Posted on 12/22/2014 4:22:36 AM PST by IBD editorial writer
Just about every year at this time, "A Christmas Carol' shows up somewhere on TV, as do headlines about how one Republican or another is the modern equivalent of the tale's greedy miser, Ebenezer Scrooge.
"The GOP's sad Scrooge agenda." "GOP Protecting Ebenezer Scrooge." "Maher Likens Republicans to Ebenezer Scrooge." "Republicans play the role of the stingy Scrooge."
You have to wonder if these folks have actually read "A Christmas Carol" or spent any time pondering what Scrooge actually says and does. Because if you do, you come to realize that Scrooge more closely resembles a modern liberal than a conservative.
A major clue comes early in the story,
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
He believed in global warming - that’s why he allowed Crachitt to use only one lump of coal.
I think he was a Republican.
Um, no. Nice try though, Investors Daily Business. Scrooge was not a liberal at the start of A Christmas Carol, nor was he a Republican (who were the nice people who freed the slaves). He was greedy and grasping, and placed the acquisition of money above any ideological considerations. So to the scraping yes-men over at IBD trying to brown-nose favor with a certain faction of your readership, all I can say is, ewwww!
National Socialist??
To the media, they are the same thing.
No. I’d say that greedy grasping old sinners, to sort of quote Mr. Dickens, are outliers in either party. But that doesn’t keep them from trying to use both parties to line their own pockets. There is a difference though, Scrooge was a fictional creation, simplified to make a point. He wasn’t concerned with trying to warp reality to lecture the rest of the world about how everyone should love them. Scrooge just wanted the cash and knew he had to change his behavior if he wanted people to like him. That was kind of the point.
He turned out to be a Republican, made a ‘deal deal’.
Well I dunno, Brits in general still seem butt hurt about the dumping of all that tea ;)
Scrooge believed that it was the government’s job to take care of the poor.
He believed that killing off young people by starving them would help to reduce the surplus population.
He obviously would have favored government paid abortions.
The main thing that made Scrooge a liberal was his hatred of Christmas. Liberals today all hate CHRISTmas. They never say Merry Christmas and the best you can get out of them is a Happy Holidays or Seasons Greetings. They protest any school that has any song that references the birth of Christ but would probably have no objection to a Ramadan hymn about Muhammed, except that Muslims hate music.
The fact that he was a greedy SOB makes him more of a GOP elitist than a traditional republican conservative.
But he also wanted to reduce the surplus population by starving children. This would equate with a support for late term abortion and infanticide as a means of population control.
A big difference between Scrooge and liberals is that when Scrooge was shown what a crappy person he was, he changed his ways and was redeemed. Liberals don’t seem capable of doing this, with just exceedingly rare exceptions.
Thus, liberals are more like Jacob Marley. Except they are specters who refuse to believe they are ghosts, because “ghosts don’t exist. it is settled science.”
He was a typical Democrat who "outsourced" his compassion to the government.
Here we go again imposing current political thought and ideas on the Victorian era. These types of articles come out every Christmas Season. Dickens wrote Scrooge as a caricature of the extreme versions of the several political movements during his era. There is the Malthusian aspect of Scrooge when he comments about the “surplus population”. There is the Utilitarians/Benthamite part when Scrooge talks about the workhouses. The workhouses were designed by followers of Jeremy Bentham to be as unpleasant as possible so poor people would only use them as the last option. His cold moral calculations pre-conversion is also an aspect of Utilitarians political-economic thought at the time. My Freeper alias is based on my interest in the 19th century. I wish the editors at IBD talked to me before writing this drivel.
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