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Victor Davis Hanson: Democratic Suicide
NRO ^ | 5/6/2005 | Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on 05/06/2005 5:26:24 AM PDT by Tolik

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To: randita
As Rush asserts, the Democrat party has been hijacked by their kook fringe

My bet is Rush will refer to this article today on his program.

21 posted on 05/06/2005 6:00:54 AM PDT by GWB00
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To: johnb838
If the republicans keep pandering and posturing and not believing their own rhetoric, the rat's may get a chance to pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

Lotta truth to that. This is the time to press home the advantage. Carefully, to be sure, but steadily, unapologetically, and over the whining objections of the has-been Left.

22 posted on 05/06/2005 6:02:06 AM PDT by IronJack
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To: IronJack

Thank you Internet.....just think if the Liberals STILL had control of the media and what we were fed. Great article. Yes the truth always wins out...actions over words....people know it and understand it and WANT it.


23 posted on 05/06/2005 6:08:04 AM PDT by Youngman442002
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To: Tolik
When we see Democrats speaking and living like normal folks — expressing worry that the United States must return to basic education and values to ensure its shaky preeminence in a cutthroat world, talking of one multiracial society united by a rare exceptional culture of the West rather than a salad bowl of competing races and tribes, and apprising the world that we are principled abroad in our support of democratic nations and quite dangerous when attacked — they will be competitive again.

It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for this to occur.

Capitalism is their enemy and buying votes by dividing us into groups is their only hope for power, therefore none of the above is possible, IMHO.

24 posted on 05/06/2005 6:09:31 AM PDT by wayoverontheright
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To: Tolik
And when you add in cracks about Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and the "Christian Right" — all the things the more cultured avoid — then the architects of a supposedly populist party seem to be ignorant of their own constituencies.

He left out the generalized insulting of non-coastal regions, particularly the south. Now they have Howard Dean trying to talk about Jesus in Tennessee. I just hope he figured out that the Book of Job is in the Old Testament.

"High taxes, government regulation, racial quotas, and more entitlements won't hurt me since I have so much money at my own disposal anyway, but will at least make me feel good that we are transferring capital to the less fortunate."

I have always felt that this is why the ultra-wealthy are often liberals. If you take a percentage of infinite wealth, you basically still have infinite wealth. Simply put, they don't want us to work our way up to their level and have us barge in on the Country Club.

25 posted on 05/06/2005 6:12:54 AM PDT by AZ_Cowboy ("Be ever vigilant, for you know not when the master is coming")
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To: Tolik
The Democrat's posture is wide of the mark on a great deal. They refuse to recognize that race and class are dead letters for American voters. What is more, the Democrats have long since dug their heels in on the defense issue. Their traditional anti-defense posture coupled with their accusations that: 1.) we should not have gone to Iraq/Afghanistan at all, and 2.) we were not prepared and will require massive and costly military upgrades to continue, is a very tidy piece of BS. How is it that we are the aggressors in this and at the same time were not prepared? This is a perfectly asinine thing to propose to anyone. ONLY aggressors are prepared!!! If we were not prepared, it is because we were not and are not the aggressors in this!!! The whole terrorist agenda is a lesson, albeit a late one, that our guard had been let down and that we failed to for see the worst. Who is to blame for that 'peace has broken out' view of things?
26 posted on 05/06/2005 6:18:55 AM PDT by SMARTY
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To: Tolik

BRAVO!!!!


27 posted on 05/06/2005 6:19:56 AM PDT by Uncledave (I want blue fingers!!!)
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To: Tolik
Outstanding article.

I want in.

28 posted on 05/06/2005 6:21:51 AM PDT by ProudGOP
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To: wayoverontheright

I agree with you. Under their current conditions regarding their financial and reliable political base, they simply cannot conduct effective outreach to the Red Regions. The commentariat and indeed the party officials themselves have fashioned their shtick almost exclusively around lambasting and making cruel humor out of the folks in the Heartland.

It isn't just the anti-capitalism that offends folks in "Flyover Country". Much of what is written in their affiliate columns and is broadcast over the airwaves is very insulting and demeaning from a personal standpoint. Not everyone will have the facts on socialism versus capitalism as we do on FR because not everyone follows news 24/7. They absolutely WILL remember when they get referred to as a bunch of dumb hicks, however. Because of this alone, even if the Dems were on their best behavior starting today, they will have to wait an entire generation. Honor is not a lightly traded copmmodity.

Of course, they have not been on their best behavior. Even when Dean tries to get ahead by doing Jesus talk, the folks see it as disingenuous, and you still have all those "brain-dead" and "low-brow" quotes from the election. Bill Maher was out doing this just a few days ago. Actually, I would say since the election that the heat has been turned up on the inhabitants of the red regions, which will unquestionably cause an even greater backlash the next time around.


29 posted on 05/06/2005 6:22:08 AM PDT by AZ_Cowboy ("Be ever vigilant, for you know not when the master is coming")
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To: AZ_Cowboy
I have always felt that this is why the ultra-wealthy are often liberals. If you take a percentage of infinite wealth, you basically still have infinite wealth. Simply put, they don't want us to work our way up to their level and have us barge in on the Country Club.

Cowboy you nailed it! Exactly. Liberals are nothing really other than benovolent( in fact, malevolent) plantation slave owners.

30 posted on 05/06/2005 6:22:22 AM PDT by mc5cents
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To: AZ_Cowboy

That would be commodity, of course.


31 posted on 05/06/2005 6:23:40 AM PDT by AZ_Cowboy ("Be ever vigilant, for you know not when the master is coming")
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To: Tolik

The Democrats will start winning again in 2006 'cause the 'Pubbies are spending like Democrats, won't tackle important issues like immigration and don't yet seem to have found their spines.
And if the Republicans don't find a decent candidate, we can look forward to Hillary! for President in 2009.


32 posted on 05/06/2005 6:27:51 AM PDT by Little Ray (I'm a reactionary, hirsute, gun-owning, knuckle dragging, Christian Neanderthal and proud of it!)
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To: Tolik
In a word, Democratic ideology and rhetoric have not evolved from the 1960s, although the vast majority of Americans has — and an astute Republican leadership knows it.

And the remarkable thing is that they keep breeding generation after generation of mental deficients, many quite educated, who fit this description perfectly:

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Incompetence is bliss

Culture/Society Humor
Source: SJ Mercury
Published: 1/18/00 Author: Erica Goode
Posted on 01/18/2000 10:52:41 PST by tpaine

Incompetence is bliss, say researchers

BY ERICA GOODE

New York Times

There are many incompetent people in the world. But a Cornell University study has shown that most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

People who do things badly, according to David A. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence. The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, the researchers -- Dunning and Justin Kruger, then a graduate student -- suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,´´ wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,´´ the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

Some college students, Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: After doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong. In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate´´ how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Aiming high -- real high

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored in only the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically correct standard English´´ and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an ``expert´´ panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the ``false consensus effect.´´ When high-scoring subjects were asked to ``grade´´ the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

``Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,´´ the researchers concluded. In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``he who knows best knows how little he knows.´´

Such studies are not without critics. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California-Riverside, for example, said he suspected that most lay people had only a vague idea of the meaning of ``average´´ in statistical terms. But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated that there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it.

Concrete clues

In some cases, Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own inability is inevitable: ``In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you´re incompetent,´´ he said.

But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And social norms prevent most people, when faced with incompetence, from blurting out, ``You stink!´´ -- truthful though this assessment may be.


Hmmm, paraphrasing a bit; -- Those who score in the lowest quarter in logic, grammar & humor tests THINK they are way 'above average' in those categories..

Explains a lot of the flaming going on around here, doesn't it?

1 Posted on 01/18/2000 10:52:41 PST by tpaine
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33 posted on 05/06/2005 6:28:00 AM PDT by Publius6961 (The most abundant things in the universe are ignorance, stupidity and hydrogen)
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To: Tolik

Excellent article! Yet another luminary from the Hoover Institution.


34 posted on 05/06/2005 6:30:54 AM PDT by hispanichoosier
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To: dawn53; Mo1

He'll be in MA on the 14th at the state Dem convention. Seems the state Dems want gay-marriage in their platform. Yesterday, he made an official statement honoring Cinco de Mayo! Other than that, he's been down south preaching communism to empty auditoriums.


35 posted on 05/06/2005 6:31:11 AM PDT by johnny7 (Ever wonder what's the 'crust' in 'Ol Crusty'?)
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To: Tolik

Great article.


36 posted on 05/06/2005 6:35:23 AM PDT by jveritas (The Left cannot win a national election ever again.)
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To: Little Ray
Doom and Gloom.

If you read the above article in a more open mind than your obsession with the immigration issue, you know why the Democrats with their current left wing ideology and leadership will never win again.

37 posted on 05/06/2005 6:37:47 AM PDT by jveritas (The Left cannot win a national election ever again.)
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To: AZ_Cowboy

He left out the generalized insulting of non-coastal regions, particularly the south.

Have you ever noticed (on TV or in a movie) our hero pulls into a small town you just KNOW the town is a hotbed of (take your choice 1 racism, 2 corruption 3 murder..etc) and the only one who is fighting this is (usually) a single mother who's working as a waitress (for below minimum wage of course) and going to night school to learn to be a lawyer. The town sheriff is obviously corrupt, the pastor of the local church is 1 a pedophile 2 beats his wife 3 a closet nazi, and if not one of these he's a wilber milktoast.


38 posted on 05/06/2005 6:45:55 AM PDT by Valin (There is no sense in being pessimistic. It would not work anyway)
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To: Tolik
In fact, a close look at a map of red/blue counties nationwide suggests that the Democrats are in deepening trouble.

Good! I hope they keep digging that big old hole and stay in there for a LONG time!

39 posted on 05/06/2005 6:50:55 AM PDT by SuziQ
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To: jveritas

Not doom and gloom. I remember the American Spectator crying about the end of the Right with the election of the Clintons. It sounded plausible and I actually bought it at the time. This reads the same to me... but I ain't buyin' this time, if only because relying on the mistakes of our enemies is foolish.

If the Republicans and the Right want to keep winning, they have to keep earning it. Right now, they are not doin' so well...


40 posted on 05/06/2005 7:02:06 AM PDT by Little Ray (I'm a reactionary, hirsute, gun-owning, knuckle dragging, Christian Neanderthal and proud of it!)
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