Posted on 03/06/2015 9:06:29 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
You can see a generation gap on the Left in this bit of MSNBC spotlighted by Hot Air’s Noah Rothman.
Why do we have the Freedom of Information Act, official record-keeping regulations and other sunshine laws? Because of the belief that when government activities are open and visible to the public, government does a better job. It keeps government officials on the straight and narrow, less likely to engage in corrupt activities, and provides accountability for decision-making.
Lawrence O’Donnell points out that openness and accountability in government are, or once were, liberal values.
“Hillary Clinton’s system was designed to defy Freedom of Information Act requests, which is designed to defy the law. The Freedom of Information Act, and all its government transparency, which we obviously care about a lot more than voters do, that was a decades-long liberal crusade. It was liberals pushing on this from the Nixon administration forward, to say ‘there’s too much nasty stuff going on back there, we gotta find out how this is really working.’ So its of every one of these regulations – the regulation that Hillary Clinton was defying is a liberal regulation. It is of a liberal spirit.”
Openness and accountability are key parts of the liberal belief that government can be a force for good that helps people — in fact, a necessity.
Most of this is lost on Alex Wagner — a.k.a., Mrs. Sam Kass, the White House chef; Barack Obama attended her wedding. She may be the Washington journalist most closely-connected to the Obama administration.
The old-school Left started with a vision of how government should operate and determined policies forward from there. The modern Left starts with the conclusion that their guys are the good guys, and Republicans and conservatives are the bad guys, and works backwards from there. ”Government openness” is a useful cudgel when complaining about Karl Rove’s e-mails in the Bush White House, but an absolute non-concern when it comes to the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
Lawrence O’Donnell cares that a rule put in place by liberals is followed because of the desired good outcome — open, accountable government. Alex Wagner cares about beating Republicans.
A major effort of the Right in recent years has been documenting and exposing how progressives don’t live up to their own rhetoric. But progressives don’t live up to their own rules, and they don’t particularly care. Progressives largely shrug when Democrats make racially-insensitive comments, hire un-diverse staffs and non-union labor, pay less than minimum wage, carry guns or hired armed bodyguards while calling for gun control, cheat on their taxes, send their kids to private school while opposing vouchers, and so on.
The purpose of the rules is not really to provide common guidelines for everyone. The purpose of the rules to impede the wrong or bad people, not the progressive aristocracy.
They care about getting their way at any cost.
I find myself agreeing with Lawrence O’Donnell? Ewww.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.”
—David Horowitz, quoting unnamed SDS leader.
Of course not. FOIA is goring their ox.
BUT WAIT, as soon as they have a GOP Prez, the lib view will change.
Mike Savage was right, liberalism is a mental disorder.
The “modern left”, in bed with radical Islam AND feminism, is close to an acute psychotic break with reality. They are about to abandon global warming unless Al Gore trumps Hillary as the Dem Presidential nominee. Various New Age gurus and “prophets” are soft pedaling global warming and have begun preaching about the great opportunities for human evolution just up ahead, which tells me they are beginning to rationalize WWIII as part of the Great Cleansing, a leftist analog to the neo-Nazi Great Culling of the races.
You want to know the actual yet hidden or occult New Age neo-primitivist eco-fascist pagan Eastern metaphysical parentage- mouse over to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savitri_Devi
More about the left’s Nazi roots:
In the Age of Info, the left has to come to terms with certain of its predecessors as they become, not revealed, but injected into the mainstream by the ease of data gathering via the Internet. Savitra Devi might be an isolated case, but, then again might not be. Her philosophical tendencies represent an anathema to many leftists and breaks down the convenient left/right cartoon categories that we have erected. Was she a lone nut or part of a tradition of “progressive” fascists who, among other things, put the socialist in National Socialist. Did Ms. Devi have influence via channels not yet detected that may have interfaced with the Nazi “Wandervogel” youth movement and/or the “Strength Through Joy” initiative. That Nazis drew upon occult teachings via Lans von Liebenfels, Dietrich Eckhardt and others, is no longer in question. Can a link to Helena Blavatsky’s theosophy and the later work of radical Theosophist Annie Bessant, be shown. The swastika or sun wheel was a fairly common occult symbol at the turn of the century and swastiak protective pendants were worn by many German soldiers during WWI. Did the Nazis rip off that symbol or was it a natural borrowing by Occult elements of the proto-Nazi movement from their Theosophist colleagues?
The left must also come to terms with the roots of the Planned Parenthood movement, as well as the “overpopulation” mania among leftists, being located in the Nazi-like racial purity Eugenics movement. Had General Snmedly Butler not blown the whistle on the “Business Plot”, where a knot of leading financiers offered him the role of dictator in an overthrow of FDR’s government, the American eugenics movement may have become every bit as radical as the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program which was the boot camp for the Dr. Mengeles and Reinhard Heydrichs which gave the world 6 million dead Jews.
Savitra Devi is a piece in an interesting puzzle- how do well intentioned humans allow themselves to be sucked into grand strategies that can be characterized as evil?
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