Posts Tagged ‘liberals’

by Michael Barone, townhall.com, May 3, 2010

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday.

All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it?

Only a dozen years ago, in 1998, President Bill Clinton enjoyed 70 percent job approval. Prime Minister Tony Blair was basking in adulation in his first full year in office.

Clinton “third way” New Democrats and Blair’s “New Labor” party seemed to have a bright and long future ahead. Clinton’s designated successor, Al Gore, despite some ham-handed campaigning, came out ahead in the popular vote in 2000 and lost the presidency by only some hundreds of votes in Florida. With Blair at its head, Labor won unprecedented re-election victories in 2001 and 2005.

Now, less than a generation later, both New Democrats and New Labour seem defunct.

Both parties have moved well to the left. Barack Obama and Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, head governments that are running budget deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product. Both are promoting higher taxes and expansion of government programs.

Read more at http://townhall.com/columnists/MichaelBarone/2010/05/03/the_left_loses_its_way_by_abandoning_third_way

Washington Times Editorial, April 28, 2010

Imagine a group of angry demonstrators toting swastika-festooned protest signs calling politicians Nazis, shouting obscenities and racial remarks and throwing rocks and bottles at police officers sent to keep order. No, these are not Tea Partiers. They are the mob that turned out last week to protest Arizona’s new immigration-enforcement law. This group of liberal rowdies has been dubbed the Tequila Party.

For the most part, liberal media coverage overlooked all the leftist violence. Typical headlines described the protest as “mostly peaceful,” with media outlets avoiding details about why they had to use the qualifier “mostly.” Reporting a near-riot by the opponents of the Arizona law doesn’t fit the dominant media storyline.

Some of the editorial bias is blatant. An Associated Press story about the Arizona immigration law quoted a 13-year-old Hispanic boy saying, “We can’t be in the streets anymore without the pigs thinking we’re illegal immigrants.” The Washington Post sanitized the boy’s views towards law enforcement by replacing the word “pigs” with “[police].” If a Tea Partier used a slur of any kind, it’s doubtful it would be given the square-bracket treatment. It would probably be a banner headline.

The assumption that Tea Partiers are hate-filled bullies explains why major media outlets rushed out reports that demonstrators in Washington opposing the government health care takeover subjected black members of Congress to racial slurs and spat on them. The accusations were never proved, and substantial video evidence and eyewitness accounts suggest the events never happened. There was no press coverage, however, when supporters of illegal immigration used physical intimidation tactics and made threats of violence against demonstrators on the National Mall the same day.

At a Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nev., on March 27, supporters of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threw eggs at buses carrying attendees and later harassed and threatened some of them. The limited-government advocates at FreedomWorks have begun publicizing the hateful e-mail and voice messages they have received, as well as documenting other examples of angry leftist violence, intimidation and extremism.

Read more at  http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/28/angry-hateful-violent-extremist-liberals/

By Quin Hillyer, American Spectator, December 18, 2009

If the consequences for this great nation of ours weren’t so serious and the policies preferred by the left weren’t so dangerous, one would really laugh, almost uncontrollably, at the beliefs and (il)logic of American liberals. Based on things they have actually said or done, here are some of the things they really, truly seem to believe.

They believe we can spend our way out of debt. They believe taking money from one part of the economy to give to another part somehow makes the economy bigger. They believe people who have never run a business can run a business better than people who have spent their whole lives running businesses. They believe that what appears to be a 20-year spike in global temperatures (a spike itself that hundreds of scientists dispute) can mean doom for a planet whose temperatures have swung much more widely for 6 billion years — but that an eight- or ten-year flattening or even drop in temperatures can be ignored because it doesn’t comport with the “models” based largely on the previous 20 years. They believe that punishing “developed” nations for carbon consumption is a good idea even if it means that developing countries without the same environmental controls will take over the production/manufacturing forced away from the developed countries. So, somehow, in the name of saving the environment from carbon emissions, they would create even more carbon emissions (and other, real pollution) elsewhere — and call it progress.

Read more at http://spectator.org/archives/2009/12/18/laughing-at-the-left

[Kathryn Jean Lopez]MSNBC reached a new shameful low tonight when Chris Matthews referred to West Point as an “enemy camp.” He was trying to convey his surprise that Barack Obama would go to such a place, somewhere, he said, where Paul Wolfowitz would be more comfortable.

Chris, he’s commander-in-chief.

From http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzdhYTY0MDRiYTBlYjVkOTAwMjE2YWM5OGU5OTg1MDA

by David Wolpe, Jonathan D. Sarna, Michael Medved, William Kristol and Jeff Jacoby

September 2009

Norman Podhoretz has been writing for COMMENTARY for 57 years, was its editor in chief for 35 years, and was its editor at large for 14 more. In his 12th book, COMMENTARY’s venerable lion of disputation addresses the question he says he is asked more frequently than any other by his fellow conservatives: Why Are Jews Liberals? In a dispassionate effort to answer the question honestly, Podhoretz traverses the history of the Jewish people, from the Romans through the evolving views of the Catholic Church and Christianity in general, the Enlightenment, the rise of 19th-century nationalism, and the totalitarian calamities of the 20th century. He demonstrates that throughout the past two millennia, the scattered Diaspora found its only succor and support from universalist ideas that, because of their universalism, were placed on the port side of the ideological divide. It is for this reason, he argues, that American Jews have been the only definable well-to-do cohort over the past 40 years that has not moved to the Right, even though the evolution of the American Right has been in a frankly philo-Semitic direction—and among whose ranks come the most ardent non-Jewish supporters of the state of Israel in the world. To note the publication of Why Are Jews Liberals? later this month, COMMENTARY has asked six notable American Jewish thinkers to reflect on its themes. Their contributions appear on the following pages, in reverse alphabetical order.

Read more at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/why-are-jews-liberals-a-symposium-15223

P.S. Most Orthodox Jews are not liberals.

by David Limbaugh, October 27, 2009

Can you imagine the outrage that would have ensued had former President George W. Bush declared off-limits those media outlets he thought (correctly) treated him unfairly?

Heck, the left declared him a dictator simply because he led a war on Iraq that Congress approved. He never tried to shut down his critics. He rarely even objected to their abuse.

But liberal politicians have been spoiled with mainstream media favoritism for so long that they believe anything other than sycophancy is mistreatment. Their selective outrage is as hollow as it is risible.

In fact, Fox News seems much more conservative than it is because no other television network over the past half-century has been anything but decidedly liberal. When the media norm is liberal, liberals equate liberalism with objectivity and deviations from it as bias, just as liberals preach tolerance toward all ideas — except conservative ones. Their self-delusion is surreal.

Read more at http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidLimbaugh/2009/10/27/obamas_war_on_fox_is_liberalisms_war_on_dissent

Tolerance? Don’t liberals pretend that they are tolerant? Where do liberals show that they are tolerant? They pretend they are tolerant, and then want to impose speech codes and political correctness and media czars.

Liberals try to show that they are superior. They have social angst and status anxiety, knowing that they are just posing.

Polanski, Letterman, and the Norwegians make conservatives’ day
by Noemie Emery, The Weekly Standard, 10/26/2009

Three times in the past several weeks, fortune has seemed to beam on conservatives, in unexpected and unprompted ways. Not that they’ve won much, but their tormentors keep losing. Three days in fall 2009 damaged or neutralized three liberal institutions, whose powers have now been curtailed.

Read more at
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/088ytjrb.asp

How Roman Polanski, David Letterman, and the Nobel Prize Committee look foolish. From the article: “Few now think that the “arts community” has any moral compass at all.” Well said.

Liberals seek health-care access for illegals
Washington Times, September 28, 2009

By Stephen Dinan

Fearful that they’re losing ground on immigration and health care, a group of House Democrats is pushing back and arguing that any health care bill should extend to all legal immigrants and allow illegal immigrants some access.

The Democrats, trying to stiffen their party’s spines on the contentious issue, say it’s unfair to bar illegal immigrants from paying their own way in a government-sponsored exchange. Legal immigrants, they say, regardless of how long they’ve been in the United States, should be able to get government-subsidized health care if they meet the other eligibility requirements.

Read more at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/28/liberals-seek-health-care-access-for-illegals

JOE WILSON WAS RIGHT . . .  AND IS STILL WAITING FOR HIS APOLOGY!

September 28, 2009
by Lloyd Marcus, a Black Un-hyphenated American!

I am so sick of the Left being allowed to make the rules. Imagine the absurdity of a competition in which one side is allowed to set the rules against their opponent. The Left tells us what is racist. The Left tells us what we can and cannot say. The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.

In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele’s campaign to run for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, “Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house”. Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.

And yet, a sign seen at a tea party depicting Obama as a witch doctor is considered by the Left to be beyond the pale and obviously racist. Why is the Left, given their track record of bias, granted final authority to determine the intent of the sign? Why do we conservatives so quickly and easily allow ourselves to be put on the defensive?

The rules set by the Left are extremely clear. Racist images of black conservatives and negative images of Bush are fair game. Even a play about murdering President Bush was called “harmless art”. Meanwhile, all unflattering images of Obama are racist, and constitute dangerous, potentially violent hate speech.

Read more at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/stop_allowing_the_left_to_set.html

Obama Critic Gives MoveOn the Finger — Doesn’t Get It Back

by Mary Katharine Ham, www.weeklystandard.com

Well, William Rice didn’t actually give MoveOn the finger — his pinky was forcibly removed by an Obamacare supporter’s teeth.

Rice, a 65-year-old real-estate appraiser from Newbury Park, Calif., expected some heated arguments when he went to a health care protest in Thousand Oaks. He did not expect to leave without his finger.

Rice was part of a small group of counter-protesters who showed up to a MoveOn-sponsored “We Can’t Afford to Wait” vigil. The two groups were on opposite sides of the street. At one point, a man from the MoveOn side of the street crossed over to confront Obama critics. Rice got in an altercation with the man, who bit off his pinky finger in the scuffle, down to the second knuckle, Rice said. The man, who is pictured leaving the scene in this group of photos, is still at large.

The following is from the New York Times Magazine, Published: July 7, 2009:

“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.” — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But a liberal female Jewish justice of our US Supreme Court says it, so that must mean that advocating eugenics must be OK. But only for the correct!

What “populations” is she thinking about? African-Americans, Hispanics, right-wingers?

“You might think the New York Times might want to trumpet its exclusive. But the mindset of that pompous, prickly, boring, self-regarding publication is so overwhelmingly liberal that it didn’t even realise it had a story on its hands.” –Damian Thompson is Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group.

Where is Jesse Jackson?
Where is Al Sharpton?

Don’t liberals just kill ya? (almost literally)