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The longstanding tactic of the left is to turn every debate into a question of which side consists of good people and which side consists of bad people. It is a tactic that Republicans have done a very poor job of fighting because they do not believe of the left what it believes about them.

I have no illusions or doubts of Leftists.

They wish us all dead.

I will never trust them in times of plenty, and when this nation inevitably collapses, Leftists will reap the whirlwind they have created.

In The Pity Party, Voegeli explores the failure of progressive ideas and the immunity of those failures to reform.

It is the immunity of those failures to be reformed that is so striking. The recent election in Greece in which the left has been placed in power demonstrates the truth of Nathan Bedford's maxim of government: the cure for failed socialism is invariably more socialism.

The should be seen on two levels: 1) the failure to reform occurs because whole constituencies for socialist largess understandably to oppose the breaking of their Rice bowls; 2) the right has never found a way to indict and convict socialists of their crimes.

Witness the recent election in Greece. Witness also the failure of the right to blame the 2009 recession on socialist policies in the housing industry. This failure is not merely a failure to communicate it is a failure of will. There is no stomach within the Republican leadership to fight these fights so the left wins by default.

Until we change the climate, elected officials are smart enough to play it safe and we will continue to lose the battles over who writes history.

“What is difficult is grappling with human limitations and aspirations.”

That is the key sentence. Greenfield sees it in the masses.

Use this brilliant sentence to slice open the bloated corpse of Liberalism in this country.

All of the Liberal Leaders.....Obama, Hillary, Pelosi, Reid, etc....believed in socialism when they were younger. All of humanity would be better off if we just “shared” with each other.

Then, reality socked them in the face. People weren’t just like them. Some people are just lazy. Some are criminal. Some have unbounded greed.

The world wasn’t what they thought it was, or should be. Great sadness overcame them. Humanity was a completely unhelpable mess.

After the sadness came the anger. Their hearts were pure and true. Yet, the masses weren’t pure and true. The masses ignored their wisdom and compassion. rhe Liberal leaders weren’t battling for noble but downtrodden people. They were battling for people whose concerns were sex, steak and some entertainment.

Cruel world.

The Liberal leaders had a lot of life left ahead of them after reality deflated their melodrama. What to do with it?

If the masses were only concerned with themselves, well, then they would be only concerned with themselves. There is no one so fallen as a fallen zealot. They would use the greed and self-centeredness of the masses to enrich themselves and those close to them.

This is where our Liberal leaders are. They are bitter. They are disillusioned. They are single-minded in their drive to enrich themselves while sneering at the people they use to gather their wealth.

The Liberal leaders are not moonstruck children who believe in fairies and unicorns. They are bitter, hardened souls out to get as much for themselves, and those close to them, as they possibly can.

It is a huge mistake to treat them as children instead of the greedy, self-serving liars that they are.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776) Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver . . .
This is what Rush has been almost succeeding in saying, when he says that government is not the “community.”
‘Way back in the 1950s I had a teacher who informed me, but did not convince me, that “government” and “society” were the same thing. I was a FReeper a long time before I saw the Paine quote above, tho . . .

That compassion is the theme of William Voegeli’s “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion.” Going from Bill Clinton’s “I Feel Your Pain” to Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can,” Voegeli challenges the conspicuous compassion and self-centered emotional displays on which the contemporary progressive argument is built.

Rather than dealing with the issues, the left deals in narratives. Its pornography of misery bypasses facts, particularly those which demonstrate that it is the left’s policies that create misery, thereby showing the dangers of placing compassion above any other value; including truth. And that is one of the subjects explored in Voegeli’s book whose themes occupy the moral realm as much as the sphere of government policy.

Greenfield's amazing...