Posted on 11/08/2004 1:33:40 PM PST by finnman69
The Sore-Loser Party
Understanding Smiley, Dowd, Raines, Krugman, Maher, Sarandon, et al.
Enough.
The first resort of a sore loser is to gripe about how the game itself was unfair, how the other team doesn't play nice, how the very act of winning is all the proof necessary that the other side will "do anything" to win. The second resort is to simply make junk up about the other guy that makes you feel better about yourself.
"The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry," writes Jane Smiley, a woman who couldn't catch a clue if you used one as a pestle and her brain pan as the mortar. Smiley's now-famous hissyfit places a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the Republican base is "ignorant" while the Democratic one is enlightened. A similar point was made by the British Daily Mirror, one of whose headlines asked, "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"
One might ask if the Democrats really want to place so much emphasis on "ignorance" of the base as a defining difference between the parties. By all means let's break out the number-two pencils and pit the homeschoolers, tractor drivers, and Sunday-school teachers against the voters who wouldn't have shown up at the polls lest they miss a chance to meet P-Diddy.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
To use my favorite British expression, the left has been "gobsmacked". They are unhinged and unmoored by the realization that a majority of Americans have just rejected their most deeply held notions of how things should be.
Compounding that terrible realization is the fact that the rejection of their candidate and their ideas came even though they had amassed the most comprehensive and well funded attack machine any President's ever faced.
They've simply come unglued as many old hardline Eastern European communists did in 1989 when they were shown the door by their own populations.
Best line in a great column!
With a cattle prod, maybe
Mark for later reading.
Yeah right, Republicans are the ignorant ones. And that's why in the last several elections, Democrats can't even follow an arrow...or punch a chad, to vote for their own plantation owners. The irony in how the Democrats have dumbed-down their own constituents is playing out nicely...as their people are even too stupid to follow directions.
"Take the two leading liberal columnists at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. As we all know, one's a whining self-parody of a hysterical liberal who lets feminine emotion and fear defeat reason and fact in almost every column. The other used to date Michael Douglas."
It took me awhile to determine which sentence described Dowd and which described Krugman!!
This is soooo good!
OH Man!
Jonah's piece is a riot!!!
The crack at Krugman floored me!
Note to Self: Shred my paperback copy of "A Thousand Acres" and mail shreds to Jane Smiley's publisher.
There's nothing I hate more than someone I've supported with my hard-earned cash turning around and calling me stooopid.
Pulitzer Prize, my arse! People like ME are the reason people like YOU (Jane Smiley) are allowed to write your novels and your hateful op/ed pieces. Ingrate.
because I keep getting 15 yard penalties for taunting.
SPUE (Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Excerpting) to the rescue once again.
That's an interesting point, and I think it has some merit. Up until now I've always believed that they simply feared Judgement.
I suppose the two are not mutually exclusive after all...
Remind me to miss Krugman's economics "textbook" a surefire winner.
The only thing elitists fear more than their own judgement is irrelvancy.
He also hits it on the head when he says:
"Their clever trick is to defend their hatred of the religious by calling it a hatred of bigotry itself a rationalization no liberal would tolerate from any other kind of bigot."
..and this is also why for a liberal, any means justify the ends. It's kinda funny...because these are the people who actually act like they are the ones doing God's work.
I kinda got a kick out of this:
"I understand that some actually believed P. Diddy's axiom that you should vote (Democratic) or die. (Although it should be self-evident that a man who chooses the name P. Diddy is not a man to take very seriously. Last time I checked, Henry Kissinger never contemplated calling himself "Special K.")"
LMAO!
Were we DUMB to have saved their behinds a thousand times?
If I may chime in re: atheism and politics. One thing I rarely see brought out is that the roles of philosophy and religion are essentially the same, and serve the same roles to people. Not to say they are mutually exclusive...but they deal with the same issues...the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge (revelation?), ethics, and a group ethics/political structure built onto those foundations.
The point I want to make is that the Left derives its politics from Kantian/Marxist philosophy. Politics without the substrate of the underlying beliefs is largely meaningless...those politics include the underlying philosophy...including atheistic answers to the foundational answers.
In America we see this as a 'religious divide'. People who derive their philisophical/religious concepts such as right and wrong from a Judeo-Christian foundation is the essence of Conservatism. People whose foundation is philosophical are by and large the secular socialist Left. The mushy middle are often mildly religious or generally agnostic. They are generally influenced by both religious AND Kantian perspectives and haven't sorted through the inherent contradictions.
However, this continuum from Kantian/Marxist on the left through the agnostic/mildly religious in the middle to the Judeo-Christian on the right does not capture everyone, including myself. Just as there are religions other than Judeo-Christian with obviously different ethical and political implications (9/11) there are philosophies that are not Kantian, although Kantian philosophy is very much dominant in 'official' academia.
I am an atheist. I have different foundations from most here. But I am VEHEMENTLY opposed to the secular left. People here are very conscious of the religious influence on our system and the founding fathers who created it. I encourage you all to also become familiar with the enlightenment era philosophy that also was a major (in my mind, even larger) influence on them.
I'd like to put in my two cents here - because after I say this, that's probably what I'll be worth to some people .. but I believe it was the Catholic church which altered the Lord's prayer to EXCLUDE the final statement which says, "for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen". The Bible does include the final statement.
Now .. that may have changed, but when I attended the church with friends in years past, I was stunned to learn they ended the prayer at, "but deliver us from evil".
I find this interesting .. in lieu of Jonah's article.
" Nevertheless, I think the great irony of this election is that for all the talk of how the bigoted Right won, the Left's loss has sparked far more bigotry. "
Every day, the leaders of the Democrat Party describe their base as being helpless blobs who are unable to function without the government taking their hand and walking them through life.
The Democrat Party went to court complaining that the regulations for casting a ballot were too tough for their average voter.
They demanded that the judicial system give their base special election dispensation , even though said voter could not read or understand a ballot, had no idea where they should vote or if they were in fact, citizens of the US.
Being able to punch a hole in a paper ballot was a task too stringent and unfair for thousands upon thousands of Democrat voters.
Filling in one's address and date of birth were apparently too challenging for the average Democrat-again, their words.
The mantra of the Democrat leadership is that their party is comprised of people who cannot get a job,
cannot get an education,
cannot get health care,
cannot feed themselves or their family or function on the most basic level,
cannot heat their homes,
retire without starving,
figure out how not to get pregnant or
educate their kids.
I always wondered how people could admit they were Democrats, when their leadership and party platform insisted that to be a Democrat, you apparently must have no more than a third grade education and the life skills of an amoeba.
And yet,it's the left that now hurls the invectives that 60 million voters are nothing more than " ignorant, uneducated, backwoods, trailer residing, Wal Mart shopping, redneck trash."
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