Never mind those 20th Century deaths of tens of millions...
FREEPATHON
by the numbers
moving the last piece
Posted on 09/08/2015 8:15:46 PM PDT by robowombat
Liberalism Doesn’t Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt Noah Rothman | @noahcrothman 09.08.2015 - 12:30 PM
Sure, their approach to governance may be of dubious efficacy, but their hearts are in the right place. Judging the left by their intentions and not whether their policy prescriptions succeed on their own terms is how liberalism has managed to avoid critical introspection and soul-searching for much of the modern era – even when it is cast into the political wilderness by the electorate. As the Obama era comes to a close and liberalism faces another time out of the public’s favor, its contemporary leaders seem fit to ignore the lessons of its period in ascendance. Liberalism is utterly undeserving of the benefit of the doubt from which it has so unduly profited. That was always the case, but this summer has so plainly demonstrated this reality that it would be pathologically self-deceptive for the left to continue to ignore it.
Carey Gabay, a Harvard-educated lawyer and aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was walking with his brother down a Brooklyn street near a well-traveled parade route when he was shot over the weekend. Gabay was caught in the crossfire that erupted between two rival gangs in Brooklyn. It is a spate of violence that had already taken the life of a 24-year-old man who was fatally stabbed in that same part of Brooklyn just hours earlier. Gabay remains in critical condition as of this writing. No arrests have been made in either his shooting or the deadly stabbing incident.
Hopefully, Gabay’s family was not watching MSNBC on Tuesday morning. If they were, they would have seen the city’s callous and indifferent Mayor Bill de Blasio affirming the tranquility of his city. “Crime is down almost five percent over last year,” a smiling de Blasio averred. “We have had the safest summer in over 20 years.” While overall crime is lower than in previous years, the murder rate is not. By mid-August, killings had risen by almost 10 percent over last year. De Blasio’s New York is not alone in experiencing a substantial increase in the homicide rate. In America’s Democrat-led metropolises, the murder rate is almost uniformly up from last year. Chicago is up 20 percent; New Orleans is up 22 percent; Washington D.C. is up 56 percent. Baltimore and St. Louis – two cities that were rocked by racial violence over the course of the last year – are up 56 and 60 percent respectively. Milwaukee has experienced a staggering 76 percent increase in the murder rate.
It was, however, on the matter of homelessness that de Blasio sounded his most out of touch. No New York City resident or commuter can pretend not to notice it. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people sleeping on the streets, begging on corners, nodding off with an outstretched hand amid an opioid-fueled stupor.
“This is a historic problem, decades old,” de Blasio said in his own defense. “The fact is, the Great Recession led to something we hadn’t seen before.” The mayor’s attempt to blame the city’s homelessness spike on a recession that began six years before he took office was exposed as naked scapegoating when he was asked if Barack Obama’s economy remained subpar. “The economy’s not worse, it’s better,” he said in direct contradiction to his earlier pronouncement. The mayor sought to inoculate himself against attacks on his record by noting that his administration has transitioned 15,000 out of city shelters and into affordable housing. “Putting people in a shelter costs their lives a lot,” he added. It’s unlikely that those souls who spend their days laying face-first on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s Herald Square being literally stepped over by morning commuters would agree.
“A city with homeless on its streets is a city that has no love of its people,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently wrote. “A city that lets people sleep in the streets doesn’t care.” The city’s homeless population is up by an estimated 59 percent over 2013. Calls from concerned citizens about the homeless population have spiked by 35 percent in the same period. In response to Giuliani’s stinging admonition, de Blasio called him “delusional” and suggested the rise in awareness of the city’s homeless problem was due only to the media’s renewed interest in the subject. Apparently, the mayor thinks his city’s residents are “delusional,” too.
De Blasio’s administration might have presided over the return of the bad old days, but he gets credit from the left and in the press for advocating preferred philosophies. The mayor has positioned himself as a progressive icon. He crafts progressive manifestos and presides over self-gratifying summits with wealthy liberal actors and business leaders with the mission of forcing the nation’s politics to the left. Rather than abandon their champion amid a humanitarian crisis, liberals have rushed to de Blasio’s defense.
Gothamist’s Ben Yakas called the former mayor’s rebuke of the current mayor’s accommodation of the destitute “faux-humanitarianism” and was soon reduced to spouting a stream of four-letter words in his denunciation of the former mayor. Vox.com and Media Matters for America have taken to attacking Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly for noticing the city’s homeless crisis and using it to “take political shots at a mayor he doesn’t like.” We have seen this before. ”It’s not a crime to sit or sleep on a public street,” said New York Civil Liberties Union Norman Siegel near the end of Giuliani’s mayoralty in 1999. ”It’s not that these people have a right to freeze to death on the streets,” Mary Brosnahan, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, added. ”It’s that they don’t have enough housing.” Today, the city’s shelters have an average of 36 percent more single adults staying in city shelters per night than they did when Brosnahan complained of a funding shortage.
These responses expose an indifference and callousness to the plight of the destitute, the mentally ill, and to those who are threatened by their menacing presence. Advocates for the homeless fast become advocates for liberalism and defenders of the status quo when these crises invariably erupt under progressive executives.
The crisis of homelessness and crime is progressivism’s fruits on a micro level. The shallow indifference to the human condition writ large is evident in the tide of humanity now descending on Europe. An epidemic of teary Western eyes greeted the images of Aylan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian refugee who washed up on a Turkish beach after the boat in which he fled war-torn shores capsized in the Mediterranean. Once again, the left howled feebly that the West must “do something.” But when the opportunity to intervene in a rapidly worsening civil war in Syria not only presented itself but also became a moral imperative in 2013, it was the West’s liberals who promoted paralysis.
Amid a refugee crisis, the American left will give no credit to European conservatives like Angela Merkel and David Cameron, who have committed to taking in the displaced from North Africa and the Middle East. Those same liberals will point to a handful of Republican presidential candidates who have opted to burnish their anti-illegal immigrant credibility by opposing calls to absorb some of these refugees into the United States. Their self-indulgent back patting is undeserved. Truly mitigating this crisis means making hard choices about war and peace. Truly saving the future means stemming the flow of migrants into a continent that can scarcely employ or provide services for its own citizens. The left congratulates itself for evincing an abundance of empathy. It’s a poor substitute for embracing policies that end crises. In power, the left presides over triage, mitigates the harshest effects of their shortsighted policies, and is congratulated by fellow travelers in the press for their courage.
The left scarcely deserves the benefit of the doubt they receive from the public. Their hearts may be in the right place, but their hearts are distinctly poor governors. It is time for liberals to take stock of their disastrous records, and that can only happen when the public and the press stops excusing the left’s abject failures because they believe their intentions are noble.
Unlikely as these are the people who since Lenin have been sure that they are the morally superior people because they are double plus good thinkers.
There's doubt? What doubt? After a century of abject failure to better people's lives and in fact causing millions of deaths, I don't see a whole lot of doubt to give them the benefit of.
Even if that were true, I don't give a rat's ass where their heart is, their NOSE is all up in my business and needs to be amputated and shoved all up in THEIR business. I have no interest in where their heart is, or their brain, should one be located.
This is the standard leftist MO
They do something, it doesn’t work and makes things work but that is OK because “At least I cared enough to try!”
Implying that I didn’t care
The left survives by riding roughshod over objections on their moral high horse.
It is time to kill that horse
Liberalism deserves the gallows or a bullet between the eyes.
It doesn’t take a genius or a seer to conclude that virtually every social ill can be laid at the feet of liberals/progressives. They have the golden touch in reverse. Exhibits A and B: The Obamanation and Hildebeest.
To paraphrase what someone once said, "They've had their six."
I like the “liberalism is what smart looks like to stupid people.” A better string of words have not been put together and describes virtually every liberal and obvious fool I know.
However, discussing anything with a conservative or libertarian is considered and act of insanity.
That is why they seldom argue with conservative ideas or policies. They just slam them as being outside the spectrum of acceptable beliefs.
Hopefully more people will realize what road they are paving and take a right turn detour!
I like that too. Not bad...
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