Posted on 10/10/2007 7:50:16 AM PDT by goldstategop
Based on a thorough examination of the historical record, I have concluded that the prototypical modern liberal wasn't Norman Thomas, Dr. Spock, Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern, but the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking Glass."
Consider the following exchange:
"I can't believe that," said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for a half-hour a day. Why, I've sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
More than unworkable, liberal ideas are preposterous, impossible - refuted by logic and human experience.
That liberals continue to believe the impossible is due to their peculiar mental makeup. Liberals believe what they want to believe, the overwhelming weight of evidence notwithstanding. Once a liberal stops clinging to certain illusions central to his worldview, he stops being a liberal.
Here are 10 impossible things liberals believe before breakfast - and for the rest of the day.
1. Conflicts are due to misunderstandings. This principle is starkly illustrated by celebrity-cum-political thinker Rosie O'Donnell's comment on The View: "Don't fear the terrorists. They're mothers and fathers." (Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels -- a man to be feared -- was the father of six. Ma Barker - well, you get the idea.)
In the liberal weltanschauung, folks are folks. Conflict is due to our failure to understand the terrorists, who want the same things we want. (Haven't we all had the urge to blow up a 747 in mid-flight?) We should take all of the money in the defense budget and the Department of Homeland Security and put it into a massive PR campaign to help Jihad International understand us, and to educate ourselves about the hopes and dreams of those who cut off the heads of hostages and engage in "honor killing."
This impossible idea is rooted in the unshakable belief that there is no evil in the world -- that rape, serial killing, genocide and Hillary are due to psychological abnormalities or a failure to socialize the young.
Whenever some monster does something atrocious to Americans, the first question liberals ask is: What did we do that caused them to misunderstand us so?
The liberal attitude toward looming annihilation may be seen in the character of President Whitmore in the 1996 movie, "Independence Day." Encountering a captured alien in Area 51, Whitmore first pleads for a truce (can't we all just learn to get along). The alien, whose race has just blown up half the Earth, chillingly replies "No truce." In desperation, Whitmore asks, "What do you want us to do?" The alien responds, "Die." After the visitor from another planet tries to kill him telepathically, Whitmore orders the brass, "Nuke the bastards!" - making the fastest transition on record from liberal to conservative.
The terrorists understand us all too well. They know we choose freedom over slavery. They know that we won't convert to their dark-ages religion. Hence, they want us to die.
2. Peace through weakness - or, weapons cause wars. This is a corollary of #1, and an application of the liberal dictum "guns cause crime" to national security.
In the world according to Cindy Sheehan (and Martin Sheen, for that matter), the more weapons we have, the more we will be tempted to use them. (So, why didn't we use nuclear weapons during the Cold War?) You might say liberals have a pronounced military-industrial complex.
Liberals believe you get peace by spending less on defense and more on social programs. Recall the classic liberal bumper sticker, "It will be a great day when public schools have all the money they need and the military has to hold bake sales." (Were that the case, the schools would still produce functional illiterates.)
Did Germany invade Poland in 1939 because it wanted the challenge of taking on a superior military force? Was Pearl Harbor due to the Japanese perception of U.S. strength? Does a 200-lb man attack a 110-lb woman because he thinks she'll beat him to a bloody pulp?
The same demented pacifism that would make unarmed homeowners the prey of armed criminals, would see America reduced to hiding in darkened corners while international thugs run rampant.
3. Guns cause crime - This impossible idea is based on the liberal dictum that inanimate objects (guns) have the free will individuals lack - that the trigger pulls the finger. Since they can't blame crime on bad people (because there are no bad people), guns must take the fall.
If guns cause crime, why do states with easy access to firearms (the Dakotas, Vermont, Washington State) have lower crime rates than tough-gun control states like New York, California, Maryland and DC?
When the number of guns in America increased by 40 million during the 1990s, the nation should have been awash in blood. Instead, the murder rate declined by 40 % nationwide.
Guns don't kill people. Liberal ideas do.
4. Health Care is a human right - This is the foundation of Hillary's presidential campaign - that we all have a right to affordable, quality health care.
But why do we have a right to affordable, quality health care and not affordable, quality transportation - a Mercedes in every garage, with zero percent down, and low monthly payments stretched out over the next 20 years?
To say that I'm entitled to quality health care means someone else is obligated to provide me with same. Who? My doctor? The local hospital? The shareholders of companies that offer medical insurance? A taxpayer who earns more than me? One who earns less than me?
In one public opinion poll, 44% of Americans said health care should be free (provided by the government). But nothing is free. Every good and service has to be produced or provided by someone.
Believe it or not, there is a relationship between the spiraling cost of medical services and the fact that government spends one of every three health-care dollars. Hillary-care is a prescription for runaway costs, waste, bureaucracy and rationing - in other words, the health-care systems of Canada and the United Kingdom, where, if you're over 65, you can die waiting for a hip replacement or dialysis.
5. Global warming is man-made. Of course it is. That's why they were growing crops in Greenland 1,000 year ago - because of global warming caused by carbon-dioxide emissions from all of the 11th century cars and factories. `
The Global Warming cultists appear to be unaware that the earth has periodically warmed and cooled over millennia, instead of remaining a constant 73.6 degrees.
Global warming is the latest excuse for the liberals' favorite pastimes - levying taxes and building bureaucracies. "Plan Uses Taxes to Fight Climate Change," read the headline in a September 26 Washington Post story.
Rep. John Dingel (a - would you believe it? -- Democrat) wants to raise the federal gas and jet fuels tax by 50-cents-a-gallon over 5 years, plus levy a new tax of $50 -a-ton on carbon released by burning coal, petroleum or natural gas. Soon, we won't be able to drive, heat our homes or work. But we can all sit shivering in the dark contemplating our contributions to the lifestyles of polar bears and penguins.
As the left has been trying to repeal the industrial revolution since at least the '60s, you might say that if global warming didn't exist, liberals would have to invent it. As a matter of fact, they did.
6. Condom distribution in the schools promotes responsible behavior. Liberals won't go so far as to say that condoms promote abstinence (a concept they consider archaic anyway). Instead, they tell us that since adolescents are going to "do it" anyway, a condom will keep them from getting pregnant or contracting what we used to call a social disease.
Liberals imagine latex will keep kids safe from the unintended consequences of intimacy, notwithstanding that teen sexual activity often coincides with heavy drinking and drug use. Perhaps public schools should have kids practice putting condoms on bananas while they're stoned or drunk.
The past three decades have seen an upsurge of mechanics-of-sex education and contraceptive giveaways. Still, 3 in 10 teenaged girls become pregnant before age 20. There are 19 million new STD (sexually transmitted disease) infections in the U.S. each year, half of them among 15 to 24 year-olds. Half of sexually active youth will contract an STD by age 25.
Could it be that the belief that condoms are foolproof encourages behavior that kids would otherwise think twice about indulging in? Naw, couldn't possibly be that.
And even if condoms worked 100% of the time, how responsible is it for 15-year-olds to engage in acts that can have far-reaching psychological, if not physical, consequences?
Condoms are the answer to teen sexuality for those who don't take sex seriously.
7. The Courts are champions of democracy and human rights. In reality, U.S. courts have become the principal obstacle to democracy and threat to human rights.
Various courts, state and federal, have overturned referendum (often passed by super-majorities) defending marriage, approving official English and denying public benefits to illegal aliens.
Many courts, especially appeals courts, use the Constitution as a hunting license - a carte blanche to shoot down popularly enacted measures of which they disapprove. If that's democracy, Stalin was a democrat.
In 2005, the United States Supreme Court held local government can seize private property for commercial use. In her dissent, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (who rarely showed restraint in exercising judicial power) correctly observed: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."
Courts regularly trample on the rights of taxpayers, gun owners, parents (especially when it comes to the education of their children) and citizens trying to stem the tide of illegal immigration. This is done in pursuit of what judges imagine to be the greater good.
If a judge doesn't like an outcome of the democratic process - and he can think of an excuse -- he'll nullify it. If he doesn't like the way you exercise a fundamental right, he'll stop you - all in the name of human rights and democracy. Savor the irony.
8. Gay marriage will have no discernible impact on the institution of marriage. In the early '70s, liberals told us no-fault divorce wouldn't have a negative impact on families. In the same era, they said day-care wouldn't hinder early childhood development. A decade earlier, they predicted that giving welfare to women and children - provided that there's no man in the household - wouldn't destabilize the family.
Now, it's Barney Frank bloviating, "How will my marriage affect your family?" When it comes to doing good for the family, liberals have an unblemished record of failure.
How will same-sex marriage harm the normal kind? By making the union of a man and women - the, you, know, kind that produces kids, and nurtures them, and raises them - just another social arrangement. No special status, no special benefits. When the traditional family loses its uniqueness, it becomes just another thing - instead of the thing.
When cohabitation became a respectable alternative to marriage, we got less marriage. When heterosexual marriage becomes one of many types of marriage, the trend will accelerate.
9. Another amnesty is the solution to the illegal immigration crisis.
Stalin used to say, "No man. No problem." That's the way liberals view illegal immigration. Declare an amnesty, forgive those who've broken our immigration laws, and - presto, chango! -- no more illegals.
Except for future waves of illegal aliens who are drawn here by the not unreasonable expectation that someday they'll be amnestied too, allowing them to receive government benefits, bring in their extended families, etc.
Regarding an amnesty, the liberal motto should be: Build it - a fat, rich republic with porous borders that periodically forgives those who enter the country illegally -- and they won't come.
10. The way to end political corruption is to get money out of politics. The way to end political corruption is to end greed and power-lust - which is another way of saying: to change human nature. Liberals would never consider the alternative: Combat political corruption by limiting political power.
Every time liberals pass another campaign "reform," politicians and interest groups devise a way to get around it. Thus the 1974 Campaign Finance Act begat political action committees, while McCain-Feingold begat 527s.
When it comes to trying to end the influence of money on political campaigns, liberals are like the proverbial dog chasing its tail - with an FEC filing tied to it.
How can any adult with an IQ above room temperature believe the above absurdities? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.
Hillary's been practicing believing the impossible since her years at Wellesley, in an era when impossible ideas captivated a generation.
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things: Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing wax, of cabbages and ideas bouncing around in the otherwise empty craniums of would-be kings and queens.
And why the sea is boiling hot - And whether pigs have wings
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Pretty well written, I’m gonna put that on a forum I’m on with a couple of Soviets and see their answers.
Great article. Now I understand why so many liberals like Star Trek. Thanks for posting it!
Guns don't kill people. Liberal ideas do.
"...the compassion of the wicked is cruel." - Proverbs 12:10b
Faster even than Dennis Miller.
ping
Awesome and pretty comprehensive. I’d have loved to add something about the way liberals can believe the Constitution says the opposite of its actual statements (especially in the case of the First Amendment saying religions should not have an effect on government rather than the opposite, but many other examples abound) ... but other than that quibble, this is a great article.
ping
Didn’t the libs used to refer to “Through the Looking Glass” a lot?
I like Star Trek, too... But I happen to recognize it is fiction - and even doubt that we’ll ever discover a means for faster-than-light travel: an essential precondition for the show.
Standard operating procedure for liberals?
bttt
“Believe it or not, there is a relationship between the spiraling cost of medical services and the fact that government spends one of every three health-care dollars. Hillary-care is a prescription for runaway costs, waste, bureaucracy and rationing - in other words, the health-care systems of Canada and the United Kingdom, where, if you’re over 65, you can die waiting for a hip replacement or dialysis.”
WOOT!
[I can’t believe you didn’t ping me!]
BTTT
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save
‘How can any adult with an IQ above room temperature believe the above absurdities? ‘
Easy, they just relabel themselves as ‘progressives’.....(chuckle)
Or some pretend to be ‘libertarians’ in my experience....of course they can’t explain how a liberatarian believes in gun control...
What you're thinking about is this: Liberals believe the Constitution is a living, breathing document, and should be updated periodically to reflect society's "needs."
Thanks for posting this. Well written.
5. Global warming is man-made. Of course it is. That’s why they were growing crops in Greenland 1,000 year ago - because of global warming caused by carbon-dioxide emissions from all of the 11th century cars and factories.
***Nice little zinger that sorta wraps up the whole Global Warming nonsense in 1 sentence.
LOL! This really sums it up.
To a liberal, the ability to see as possible something that others see as impossible is a sign of brilliance, regardless of whether the thing in question actually is possible.
Further, to the extent that the world fails to behave as their world view says it should indicates not that their view is defective, but rather that the world is (since their view is better than the world, the defect must lie with the clearly-inferior world).
There's a considerable "Emperor's New Clothes" to liberalism, that appears in many fields. People who are convinced that it's desirable to see things are apt to see them whether it exists or not. Further, they may well believe the desirability of seeing such things is independent of their actual existence.
As a hobby, I try to make old microprocessor systems do the impossible. Sometimes I spend a few hours figuring an approach which "should" work, but I try it out on real hardware and it doesn't. No matter how much I may wish that the real hardware would behave as I want, though, I recognize that the problem is with what I'm trying to do; it may or may not be possible, but certainly not the way I'm currently trying to do it.
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