There seems to be an unwritten rule, in the minds of many, that being a Political Independent makes a person more “reasonable” than people on the extremes of the political spectrum. Many on the right look to “soften” their views in order to gain acceptance from the MSM (Main Stream Media). They may say things such as “I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal”, or the all too popular “I’m neither a republican nor a democrat”.
People on the left don’t need to soften their views because the MSM never views a far left view as “extreme”. The only time politicians on the left look to soften their views and move to the right is during election time which shows that either consciously or subconsciously, they know that it is THEIR views that are not in the main stream. Yet people who are independent of both parties seem to have a special arrogance as if they are more reasonable than people on the left OR the right.
One of the worst offenders of the “I’m an Independent and therefore better than the rest of you” mentality is FOX pundit Bill O’Reilly. If O’Reilly criticizes Michael Moore, he may also feel obligated to criticize someone associated with the right such as Ann Coulter. When O’Reilly criticizes far left websites such as moveon or the DailyKos, he seems to feel obligated to say that he also criticizes far right websites. He is constantly bloviating about being an “Independent”.
Bill O’Reilly, to his credit, has been at the forefront of a number of controversies. One of his uncompromising issues is child abuse and the need for laws to protect children. O’Reilly would never feel the need to justify his uncompromising stance in protecting children by saying something such as “We need to look at the underlying reasons that cause a person to commit child abuse.” There is only one issue and that is the protection of children. O’Reilly gets this here but on issues such as healthcare, the environment, the economy, national defense, taxes and many others he bends over backwards to show his “independence”.
The issue here is not that everyone on the right must agree on every issue. The left is far more intolerant of people within their ranks. They basically threw Joe Lieberman out of the democrat party because he disagreed with them on one issue – national defense. The right does, and should, tolerate differing views on all issues. However, what is happening today is that people on the right, by constantly justifying and rationalizing their views, cede the moral superiority to the left.
If someone on the right points out that Reverends Jeremiah Wright or Al Sharpton are racists, he may feel obligated to point out that he would feel the same way if they were white racists. Former KKK member David Duke has not been in the news for years but his name keeps popping up, as in “I would feel the same way about Jeremiah Wright as I do about David Duke.” Do the filthy words of Jeremiah Wright not stand on their own? Does it make it acceptable to criticize a minority as long as you throw a white racist former KKK member into the sentence?
When Bill O’Reilly points to extremes, he falls into the same trap that the MSM does. For example, in the Michael Moore-Ann Coulter comparison, saying that one is on the far left and one is on the far right gives them both equal status. Michael Moore has been caught lying many times. David T. Hardy in his book “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man” documents these deceptions. There are NO deceptions of a like status in any of Ann Coulter’s writings. People can debate what she says but there aren’t misrepresentations in her writings. There is a far greater difference between these two people than “far left” and “far right”.
Sometimes the truth is crazier than fiction. If this is the case do you turn the truth into fiction in order to sanitize it and make it more believable? If I said that Barack Obama is fundamentally trying to change this country from a constitutional republic where the government is put into place and run only by the consent and the permission of the people, into one where the government doesn’t care whether or not the people consent to how they are being governed and, in fact, is closer to a dictatorship in that the people have practically no say at all in what the government could do to them, you might say that I am being a radical. Certainly, politicians such as Barney Frank or Anthony’s Weiner would label me as “extreme”.
Perhaps the solution is to say “Barack Obama is gaining dictatorial power but David Duke is a racist and I’d feel the same way if he were gaining dictatorial power.” There is no need to rationalize the truth! Republicans seem to live in constant fear of what democrats and the MSM may say about them. Ronald Reagan was loved by the right because he never rationalized his beliefs. He stated his case eloquently and wasn’t intimidated by how the democrats or MSM characterized what he said. John McCain, Bill O’Reilly and many others labeled as “moderate republicans” or “independents” are looked at with suspicion from the right because they sometimes seem to look at the right with the same condescending attitude that the democrats and the MSM does.
There is a radicalism to Independents that rivals any on the right or the left. There is a need to take any situation and find an alternative to it to show that there MUST be another side to the argument. Ayn Rand spoke about this issue. She said:
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
Today, the strategy being used by democrats is to label all criticism of Obama as “extreme”. During the election, John McCain did not bring up a number of vital campaign issues because he didn’t want to be divisive. McCain failed in his duty as a candidate in the same way that a lawyer might fail in his responsibility if he left out critical evidence that could have exonerated his client. The citizens of the US are not children and they have the right to know the truth no matter how strange the truth is!
It is not radical to ask the President of the US and the leader of the free world (if there is such a thing anymore) to put forth the same paperwork as a person applying for a job at a local bank. Yet republicans run from this by saying it is not a winning strategy. Maybe it’s not, but it’s not a crazy idea to want to know the truth! And this truth involves much more than Obama’s birth certificate. It involves organizations he was part of, his sealed college records, his associates over the years and much more.
Republicans and conservatives will never be successful until they learn how to defend their vision, rather than excuse it. Bi-partisanship is not a virtue when you give up your principles in order to be perceived as a “moderate”. Again, according to Ayn Rand:
Moderation in the protection of liberty is no virtue…When people call themselves moderates, ask yourself: “Moderate—about what?” Since the basic question today is freedom versus statism, or individual rights versus government controls, to be a moderate is to advocate a moderate amount of statism, a moderate amount of injustice, a moderate amount of infringement of individual rights. Surely, nobody would call that a virtue.
People on the right need to stop worrying about how they are perceived. To lie even when the truth and the facts are on your side makes people doubt what the truth and facts are. Informed people will respect a person who honestly fights for his convictions. Let the left and the democrats lie – they need to!
Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
A Letter To The President
Hi Barack,
You don’t mind if I call you Barack, do you? In the recent healthcare summit, you referred to all the Senators by their first names so I thought it would be appropriate here, considering that a little over a year ago, you were just a simple Senator yourself.
Barack, you keep reminding everyone that you won the election. The fact that you won the election should be demonstrated by your deeds and actions. We know you’re the President. We get that already. Whether a President, a corporate exec, or the manager of a baseball team, a good leader doesn’t need to remind people of what his position is. If your leadership was profound and strong, you wouldn’t need to constantly, and quite frankly a bit obnoxiously, bring up that you are the president. I can’t imagine Vince Lombardi reminding the Green Bay Packers that he was their coach. That group of football players knew who their coach was and they respected him for who he was as a person, not for the position he held.
Saying that you are the president doesn’t give you the respect that goes with the position. That has to be earned. The election was only the interview. Now you’ve got to start working and I have a number of concerns. Let’s start with your answer to Senator McCain in the healthcare summit. Again, you pointed out for the umpteenth time that the election was over. Senator McCain pointed out that you misrepresented yourself on your ‘job application’. You said you’d put the health care debates on C-Span. You said this eight times and not as mere passing references. You went into great detail about how you were going to do this and haven’t explained why you didn’t. When a job applicant says he can or will do a task and then either doesn’t do it or is incapable of doing it, I find it a reason for dismissal, unless I can get a reasonable explanation. A reasonable explanation is not for the job applicant to tell me; “You hired me, I’m the new Analyst. I got the job”. “Wrong” I would tell him, “you HAD the job.”
Barack, I’ve heard you and your representatives say that your election was a mandate on the policies that you are proposing. If you were so proud and confident that your policies were what the people wanted, then why weren’t you up front with the people BEFORE you got elected? For example, if you said that you would propose additional spending that would put the projected deficit at 20 times that which you inherited from Bush; do you think you would have gotten elected? If you said that you planned on bringing terrorists to trial in civilian courts, do you think you would have gotten elected? If you brought out the 2,700 page monstrosity of health care “reform” before the election do you think you would have gotten elected? Incidentally, just as an aside, you could do some good work for the environment if you’d stop printing all these health care plans! If you won’t consider the will of the people, please consider the trees! If you told the people before the election that you would take over banks and car companies do you think you would have gotten elected? If you told people that you would traipse around the world apologizing for the things that most of us think make our country great, do you think you would have gotten elected?
My point in bringing these things up Barack, is that if you’re going to point out that your election gives you carte blanche to do whatever you want, then I think it’s important to point out back to you that your election was NOT a mandate to do the things you are trying to do. People did not vote for you to do these things. You didn’t campaign on doing these things so how can you now say that you have a mandate to do these things?
You drive me crazy Barack. The thing that bothers me most is that I don’t feel that you have a lot of respect for the American people. Yes you won the election with 52% of the votes but many of those were votes you wouldn’t have gotten if people actually knew what they were getting. What makes this worse, though, is that you have the chutzpa to talk about the 52% of these votes as some kind of mandate but are willing to outright dismiss polls which show that 60% to 70% of the American people are against your healthcare proposal. Those people are, apparently, too stupid to understand your brilliant plan. So when 52% of the people vote for you, based on misleading information, that is a mandate but when 60% or 70% of the people vote against your plan, that is a matter of them not understanding your plan?
Look Barack, you and I both know what’s going on here. The last thing you want is for people to “understand” your plan for healthcare. That’s why you tried to push it through in August before anyone even had a chance to read the 2,000+ page monstrosity. You said that it had to be passed right away or there would be dire consequences. Well, it’s seven months later and there aren’t any dire consequences. In fact, the health care in the United States, with all its faults, is still the best in the world. There are far more important things to concern ourselves with. This is your priority, it is not the priority of the country but that doesn’t seem to concern you.
In fact, Barack, when you say that you haven’t “explained” or “communicated” your plan well enough, what you are really saying is that you haven’t been able to misrepresent your plan well enough. The excessive costs of the plan, the health care rationing, putting choices in the hands of government rather than in the hands of individuals and doctors, the back room shady deals; all of this is an embarrassment to your administration but you want to try to paint the people who see your plan for the catastrophe that it is as being too dumb to understand it. I know that this is a tactic of one of your heroes, Saul Alinsky. Your idea is to make the radical seem main stream and to criticize and attack those who are against it as the radicals.
It’s not working Barack. Your purported eloquence has been overshadowed by your actual arrogance. Your speeches are, quite frankly, boring. The only people still excited by your rhetoric are Chris Matthews and the six people that watch his show. What really ticks me off is when you, Reid, and Pelosi talk about getting this done for the American people when it is the American people who keep telling you that they don’t WANT this!
I guess you’re going to try to push this through no matter what. I know you’re not stupid Barack. You’ve become boring and predictable, but you’re not stupid. You have an agenda which is obvious by the crowd you’ve always hung out with. You’ve put your agenda above what the people want and above the good of the country. You try to present yourself as someone who will listen to the other side but at your health care summit, you cut people off the moment that they brought up points that conflicted any of your own.
Barack, you can’t cut off the voice of the American people the way you tried to cut off the voice of people against your health care plan at that summit. You are not the King of the United States, although you may think you are. You are the top representative of the American people and you must answer to the American people, not the other way around. The people have seen you for what you are Barack, and they don’t like what they are seeing. I’m insulted to have a president who thinks so little of the American people that he is willing to so completely disregard their will.
So in closing Barack, I know you are not going to change. You are driven by your agenda as you always have been, but as you said yourself; “That’s what elections are for”. I just hope that by the time we throw you, Reid, and Pelosi out of office, that you haven’t created a hole that is too deep to climb out of.
You don’t mind if I call you Barack, do you? In the recent healthcare summit, you referred to all the Senators by their first names so I thought it would be appropriate here, considering that a little over a year ago, you were just a simple Senator yourself.
Barack, you keep reminding everyone that you won the election. The fact that you won the election should be demonstrated by your deeds and actions. We know you’re the President. We get that already. Whether a President, a corporate exec, or the manager of a baseball team, a good leader doesn’t need to remind people of what his position is. If your leadership was profound and strong, you wouldn’t need to constantly, and quite frankly a bit obnoxiously, bring up that you are the president. I can’t imagine Vince Lombardi reminding the Green Bay Packers that he was their coach. That group of football players knew who their coach was and they respected him for who he was as a person, not for the position he held.
Saying that you are the president doesn’t give you the respect that goes with the position. That has to be earned. The election was only the interview. Now you’ve got to start working and I have a number of concerns. Let’s start with your answer to Senator McCain in the healthcare summit. Again, you pointed out for the umpteenth time that the election was over. Senator McCain pointed out that you misrepresented yourself on your ‘job application’. You said you’d put the health care debates on C-Span. You said this eight times and not as mere passing references. You went into great detail about how you were going to do this and haven’t explained why you didn’t. When a job applicant says he can or will do a task and then either doesn’t do it or is incapable of doing it, I find it a reason for dismissal, unless I can get a reasonable explanation. A reasonable explanation is not for the job applicant to tell me; “You hired me, I’m the new Analyst. I got the job”. “Wrong” I would tell him, “you HAD the job.”
Barack, I’ve heard you and your representatives say that your election was a mandate on the policies that you are proposing. If you were so proud and confident that your policies were what the people wanted, then why weren’t you up front with the people BEFORE you got elected? For example, if you said that you would propose additional spending that would put the projected deficit at 20 times that which you inherited from Bush; do you think you would have gotten elected? If you said that you planned on bringing terrorists to trial in civilian courts, do you think you would have gotten elected? If you brought out the 2,700 page monstrosity of health care “reform” before the election do you think you would have gotten elected? Incidentally, just as an aside, you could do some good work for the environment if you’d stop printing all these health care plans! If you won’t consider the will of the people, please consider the trees! If you told the people before the election that you would take over banks and car companies do you think you would have gotten elected? If you told people that you would traipse around the world apologizing for the things that most of us think make our country great, do you think you would have gotten elected?
My point in bringing these things up Barack, is that if you’re going to point out that your election gives you carte blanche to do whatever you want, then I think it’s important to point out back to you that your election was NOT a mandate to do the things you are trying to do. People did not vote for you to do these things. You didn’t campaign on doing these things so how can you now say that you have a mandate to do these things?
You drive me crazy Barack. The thing that bothers me most is that I don’t feel that you have a lot of respect for the American people. Yes you won the election with 52% of the votes but many of those were votes you wouldn’t have gotten if people actually knew what they were getting. What makes this worse, though, is that you have the chutzpa to talk about the 52% of these votes as some kind of mandate but are willing to outright dismiss polls which show that 60% to 70% of the American people are against your healthcare proposal. Those people are, apparently, too stupid to understand your brilliant plan. So when 52% of the people vote for you, based on misleading information, that is a mandate but when 60% or 70% of the people vote against your plan, that is a matter of them not understanding your plan?
Look Barack, you and I both know what’s going on here. The last thing you want is for people to “understand” your plan for healthcare. That’s why you tried to push it through in August before anyone even had a chance to read the 2,000+ page monstrosity. You said that it had to be passed right away or there would be dire consequences. Well, it’s seven months later and there aren’t any dire consequences. In fact, the health care in the United States, with all its faults, is still the best in the world. There are far more important things to concern ourselves with. This is your priority, it is not the priority of the country but that doesn’t seem to concern you.
In fact, Barack, when you say that you haven’t “explained” or “communicated” your plan well enough, what you are really saying is that you haven’t been able to misrepresent your plan well enough. The excessive costs of the plan, the health care rationing, putting choices in the hands of government rather than in the hands of individuals and doctors, the back room shady deals; all of this is an embarrassment to your administration but you want to try to paint the people who see your plan for the catastrophe that it is as being too dumb to understand it. I know that this is a tactic of one of your heroes, Saul Alinsky. Your idea is to make the radical seem main stream and to criticize and attack those who are against it as the radicals.
It’s not working Barack. Your purported eloquence has been overshadowed by your actual arrogance. Your speeches are, quite frankly, boring. The only people still excited by your rhetoric are Chris Matthews and the six people that watch his show. What really ticks me off is when you, Reid, and Pelosi talk about getting this done for the American people when it is the American people who keep telling you that they don’t WANT this!
I guess you’re going to try to push this through no matter what. I know you’re not stupid Barack. You’ve become boring and predictable, but you’re not stupid. You have an agenda which is obvious by the crowd you’ve always hung out with. You’ve put your agenda above what the people want and above the good of the country. You try to present yourself as someone who will listen to the other side but at your health care summit, you cut people off the moment that they brought up points that conflicted any of your own.
Barack, you can’t cut off the voice of the American people the way you tried to cut off the voice of people against your health care plan at that summit. You are not the King of the United States, although you may think you are. You are the top representative of the American people and you must answer to the American people, not the other way around. The people have seen you for what you are Barack, and they don’t like what they are seeing. I’m insulted to have a president who thinks so little of the American people that he is willing to so completely disregard their will.
So in closing Barack, I know you are not going to change. You are driven by your agenda as you always have been, but as you said yourself; “That’s what elections are for”. I just hope that by the time we throw you, Reid, and Pelosi out of office, that you haven’t created a hole that is too deep to climb out of.
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