are any indication —i.e., blame the voter not the candidate— then the Democrats will be more inclined to blame Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for the losses than to see the data as a repudiation of their own agenda. So just what are Krugman and these other geniuses thinking? They’re not thinking… they’re being driven by what they want to believe —not what the data is telling them.”
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