Posted on 04/09/2005 1:10:47 PM PDT by CHARLITE
The phrase, “Level Playing Field,” was coined in the 1980s, according to The Phrase Finder, to mean fair competition with no advantage to either side.
Today, I hear this phrase used more often in politics—from both the Left and the Right. Somehow, I think this phrase has become contaminated, depending on one’s viewpoint or naiveté.
Coming from the Right, this probably means “idealism.” Coming, though, from the Left, I suspect that it means that they want welfare from the USA, or they prefer to blame the USA for its capitalism and imperialism and look to either Socialism or Communism as the better form of government.
Take the Kyoto Protocol: European nations and environmentalists from all over blame the USA or President Bush for not signing this treaty. The USA just does not want to save the world from so-called environmental disasters, they imply. But it received overwhelming opposition in the U.S. Congress - the Senate rejected it 95-0. President Bush said Kyoto regulations would be overly burdensome to U.S. industry at a time when businesses were struggling against a slowing economy. The Kyoto Protocol was supposed to provide all the countries with a level playing field to prevent global warming. The problem seemed to be that it would only ruin our economy and that the science it was based upon was a simple fraud. No wonder the fastest growing economy in the world, China, also rejected it (as did every other nation, save one)..
Another example of how leftists view the level playing field: Meet Mark LeVine, an academic known not for his music but for his steady stream of anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes from a Marxist perspective. LaVine’s views present Washington and Jerusalem as aggressors in a war against Islam. He’s a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of California-Irvine (UCI).
Tzvi Kahn is an intern with the Middle East Forum and has written about LeVine for The Front Page -- http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17449
LeVine,” Mr. Kahn writes, “has performed with Mick Jagger, Johnny Copeland, Chuck D, Albert Collins, and Ben E. King. He considers himself, with his long blond hair and penchant for aging rock stars, a ‘disgruntled ex-hippie,’ who renounced his Jewish faith in his late teens after witnessing his father’s death, as well as ‘a lot of suffering and injustice.’ A liberal antiwar activist who frequently guest-stars at ‘peace’ rallies across the country, he views globalization, capitalism, and any form of nationalism - especially American and Jewish - as forces of evil that do nothing but foment war and misery.”
LeVine views any nation that attempts to assert a distinct identity as inherently immoral. ‘What I am is anti-nationalist,’ LeVine told the Orange County Register. ‘Each nation has an exclusive identity, and that’s been an abysmal failure. They need to imagine an identity that isn’t dependent upon excluding the other. Israel,’ he says, ‘As the occupying power bears primary responsibility for the continued conflict,’ and constitutes a ‘belligerent,’ ‘autocratic,’ and ‘violent’ regime that should receive no funding from the West.
Thus, LeVine effectively reduces his worldview to a simplistic dichotomy of oppressor vs. oppressed, powerful vs. weak, rich vs. poor. Nations that retain any sort of national identity are abhorrent, especially if they are successful. Not surprisingly, in many of his writings, LeVine deliberately places “war on terrorism” in quotation marks - the evil of airplanes destroying skyscrapers can hardly compare with the evil of capitalism destroying, well, communism.
In other words, this is Mr. LeVine’s example of a “level playing field.”
Even within our own borders, we find that the Democrats have their own definition of a level playing field. Many Democrats really want to stack the courts with permissive, liberal judges who will continue to change the Constitution into a Socialist document!
But most Republicans believe that our Federal judges must be Constitutional judges and not be allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch.
Such usurpation will continue to happen as long as the Democrats filibuster the Bush appointments for Federal and Supreme Court judges.
The Democrats demand political litmus tests when experience and knowledge should be the only test.
The Republicans can stop this by simply returning to the majority vote. It is not a so-called nuclear option; it is simply the tried and true method always used in prior years to appoint judges. Speaker Hastert and others must act! Give appointees the up or down vote!
The phrase, “Level Playing Field,” has outlived its usefulness. It needs to go out with a lot of other former buzzwords and catch-phrases that have lost their original meanings and were used only to confuse voters emotionally.
About the Writer: Lee Ellis is a retired journalist and a former vice president of both CBS and Gannet. He resides in Indio, California, where he write op-eds that appear in several local newspapers. Lee receives e-mail at indiolee@dc.rr.com.
Clearly Mark LeVine is one of the many "little Ward Churchills" now poisoning our colleges and universities.
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