I hate to say it, but I despise all liberals and dislike moderates.
Present company excluded, there is a lot of truth in what Goldberg says.
Too many of today's "liberals", in particular those in the media, are putting a mean-spirited face on the persuasion.
And many people who think they are liberal actually have more in common with conservatives than with those who claim to speak for them.
But I don't consider this making me "as bad as them." Because how you fight is not what makes you better. What you fight for is. I'm sure they feel the same way, but that doesn't mean that this is, then, a deadlock. One has to look and see whose policies, when implemented, have done what over the years. It's evident what Marxism has done. Therefore, my side is objectively right, and I don't have to be charming about it to be on the correct side.
But that's JMHO.
Oh, no.
I don't think he "wishes they would drop off the face of the earth".
This is what happens when leftists come to power:
If he and his ilk get his way and turn this fine land into a socialist, quasi-communist country, he may get his wish because governments of those types have a tendancy to imprison and/or execute those who don't graduate with high grades from the re-education camps.
What he also doesn't realize is that those governments force bootlickers like Alterman back into anyonymity (sp?) as just another worker for the State.
Berie, me lad, yer just a'whistlin' past the graveyard on this one.
American Civil War II bump.
He has been snippy and all out of sorts
at Bush he's really p*ssed
Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist
He has had migraines and he has had cramps
oh, why must these pains persist
Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist
Out of control
he's an a-hole
He writes his B.S. in the Nation
Eric needs new medication
Down on his kneepads when Clinton would call
he'd say "If you insist"
Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist
Out of control
he's an a-hole
He writes his B.S. in the Nation
Eric needs new medication
Girly man Eric warns FReepers they'll get
a slap with his limp wrist
Poor Eric Alterman needs a
he's desperate and needs right away
A new gynecologist
"They despise Attorney General John Ashcroft, whom many are convinced is a bigger menace to America than Osama bin Laden."
"Liberals" are a greater danger to America than Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaida, and all America's foreign enemies combined, because they are the enablers.
So funny how liberals love to think of themselves as the smart ones. There are piles of smart liberals, but they're only smart enough to screw everything up. They're smart enough to question the old dogmas -- the ones that conservatives hang on to -- and to view them as retrograde, but they're not smart enough to understand why the old dogmas are good. This is because even simple-seeming dogmas are good for very complex reasons, more complex than even smart liberals understand.
Here's an analogy.
"Eat your vegetables: doing so will keep you healthy" is a time-honored piece of understanding about nutrition. Conservatives will accept this as true and live accordingly, even if many can't explain the science behind why eating vegetables has positive effects on the body -- the phytochemicals, the anti-oxidants, the effects on the endocrine system, the cumulative systemic effects of the enzymes, etc, etc..
A liberal will then come along and accuse the conservative of being dogmatic, stuck in the past, blockheaded, etc. Why, "eat your vegetables" is a simplistic relic of the past! We have progressed to new things -- multivitamins, beta-blockers, man-made insulin! We don't have to eat our vegetables any more because we have drugs and things that'll force the body to be healthy!
And he'll think he's smart. But he's really only smart enough to have caused complex new problems. The drug solution appears to be superior to the old "eat your vegetables" approach -- drugs work instantly and save you the labor of preparing vegetables and the drudgery of eating them -- but drugs have unintended side effects and ultimately they degrade and undermine the body. The catch is that onset of the side effects and the degradation may be delayed, or it may not be immediately evident that they are the result of eating pills rather than vegetables, and so the liberal will continue to believe in his wisdom.
This is where true intelligence and wisdom steps in -- the knowledgeable conservative. He knows that the old "eat your vegetables" approach lacks the instant gratification and appearance of progress that comes with drugs and vitamins, but he knows that, in the end, the discipline of eating your vegetables will be of the greatest benefit, that the good effects might be slow to manifest themselves but that they will be systemic and real, and that the most fundamental -- the most real -- requirements of the body will be satisfied. He understands that the body is massively complex, full of fragile interdependent chemical relationships and finely-tuned self-levelling feedback loops that rely on the presence of certain nutrients and compounds -- things that vegetables will supply but pills will not. In other words, the old "eat your vegetables" dogma is correct for very complex reasons.
The perfect real-life example of this is affirmative action. Joe Conservative says affirmative action is bad because it's a form of institutionalized descrimination, that, instead, all men should be equal before the law, that the government should be colorblind -- in other words, he posits the old dogmas. A liberal then comes along, tells Joe Conservative he's dumb or reactionary or whatever and that progress requires the government to force race relations in a certain direction, which means abandoning old notions of equal treatment under the law. He'll consider himself very clever for this. But the intelligent conservative will understand that there are all sorts of unintended negative consequences that come with using the coercive powers of government to change society's behavior, that the true solution is will be systemic and will require work and deep-seated changes in attitude and probably some risk-taking by the society itself, from within itself in order to fix itself -- i.e. that people will have to suck it up and learn to establish healthy relationships with each other -- i.e. that society will have to *eat its vegetables*. The reasons for problems in race relations are complex and deep and must be corrected with deep sytemic solutions, not government quick fixes which seem clever -- and which require that we jettison our traditional understanding of things -- but which really are pretty dumb.
< / odd ramble about vegetables >