For Building Tolerance, Acceptance, Peace, Harmony, Mutual Respect, Mutual Understanding, And Love among Different Nations And People
This proposal has been created and authorized by our organization, the Bastion of Urban Renewal and Progress (BURP). This is a community organization which has its home office on the upper west side of Manhattan, and is dedicated to the betterment of humanity, the cleanliness of the earth and the causes of equality within and between all nations.
Recently in New York, a manual was created to advise heroin users how to properly use needles. We here at our organization (BURP) applaud this progressive idea. Too many of our rules and laws are based on conflict. Instead of trying to force people to abide by laws, we need to make it so that it is in the best interest of individuals to do what is also in society’s best interest. If we can’t get people to comply with society’s needs, then in order to reduce costs and minimize the damage, we need to find a way to allow their destructive behavior while minimizing the damage and cost to the rest of us.
It is in this vein that we take on the issue of foreign policy and the issue of terrorism, in particular. First off, we are grateful to President Obama for not using the word terrorism, which heretofore will be referred to as the T-word. However, when people in the media refer to people who commit acts of “T-word”, they often use the term “militants”. This too, is unacceptable as it sheds a cloud over an entire person’s outlook and personality. When referring to people who commit such acts, we propose the term “Misunderstood soldiers without uniforms”.
We need to look at the motivations of why people would engage in T-Word. Some people commit these acts thinking that there is a higher power that will reward them in the afterlife. Also, we need to look at our own behavior and how it is perceived by others. Many people who commit these acts believe that if they give their life to their cause, they will be rewarded with 72 virgins.
We are creating something called “The 72 Virgins In Life Project”. People will not have to give their lives for 72 virgins. Professional sex workers will be recruited. Some may call this bribery and we can’t deny that there is a certain amount of bribery in this plan. However, we feel that if bribery is good enough for our congress and senate as their standard operating procedure, surely it is also good enough to use on a plan designed to save lives and to combat acts of violence.
The “72 Virgins In Life Project” will provide clean, meaningful lives to women of the evening. These women will be provided with medical care, clean living quarters, and an education. If they have drug habits, clean needles will, of course, be provided and their heroin will be sold to them at cost. The women will be expected to tend to all of the needs of the misunderstood soldiers without unforms. In no way will they be expected or asked to try to gain information from the misunderstood soldiers without uniforms as this would defeat the purpose of the project. The misunderstood soldiers without uniforms must know and believe that this service is being provided to them out of respect and friendship, not out of fear or to gain intelligence.
If there are women who are actual virgins that wish to participate, their services will be at a premium as they will fetch the most interest. These actual virgins will be given the moniker of “Grade-A Virgins”. Once their services are used, their moniker will change to “Pre-Owned” and those women of the evening who are providing the service will be known as “Grade-B”. All of the women providing the service however, will be referred to simply as “The Virgins”. The group of 72 will be a wonderful eclectic mix of all three grades that will make any misunderstood soldier without uniform change his ways.
Now we realize that there will be criticism of this solution as it certainly is an unorthodoxed way of solving a problem. We must look at the benefits before jumping to conclusions. In the street, women of the Evening are taken advantage of, are subject to disease, violence and drugs. In the environment that they live in, the life expectancy is short and the life lived is sad. They will be cleaned up, provided with care and in turn, they will provide a service to the country of incalculable value.
There are those who will say that by rewarding people who commit acts of T-Word we would create the motivation for more people to become misunderstood soldiers without uniforms. We here at our organization (BURP) could not disagree more. What creates misunderstood soldiers without uniforms is putting them in a place such as Guantanamo Bay or using methods such as water boarding to gain information. Profiling at airports, listening in on their conversations, or watching bank accounts from certain countries or nationalities is what creates the motivation for people to become a misunderstood soldier without a uniform. By providing in life, what they hope to gain in death, we take away their motivation, not add to it. Also, they are surely to notice how nice we are being and after all is said and done, are likely to say something such as “You know, these people are all right with us!”
We would, of course, like it if the misunderstood soldier without uniform community were a bit more diverse. We toyed with the idea of recruiting 72 male virgins for our gay and female soldier without uniform friends but there just isn’t the demand for that at this point. We will, however, keep that one on the backburner and hope that at some point in the future, we can implement that part of the plan as well.
Now for the issue of profiling -- we feel it is provocative and quite frankly, defeatist, to single out people at airports or other checkpoints because of nationality or country of origin. This kind of treatment creates anger and again, causes more, not less, people to become misunderstood soldiers without uniforms. We’ve heard the arguments “Why single out granny? What are the chances that she is carrying a weapon?” That is a simple minded argument and completely misses the point. By focusing on one nationality as being closely linked to the misunderstood soldier without uniform community, we have created anger in that community. What we should be doing is profiling everyone EXCEPT people from those countries that are linked to T-Word. By doing this, we would be saying that we are a fair country and that we trust people from the countries linked to T-Word. This trust would surely be repaid in kind by a spirit of love and friendship. The misunderstood soldier without a uniform who gets on a plane and is about to commit an act of T-Word would break down in tears and be unable to complete the mission due to the kind treatment that he has been afforded.
We applaud our friends in Saudi Arabia for giving drawing lessons to people linked to T-Word. We need to take that idea and run with it. Our proposal is to create a major university in the US for misunderstood soldiers without uniforms. For short, we will call it MUSWU University. These misunderstood soldiers without uniforms will be given liberal arts classes where they will read and study a diverse selection of literature such as Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Hemmingway, Steinbeck and much more. There will be courses and detailed discussions of topics such as “The Koran and Lesbianism – Are they mutually exclusive?” We feel that this university will be a great cultural exchange and will result in many people choosing a different career path than the one that leads them to becoming misunderstood soldiers without uniforms.
There are many other progressive ways that we can combat T-Word and we will comment on them in subsequent proposals. We have to compliment our President Barack Obama for beginning this necessary path toward understanding, rather than conflict. His proposed closing of Guantanamo Bay, his banning of harsh interrogation methods and his bringing misunderstood soldiers without uniforms to face trial in civilian courts in the US are all good ideas but they are only the beginning of the things we need to do to permanently end the threat of T-word.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The Battle Of The Ages -- Words And Language Versus Thoughts And Ideas
Thoughts and ideas are expressed with words and language so how can these concepts, which are dependent upon each other, be in conflict? There is too much meaning placed on the words and not enough exploration of the ideas that the words represent, especially if the words sound good. If they are soothing words that make people feel good about themselves then people are unlikely to explore the real meaning. Call it intellectual laziness; this conflict is the dictator’s best friend.
Joseph Goebbels is known for having said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The rest of that quote is lesser known. He continued “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
While one should be careful in comparing anything to the evils of Goebbels and Nazi Germany, the propaganda methods that Goebbels spoke of have been used throughout history. Whether as a citizen, a consumer, a student, an employee, or a spouse (especially as a spouse!) people should be aware of misleading words and be careful not to confuse the words with the thoughts behind them. Ayn Rand once said “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” The key part of that Rand quote is “Check your premises”. What is the premise of the person saying the words and how does it conflict with what the listener or reader believes? Too often, the consumer of information assumes that he SHOULD accept the information at face value and is afraid to question it for fear of seeming an outcast, or worse, he may fear being scorned for being too stupid to understand the greater good of the propaganda that is being spoon fed to him. This fear is the propagandist’s best friend.
A good example is the current health care debate in the US. People have argued about this on many levels. The debate has taken many turns but the basic premise doesn’t go challenged. President Obama is always talking about reducing costs. Whose costs is he concerned about? Is each individual responsible for the medical costs of others? It doesn’t matter what the specifics are of a plan whose foundations are based on a false premise. Once it becomes the responsibility of one person to pay for the care of another, then everyone else has an incentive to get involved in the way we each live our lives. Community involvement is one thing but personally, if I work hard for my money, no one has the right to tell me how to spend it -- or worse – take it away from me to force me to buy a product that I don’t want. I need many things beside medical care (some people after reading my articles say it really is medical care I need the most). We all need food, shelter, a way to make a living, some entertainment once in a while, a 54 inch plasma TV and many other basic needs. Should we share the costs on those also?
You don’t reduce costs by cutting into the freedom of individuals. That is sacrosanct and off-limits. If Obama was interested in government waste and reducing debt and costs, which we all have as a burden, then he would start putting a serious investment in enforcing the border, where people coming here illegally are putting an incredible financial strain on the medical system. He would put a serious investment and effort into tort reform, so that doctors wouldn’t have to send patients for needless tests just to protect themselves. He would allow free competition across state lines for health insurance which would reduce prices. Another worthwhile idea would be to look into whether or not states should mandate insurance companies to cover non-essential procedures which provide incentive for people to get elective procedures which they may not need or want if it weren’t provided on someone else’s dime. When Obama speaks the words “save money” or “reduce costs” (and by the way if you google those phrases you’ll find that he says them almost as much as “I”), the translation is more government power and less freedom for the individual. He is like a car salesman that goes on and on with lies and faulty logic but the nightmare is that as a consumer, you don’t have the freedom to walk away from it! You are forced to buy the “car” with money that they take right out of your pocket.
Thomas Sowell once said that if the democrats came up with a plan that would mandate all citizens to jump off of a 100 story building, a week later the republicans would come up with a plan to mandate all citizens to jump off of a 50 story building. This health care debate is about whether to jump off of a 50 story or a 100 story building and before getting into the specifics of the plan, we should ask “Is it a good idea to be jumping off of buildings?”
This idea of misusing words is used in public policy debates but it also permeates our day-to-day conversation like a growing cancer. Stuart Chase, a left wing writer in the 1930s, correctly pointed out in his book “The Tyranny of Words” that words which end in “ism” tend to be misused more than most. These are words that represent concepts which can’t be defined simply, yet the mere mention of these words invokes images of pure evil in some and pure joy in others. Words such as fascism, industrialism, communism, capitalism have meanings based on emotion but not too many people actually know what any of these words really mean. One word cannot possibly define a complex political/economic system. Ask the average person to tell you the meaning of fascism and what you’ll get is something such as “evil, tyranny, bad government, totalitarian….” But not too many people can go further.
Fascism is often portrayed as the opposite of communism when in fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Fascism is positioned on the right and communism on the left and if no one questions this, it goes without further argument. In reality, however, both fascism and communism subjugate the rights of individuals, the family, self protection, religious freedom, the right to own property, and many other rights taken for granted, to the state. The state decides what you can own, where you can worship, even how many children you can have. These are not opposites -- they are basically the same! Yet if you listen to your average newscast or read your average paper, you’ll hear fascism linked with capitalism, not with its brother communism.
Capitalism is one word that is completely misleading. The term implies a society based on capital when in fact, the idea was to have a society based on freedom. It is the freedom to operate without government interference that makes “Capitalism” the true opposite of both communism and fascism. Yet the word itself has to be called into question because it implies that capital is at the root of a free society rather than the result of a free society. The term capitalism is itself, a derogatory term coined by none other than Karl Marx. He mistakenly viewed free markets as being based on capital and coined “capitalism”. People continue to defend capitalism by using the term capitalism which by its very use undermines what a free market is.
While there are some words that are misleading, others are sophisticated euphemisms. On September 11, 2001, the worst attack in American history took place on American soil. When we refer to that horrific day, we say “9-11”. There is a “pre 9-11 mentality” and a “post 9-11 mentality”. Other countries, after having been attacked, have said, “This is our 9-11”. After December 7, 1941, people didn’t call the Pearl Harbor attack “12-7”. They called it a sneak attack and said some not too complimentary things about the people that did the attack. Admiral Halsey said “Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” While we don’t need to resort to insulting any group of people, we don’t need to pretend that reality is something it isn’t. Barack Obama refuses to even use the word “terrorism”. On September 11, 2001, people went to work and found themselves trapped in a burning building knowing they were about to die. It was just a day of work for them. They were thinking about lunch, their weekend plans, their work schedule – all of a sudden they were faced with the end of their lives. Using the phrase 9-11 doesn’t do them justice and it doesn’t speak to the evil that occurred on that day. It doesn’t sound like a Madison Ave jingle and it shouldn’t – it was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, not a date and not a number.
Sometimes words just seem to pop up out of thin air. Some political consultant who just got out of Harvard decides that there is a new word to be used and all the networks, pundits and politicians go with the word in lock step. One such word was “gravitas”. In 2000, when Bush was running against Gore, the democrats came out and said he lacked “gravitas”. All of a sudden all the people on television were talking about “gravitas”. In the last campaign the word “transparency” was the word of the day. Politicians should stop being so political and learn how to talk to people, not by using a word such as “transparency” but by explaining how as citizens, we have a right to know what our government is doing. Words as concepts lose their meaning and we hear them without really being affected by them. As for the word “gravitas”, after a grand explosion on the political scene in 2000, it seems to have gone back into hiding. No point in bringing out the word “gravitas” when there is a democratic president who lacks “gravitas”. George Orwell understood why politicians will bring words such as “gravitas” up from the basement, dust them off and use them. He said “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy…Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful…to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Take the advice of Ayn Rand and “Check your premises” when reading, hearing or watching information. If it doesn’t sound right, don’t be afraid to question it. Look past the words and ask, where is this coming from? Why is it being presented in this way? Why now? Who has to gain from this? What is the real agenda behind this? As Orwell pointed out, political speech is designed to deceive. Read between the lines and look for what is being implied, rather than said.
Joseph Goebbels is known for having said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The rest of that quote is lesser known. He continued “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
While one should be careful in comparing anything to the evils of Goebbels and Nazi Germany, the propaganda methods that Goebbels spoke of have been used throughout history. Whether as a citizen, a consumer, a student, an employee, or a spouse (especially as a spouse!) people should be aware of misleading words and be careful not to confuse the words with the thoughts behind them. Ayn Rand once said “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” The key part of that Rand quote is “Check your premises”. What is the premise of the person saying the words and how does it conflict with what the listener or reader believes? Too often, the consumer of information assumes that he SHOULD accept the information at face value and is afraid to question it for fear of seeming an outcast, or worse, he may fear being scorned for being too stupid to understand the greater good of the propaganda that is being spoon fed to him. This fear is the propagandist’s best friend.
A good example is the current health care debate in the US. People have argued about this on many levels. The debate has taken many turns but the basic premise doesn’t go challenged. President Obama is always talking about reducing costs. Whose costs is he concerned about? Is each individual responsible for the medical costs of others? It doesn’t matter what the specifics are of a plan whose foundations are based on a false premise. Once it becomes the responsibility of one person to pay for the care of another, then everyone else has an incentive to get involved in the way we each live our lives. Community involvement is one thing but personally, if I work hard for my money, no one has the right to tell me how to spend it -- or worse – take it away from me to force me to buy a product that I don’t want. I need many things beside medical care (some people after reading my articles say it really is medical care I need the most). We all need food, shelter, a way to make a living, some entertainment once in a while, a 54 inch plasma TV and many other basic needs. Should we share the costs on those also?
You don’t reduce costs by cutting into the freedom of individuals. That is sacrosanct and off-limits. If Obama was interested in government waste and reducing debt and costs, which we all have as a burden, then he would start putting a serious investment in enforcing the border, where people coming here illegally are putting an incredible financial strain on the medical system. He would put a serious investment and effort into tort reform, so that doctors wouldn’t have to send patients for needless tests just to protect themselves. He would allow free competition across state lines for health insurance which would reduce prices. Another worthwhile idea would be to look into whether or not states should mandate insurance companies to cover non-essential procedures which provide incentive for people to get elective procedures which they may not need or want if it weren’t provided on someone else’s dime. When Obama speaks the words “save money” or “reduce costs” (and by the way if you google those phrases you’ll find that he says them almost as much as “I”), the translation is more government power and less freedom for the individual. He is like a car salesman that goes on and on with lies and faulty logic but the nightmare is that as a consumer, you don’t have the freedom to walk away from it! You are forced to buy the “car” with money that they take right out of your pocket.
Thomas Sowell once said that if the democrats came up with a plan that would mandate all citizens to jump off of a 100 story building, a week later the republicans would come up with a plan to mandate all citizens to jump off of a 50 story building. This health care debate is about whether to jump off of a 50 story or a 100 story building and before getting into the specifics of the plan, we should ask “Is it a good idea to be jumping off of buildings?”
This idea of misusing words is used in public policy debates but it also permeates our day-to-day conversation like a growing cancer. Stuart Chase, a left wing writer in the 1930s, correctly pointed out in his book “The Tyranny of Words” that words which end in “ism” tend to be misused more than most. These are words that represent concepts which can’t be defined simply, yet the mere mention of these words invokes images of pure evil in some and pure joy in others. Words such as fascism, industrialism, communism, capitalism have meanings based on emotion but not too many people actually know what any of these words really mean. One word cannot possibly define a complex political/economic system. Ask the average person to tell you the meaning of fascism and what you’ll get is something such as “evil, tyranny, bad government, totalitarian….” But not too many people can go further.
Fascism is often portrayed as the opposite of communism when in fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Fascism is positioned on the right and communism on the left and if no one questions this, it goes without further argument. In reality, however, both fascism and communism subjugate the rights of individuals, the family, self protection, religious freedom, the right to own property, and many other rights taken for granted, to the state. The state decides what you can own, where you can worship, even how many children you can have. These are not opposites -- they are basically the same! Yet if you listen to your average newscast or read your average paper, you’ll hear fascism linked with capitalism, not with its brother communism.
Capitalism is one word that is completely misleading. The term implies a society based on capital when in fact, the idea was to have a society based on freedom. It is the freedom to operate without government interference that makes “Capitalism” the true opposite of both communism and fascism. Yet the word itself has to be called into question because it implies that capital is at the root of a free society rather than the result of a free society. The term capitalism is itself, a derogatory term coined by none other than Karl Marx. He mistakenly viewed free markets as being based on capital and coined “capitalism”. People continue to defend capitalism by using the term capitalism which by its very use undermines what a free market is.
While there are some words that are misleading, others are sophisticated euphemisms. On September 11, 2001, the worst attack in American history took place on American soil. When we refer to that horrific day, we say “9-11”. There is a “pre 9-11 mentality” and a “post 9-11 mentality”. Other countries, after having been attacked, have said, “This is our 9-11”. After December 7, 1941, people didn’t call the Pearl Harbor attack “12-7”. They called it a sneak attack and said some not too complimentary things about the people that did the attack. Admiral Halsey said “Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” While we don’t need to resort to insulting any group of people, we don’t need to pretend that reality is something it isn’t. Barack Obama refuses to even use the word “terrorism”. On September 11, 2001, people went to work and found themselves trapped in a burning building knowing they were about to die. It was just a day of work for them. They were thinking about lunch, their weekend plans, their work schedule – all of a sudden they were faced with the end of their lives. Using the phrase 9-11 doesn’t do them justice and it doesn’t speak to the evil that occurred on that day. It doesn’t sound like a Madison Ave jingle and it shouldn’t – it was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, not a date and not a number.
Sometimes words just seem to pop up out of thin air. Some political consultant who just got out of Harvard decides that there is a new word to be used and all the networks, pundits and politicians go with the word in lock step. One such word was “gravitas”. In 2000, when Bush was running against Gore, the democrats came out and said he lacked “gravitas”. All of a sudden all the people on television were talking about “gravitas”. In the last campaign the word “transparency” was the word of the day. Politicians should stop being so political and learn how to talk to people, not by using a word such as “transparency” but by explaining how as citizens, we have a right to know what our government is doing. Words as concepts lose their meaning and we hear them without really being affected by them. As for the word “gravitas”, after a grand explosion on the political scene in 2000, it seems to have gone back into hiding. No point in bringing out the word “gravitas” when there is a democratic president who lacks “gravitas”. George Orwell understood why politicians will bring words such as “gravitas” up from the basement, dust them off and use them. He said “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy…Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful…to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Take the advice of Ayn Rand and “Check your premises” when reading, hearing or watching information. If it doesn’t sound right, don’t be afraid to question it. Look past the words and ask, where is this coming from? Why is it being presented in this way? Why now? Who has to gain from this? What is the real agenda behind this? As Orwell pointed out, political speech is designed to deceive. Read between the lines and look for what is being implied, rather than said.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Universal Healthcare And Death Panels – Sarah Palin Was Right
Sarah Palin was roundly criticized, laughed at, and excoriated by supporters of Obama when she said that the universal health care plan would lead to death panels. The characterization of the term ‘death panels’ was quickly associated with people wearing tin foil hats. It is ironic that a group of people who believe the twin towers were brought down by inside conspiracies and that a plane never crashed into the Pentagon, could call other people ‘tin foil hat wearers’.
When liberals are afraid of a person or of a particular point, they attack it with a vengeance. It’s much like the story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Hans Christian Andersen. The Emperor is told that his clothes will be invisible only to the incompetent and the stupid. He doesn’t want to seem incompetent so, of course he says that he sees the clothes, as does everyone else until a child says “He hasn’t got any clothes on!”
The moment the term ‘Death Panels’ is labeled as a lunatic term; everyone is supposed to be afraid to explore the logic behind the term. It is a strategy often used by liberals. We see the proof that there are, in fact, ‘Death Panels’ but we are supposed to be afraid to say it for fear of being labeled incompetent or stupid – but if you see the emperor wearing a pair of stripped boxer shorts, it’s stupid to pretend that he’s wearing a three piece suit.
When this health care debate started, the first instinct was to look at other countries which have tried universal health care. What we saw was frightening – long waits for MRIs, horrific survival rates for cancer, waits for hip surgeries and on and on. It is so bad in England that there is a waiting list just to get on the waiting list! There are 40,000 people in the UK who have been waiting over a year for surgeries. There are shortages of critical supplies, drugs and medical equipment. According to the Burton Report, it is so bad in some countries that there is a black market in health care. In Japan life saving devices such as defibrillators are rarely available.
Socialized medicine has ruined the medical profession in any country where it has been tried. It’s basic economics. Increase the demand for a product and decrease the incentive to supply that demand and you create a shortage. Not only is there a shortage in medical care, there is little to zero medical innovation and advancement. There is no money to invest in research and no incentive to even try. There is a reason why most new medical innovations come out of the United States – it is called the free market.
People who support the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Health care plan say that their plan is different. They say their plan will give people a choice; that people will be able to keep their current plan and won’t be forced into anything they don’t want. Their own words, however, prove that this is not the case.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is now an economics adviser for Barack Obama, said the following at a speech in 2007 at UC Berkeley. The premise of Reich’s comments is that this is what a presidential candidate would say if he were honest about healthcare:
"what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it (healthcare) to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more."
"And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."
"Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid…to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents."
Tom Daschle was Barack Obama's first choice to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In Dashchle’s 2008 book, ‘Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis’, he laid out some of his ideas on healthcare:
"Doctors will have to 'learn to operate less like solo practitioners' and be willing to accept mandatory government controls and guidelines."
Daschle advocates the creation a brand new bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. This new government organization will monitor all medical treatments to make sure that your doctor is prescribing the exact drugs and medical treatments that the federal government believes are 'appropriate' and 'cost effective'. This would slow the development and use of new medications and treatments because they are driving up medical costs. According to Betsy McCaughey, Daschle praises Europeans for being more willing to accept 'hopeless diagnoses' and 'forgo experimental treatments,' and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is a special advisor to the President on health care. He believes people between the age of 15 and 40 should be given preferential treatment. Some quotes from Emanuel:
"Suppose a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old have a life threatening disease. Since the 25-year-old has many more potential years of life ahead of him, he should receive preferential treatment."
"The complete lives system discriminates against older people…. Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years."
"Health services should not be guaranteed to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
Barack Obama said:
"So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here…I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists…It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions through normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."
What is this independent group of Obama’s to be called? A death panel by any other name is still a death panel.
People may argue that the quotes listed above are taken out of context. An example of something truly taken out of context, ironically also involving Sarah Palin, is when Drew Griffin from CNN said to Palin, “some conservatives have been pretty hard on you… "The National Review" had a story saying that, you know, I can't tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above? In actuality, the National Review article by Byron York said "Watching press coverage of the Republican candidate for vice president, it's sometimes hard to decide whether Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, backward or, well, all of the above." The words “Watching press coverage” completely change the meaning. There is nothing, in any of the quotes listed above, that can change the context of the meaning or the intent of what is said in the way that those three words “Watching press coverage” do.
The Health care proposals that are being shoved down the throats of the American people do, in fact, have death panels. It would be obvious if all we had to go on were the many examples of how socialized healthcare works in different countries around the world. In fact, we have so much more proof than that as stated in the very words of the very people who are shoving this immoral debacle down our throats. Who the hell do these people think they are? If I work and save my own money I won’t have the right to use my OWN money on the care of my elderly parents? It won’t be available? This is their moral plan? This plan is pure evil and it is a moral obligation to stop it.
When liberals are afraid of a person or of a particular point, they attack it with a vengeance. It’s much like the story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Hans Christian Andersen. The Emperor is told that his clothes will be invisible only to the incompetent and the stupid. He doesn’t want to seem incompetent so, of course he says that he sees the clothes, as does everyone else until a child says “He hasn’t got any clothes on!”
The moment the term ‘Death Panels’ is labeled as a lunatic term; everyone is supposed to be afraid to explore the logic behind the term. It is a strategy often used by liberals. We see the proof that there are, in fact, ‘Death Panels’ but we are supposed to be afraid to say it for fear of being labeled incompetent or stupid – but if you see the emperor wearing a pair of stripped boxer shorts, it’s stupid to pretend that he’s wearing a three piece suit.
When this health care debate started, the first instinct was to look at other countries which have tried universal health care. What we saw was frightening – long waits for MRIs, horrific survival rates for cancer, waits for hip surgeries and on and on. It is so bad in England that there is a waiting list just to get on the waiting list! There are 40,000 people in the UK who have been waiting over a year for surgeries. There are shortages of critical supplies, drugs and medical equipment. According to the Burton Report, it is so bad in some countries that there is a black market in health care. In Japan life saving devices such as defibrillators are rarely available.
Socialized medicine has ruined the medical profession in any country where it has been tried. It’s basic economics. Increase the demand for a product and decrease the incentive to supply that demand and you create a shortage. Not only is there a shortage in medical care, there is little to zero medical innovation and advancement. There is no money to invest in research and no incentive to even try. There is a reason why most new medical innovations come out of the United States – it is called the free market.
People who support the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Health care plan say that their plan is different. They say their plan will give people a choice; that people will be able to keep their current plan and won’t be forced into anything they don’t want. Their own words, however, prove that this is not the case.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who is now an economics adviser for Barack Obama, said the following at a speech in 2007 at UC Berkeley. The premise of Reich’s comments is that this is what a presidential candidate would say if he were honest about healthcare:
"what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it (healthcare) to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more."
"And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."
"Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid…to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents."
Tom Daschle was Barack Obama's first choice to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In Dashchle’s 2008 book, ‘Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis’, he laid out some of his ideas on healthcare:
"Doctors will have to 'learn to operate less like solo practitioners' and be willing to accept mandatory government controls and guidelines."
Daschle advocates the creation a brand new bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. This new government organization will monitor all medical treatments to make sure that your doctor is prescribing the exact drugs and medical treatments that the federal government believes are 'appropriate' and 'cost effective'. This would slow the development and use of new medications and treatments because they are driving up medical costs. According to Betsy McCaughey, Daschle praises Europeans for being more willing to accept 'hopeless diagnoses' and 'forgo experimental treatments,' and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is a special advisor to the President on health care. He believes people between the age of 15 and 40 should be given preferential treatment. Some quotes from Emanuel:
"Suppose a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old have a life threatening disease. Since the 25-year-old has many more potential years of life ahead of him, he should receive preferential treatment."
"The complete lives system discriminates against older people…. Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years."
"Health services should not be guaranteed to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
Barack Obama said:
"So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here…I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists…It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions through normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."
What is this independent group of Obama’s to be called? A death panel by any other name is still a death panel.
People may argue that the quotes listed above are taken out of context. An example of something truly taken out of context, ironically also involving Sarah Palin, is when Drew Griffin from CNN said to Palin, “some conservatives have been pretty hard on you… "The National Review" had a story saying that, you know, I can't tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above? In actuality, the National Review article by Byron York said "Watching press coverage of the Republican candidate for vice president, it's sometimes hard to decide whether Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, backward or, well, all of the above." The words “Watching press coverage” completely change the meaning. There is nothing, in any of the quotes listed above, that can change the context of the meaning or the intent of what is said in the way that those three words “Watching press coverage” do.
The Health care proposals that are being shoved down the throats of the American people do, in fact, have death panels. It would be obvious if all we had to go on were the many examples of how socialized healthcare works in different countries around the world. In fact, we have so much more proof than that as stated in the very words of the very people who are shoving this immoral debacle down our throats. Who the hell do these people think they are? If I work and save my own money I won’t have the right to use my OWN money on the care of my elderly parents? It won’t be available? This is their moral plan? This plan is pure evil and it is a moral obligation to stop it.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
A Brooklyn Conservative in Blue State New York
A friend of mine was surprised when I told her that I was a conservative. I asked her why she was surprised. She said “Well, you seemed intelligent; I just assumed you were liberal.” Sometimes I hide the dirty secret of my conservatism. Living in New York, it can be easier that way. I’m passionate about my beliefs, however, and sometimes I just can’t contain myself.
If I say nothing while my core beliefs are being trashed right before my eyes, I feel as if I am going to explode. If I say something, I’ll get into an argument and I’ll feel bad for starting an argument, for being the outcast in this world of left leaning lunacy. Usually, when I can’t take the liberal onslaught and am forced to respond, it’s in a situation where there are two, three or four people arguing against me. This causes me to have to raise my voice to be heard. The spit starts flying out as I go on the attack and act like the Cro-Magnon man that the left believes us conservatives to be.
It’s really so much easier to be a liberal. You could say “Of course I’m for universal health care. What kind of person would want sick people to be without care?” This is so easy! You don’t have to look at facts or details. If I get sick or lose my job, I could say, “I deserve to be taken care of because I wanted to take care of other people who could have been in the same situation.” I would never have to worry about being blamed for anything because I wouldn’t strive for anything. If I cheated on my wife, I could say that I never said that having an affair was wrong. If I got addicted to drugs, I could say “It’s not my fault; we’re all victims of an unfair system.”
We conservatives are victims of our own standards. When it was revealed that Bill Bennett, who had written books about virtue and family values, had a gambling problem, the left was all over the story, using the H-word “hypocrisy” over and over again; the same with Rush Limbaugh when it was revealed he had a drug problem.
Conservatives never said that they, or anyone else, needed to walk on water. If it is hypocritical to strive for something and fail, what is it when one strives for nothing and succeeds? The philosophy of the left is evident in both personal matters and in larger, governmental and economic concerns. Striving for success, failing and learning from failure is the basis of a Free Market economic system. In a true free market system, a person takes a chance, gets the rewards for success and the blame for failure. Socialist systems, on the other hand, strive for nothing more than the maintenance of the society, not for creating anything better. And when a conservative gets caught doing something wrong, well, contrary to the stereotypes of the left, we conservatives like to have fun! Sometimes, like all human beings, we make mistakes. The left wants us to behave as if we were the robots that they believe us to be.
Whether it is striving for personal success, success in business, success in family life, or anything else, the conservative mind does not see failure as hypocritical, it sees failure as an essential part of the process of making the most of who you are as a person in all facets of life. The left, in judging conservatives, tends to judge them based on their standards, not with the standards that conservatives use in judging themselves.
Conservatives take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them. A conservative who talks about family values is not hypocritical when he makes a mistake. He is a person who is striving for something greater. The mistake or the hypocrisy is not in failing to achieve your own standards, the real hypocrisy is to not have any standards, or anything worth striving for in the first place.
When I try to debate points such as this with liberals, I get blank stares. They are like children who just repeat something over and over again. My nephew, when he was about six years old, once came to me and said “Hey Howie, you know what?” To which I said “What?” “Chicken Butt!” he said, and then laughed hysterically, which made me laugh as well. Two seconds later he said, “Hey Howie, you know what?” To which I said “Tell me”. And he said “NO NO NO! You know what?” “What?” I said. And he said “Chicken Butt!” -- And then laughed hysterically once again. Somewhere around the 45th time he said the joke I had to figure a way out of it. This, by the way, is what it’s like arguing with a liberal.
Liberals will bring up points that have nothing to do with the debate and then act as if they have just declared a major “gotcha” moment. The “Chicken Hawk” argument is a good example. If someone needs to hire an accountant, it is not necessary that the person have worked, himself, as an accountant. If a person calls the police for help, it is not necessary that the person would have had to, at one time, work for the police department. Liberals, incapable of winning a debate on issues, try to cut it off with personal attacks.
As to the “Chicken Hawk” argument, if a person who never served in the military tried to tell the military what strategy to use, how to use troops, technology and equipment, then there would be a legitimate case to be made. However, whether or not the country, in defense of its borders and safety of its people, has a need to use the military is something that any person (whether having served in the military or not) has a right, even an obligation, to speak up about. The alternative would be to have a military dictatorship. Does the left ever think of the logical consequences of their arguments?
As to logical arguments, I was talking to a liberal once about the benefits of drilling for oil in Alaska. She argued that we change the environment by our drilling for oil. I countered by saying that the Alaska pipeline has actually turned out to be beneficial to the environment, as well as to humanity. The caribou population has grown and has thrived around the pipeline because the heat generated by the pipeline attracts animals. The caribou gather around the pipeline, which in turn, helps not only the caribou but other animals that prey on the increased population of caribou. Rather than see the benefit of this win-win situation, my friend said “You see! That’s what I mean; we’ve messed with the natural order of things!” I said “But they’ve INCREASED!!” “It doesn’t matter!” she said. How do you argue against this?
Sometimes, we conservatives can use the liberal biases to our advantage. I have a conservative friend in New York (one of two – not one of two conservative friends, one of the two other conservatives that live in New York) who is a baker. She entered a cupcake baking contest on July 4th. She thought of putting tiny American flags on the cupcakes. Being that this is New York, however, she thought better of it and put peace signs on the cupcakes. She won the contest. We’ll never know if she won because of the peace signs vs. the American flags. The cupcakes are amazing and may have won anyway. The point is that instinctively, she knew that to this crowd, the American flag would have been an impediment to winning and that is truly a shame.
What does one do, when the liberal assumes he is speaking to a comrade in arms? Another friend was listening to a client go on and on about the evils of the Bush administration, the evils of Cheney, Halliburton, Abu Ghraib and on and on and on. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore and said “I voted for Bush!” The reply was “You couldn’t have voted for Bush, you’re a photographer!” Liberals, who pride themselves on their progressiveness, their openness, their acceptance of others not like them, are not only the most intolerant people I’ve ever met, but the most hypocritical of all!
The left prides itself on diversity but the diversity they talk to is superficial diversity. Real diversity is diversity of thought and opinion and they do not tolerate it. These are people who love to shock and stun others with their openness and creativity but they, in turn, are truly shocked and come out with some of the most inane statements when they hear anything in disagreement with their liberal dogma.
If I say nothing while my core beliefs are being trashed right before my eyes, I feel as if I am going to explode. If I say something, I’ll get into an argument and I’ll feel bad for starting an argument, for being the outcast in this world of left leaning lunacy. Usually, when I can’t take the liberal onslaught and am forced to respond, it’s in a situation where there are two, three or four people arguing against me. This causes me to have to raise my voice to be heard. The spit starts flying out as I go on the attack and act like the Cro-Magnon man that the left believes us conservatives to be.
It’s really so much easier to be a liberal. You could say “Of course I’m for universal health care. What kind of person would want sick people to be without care?” This is so easy! You don’t have to look at facts or details. If I get sick or lose my job, I could say, “I deserve to be taken care of because I wanted to take care of other people who could have been in the same situation.” I would never have to worry about being blamed for anything because I wouldn’t strive for anything. If I cheated on my wife, I could say that I never said that having an affair was wrong. If I got addicted to drugs, I could say “It’s not my fault; we’re all victims of an unfair system.”
We conservatives are victims of our own standards. When it was revealed that Bill Bennett, who had written books about virtue and family values, had a gambling problem, the left was all over the story, using the H-word “hypocrisy” over and over again; the same with Rush Limbaugh when it was revealed he had a drug problem.
Conservatives never said that they, or anyone else, needed to walk on water. If it is hypocritical to strive for something and fail, what is it when one strives for nothing and succeeds? The philosophy of the left is evident in both personal matters and in larger, governmental and economic concerns. Striving for success, failing and learning from failure is the basis of a Free Market economic system. In a true free market system, a person takes a chance, gets the rewards for success and the blame for failure. Socialist systems, on the other hand, strive for nothing more than the maintenance of the society, not for creating anything better. And when a conservative gets caught doing something wrong, well, contrary to the stereotypes of the left, we conservatives like to have fun! Sometimes, like all human beings, we make mistakes. The left wants us to behave as if we were the robots that they believe us to be.
Whether it is striving for personal success, success in business, success in family life, or anything else, the conservative mind does not see failure as hypocritical, it sees failure as an essential part of the process of making the most of who you are as a person in all facets of life. The left, in judging conservatives, tends to judge them based on their standards, not with the standards that conservatives use in judging themselves.
Conservatives take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them. A conservative who talks about family values is not hypocritical when he makes a mistake. He is a person who is striving for something greater. The mistake or the hypocrisy is not in failing to achieve your own standards, the real hypocrisy is to not have any standards, or anything worth striving for in the first place.
When I try to debate points such as this with liberals, I get blank stares. They are like children who just repeat something over and over again. My nephew, when he was about six years old, once came to me and said “Hey Howie, you know what?” To which I said “What?” “Chicken Butt!” he said, and then laughed hysterically, which made me laugh as well. Two seconds later he said, “Hey Howie, you know what?” To which I said “Tell me”. And he said “NO NO NO! You know what?” “What?” I said. And he said “Chicken Butt!” -- And then laughed hysterically once again. Somewhere around the 45th time he said the joke I had to figure a way out of it. This, by the way, is what it’s like arguing with a liberal.
Liberals will bring up points that have nothing to do with the debate and then act as if they have just declared a major “gotcha” moment. The “Chicken Hawk” argument is a good example. If someone needs to hire an accountant, it is not necessary that the person have worked, himself, as an accountant. If a person calls the police for help, it is not necessary that the person would have had to, at one time, work for the police department. Liberals, incapable of winning a debate on issues, try to cut it off with personal attacks.
As to the “Chicken Hawk” argument, if a person who never served in the military tried to tell the military what strategy to use, how to use troops, technology and equipment, then there would be a legitimate case to be made. However, whether or not the country, in defense of its borders and safety of its people, has a need to use the military is something that any person (whether having served in the military or not) has a right, even an obligation, to speak up about. The alternative would be to have a military dictatorship. Does the left ever think of the logical consequences of their arguments?
As to logical arguments, I was talking to a liberal once about the benefits of drilling for oil in Alaska. She argued that we change the environment by our drilling for oil. I countered by saying that the Alaska pipeline has actually turned out to be beneficial to the environment, as well as to humanity. The caribou population has grown and has thrived around the pipeline because the heat generated by the pipeline attracts animals. The caribou gather around the pipeline, which in turn, helps not only the caribou but other animals that prey on the increased population of caribou. Rather than see the benefit of this win-win situation, my friend said “You see! That’s what I mean; we’ve messed with the natural order of things!” I said “But they’ve INCREASED!!” “It doesn’t matter!” she said. How do you argue against this?
Sometimes, we conservatives can use the liberal biases to our advantage. I have a conservative friend in New York (one of two – not one of two conservative friends, one of the two other conservatives that live in New York) who is a baker. She entered a cupcake baking contest on July 4th. She thought of putting tiny American flags on the cupcakes. Being that this is New York, however, she thought better of it and put peace signs on the cupcakes. She won the contest. We’ll never know if she won because of the peace signs vs. the American flags. The cupcakes are amazing and may have won anyway. The point is that instinctively, she knew that to this crowd, the American flag would have been an impediment to winning and that is truly a shame.
What does one do, when the liberal assumes he is speaking to a comrade in arms? Another friend was listening to a client go on and on about the evils of the Bush administration, the evils of Cheney, Halliburton, Abu Ghraib and on and on and on. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore and said “I voted for Bush!” The reply was “You couldn’t have voted for Bush, you’re a photographer!” Liberals, who pride themselves on their progressiveness, their openness, their acceptance of others not like them, are not only the most intolerant people I’ve ever met, but the most hypocritical of all!
The left prides itself on diversity but the diversity they talk to is superficial diversity. Real diversity is diversity of thought and opinion and they do not tolerate it. These are people who love to shock and stun others with their openness and creativity but they, in turn, are truly shocked and come out with some of the most inane statements when they hear anything in disagreement with their liberal dogma.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Heads I Win – Tales You Lose (Liberals Win but leave behind a Mess)
Barack Obama has made it a point to continually talk about the “mess” he inherited from the Bush administration. In August, he said "But I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."
Indeed, Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall. There are wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while terrorist groups remain a constant threat. North Korea and Iran are testing long range missiles in conjunction with the development of nuclear weapons. It’s worth noting that the precarious state of the country is what got him elected in the first place. If everything was going along swimmingly, the country wouldn’t have changed direction.
Liberals need a catastrophe to get elected. They use the misfortune of others, a bad economy, a war, racial tension, hurricanes, the Rachel Maddow show – anything and everything to convince others that they and only they, can come in on their white horses with shining armor to come to the rescue and save the day. Their very existence as a political force is predicated not on solving real problems but on having problems to justify the need for their policies.
It’s a vicious circle. Without having to have to worry about consequences, liberals can promote the most radical policies the way that a gambler can go down double or nothing, without ever having to worry about losing. They are never held to account for their policies. No matter what the facts say, it’s always someone else’s fault. Hence they have a ‘Heads I Win – Tales you lose’ policy. If the radical policy produces results, they are heroes; if not, then there is justification for more of their policies.
Think this sounds crazy? In 1977, the Carter administration passed the Community Reinvestment Act. The goal was noble, as most liberal goals seem, but devoid of logic, as most liberal plans are. The idea was to create a situation where low income people would be able to buy homes. Banks had to prove that a certain percentage of loans went to these low income people and it forced them to make loans to people who didn’t qualify. In the 1990’s, in order to guarantee those loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie May promised to buy 2 trillion dollars worth of those mortgages. This took financial pressure off banks and they were able to make more of these risky loans and show what good ‘corporate citizens’ they were. The downfall was inevitable.
Once all this was set in place, there was speculation and trading on these loans to try to profit from it but none of that would have happened if the irresponsible policies weren’t put into effect in 1977 and then increased in the 1990’s. Before the inevitable collapse, President Bush tried to point out that there would be problems if the current policies continued. It was liberals such as Barney Frank who assured everyone that Fannie and Freddy were solvent. Bush didn’t push the point as hard as he should have, but at least he recognized the problem while liberal democrats said there was no problem.
So Barack Obama is elected into office based on an economic downturn that was created by exactly the kind of policies that he wants to implement to solve the problem. Incidentally, Social Security is another problem that George Bush tried to deal with. They criticized him for bringing up Social Security the same way they criticized him for trying to deal with the mortgage crisis. When Social Security blows up, liberals will no doubt use the same policies that blew it up to try to fix it. At the same time, they will blame republican and conservative greed for causing it to fail even though conservatives were the only ones who tried to head off the problems before they became critical.
President Obama talks about those who ‘created the mess’. How many messes has the left created and how many of those messes have they had to answer for? When you don’t have to answer to your failures, when you are, in fact, rewarded for your failures, it doesn’t provide any incentive to stop failing. Liberals either don’t understand or don’t care that there are consequences to their actions that go beyond the immediate situation at hand.
One mess created by liberals is the banning of the chemical DDT. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” created hysteria around chemical pesticides. The manufacturers of DDT, farmers, scientists, and others tried to assure people that DDT was not harmful and had tremendous benefits. The anti DDT campaign took on a life of its own and when a liberal cause takes on that kind of momentum, there is no stopping it (See Global Warming). So DDT was banned. Since 1972, over 100 million people have died from malaria. This is a disease that was on the verge of being eradicated in the early 1960s. Millions of people died needlessly. This is a catastrophic event of monumental proportions that few people address and fewer take responsibility for. It’s not an exaggeration – 100 MILLION people have lost their lives yet no one is asked to answer for this! Is it because their heart was in the right place? Their intentions were good? People continue to suffer, mostly in Africa, to this very day and some are talking about re-introducing DDT – a bit late for all those who died because of well-intentioned people. For more information on Rachel Carson and the DDT ban, a good article is “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Genocide” by Lisa Makson in FrontPageMagazine.com.
Another fine mess that liberals have never had to answer for was when they pressured congress to withdraw all funding from the war in Vietnam. When the US withdrew, it did so under a treaty that it would go back in if the situation got out of hand. There was so much pressure by the left to get out of Vietnam, that they constantly blamed the US and absolved the North Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge of any wrong doing. When it became obvious that mass extermination was taking place in Cambodia, the left continued to blame the US and make excuses for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They placed all the blame on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as if, even if that were true, it would absolve them of the responsibility of living up to a treaty and saving the millions of people who were being slaughtered.
The propaganda that took place then was similar to the propaganda now and there was no FOX news, talk radio, or the internet to present the other side. Movies such as “The Killing Fields” made it seem as if everything the Cambodians did was the result of the actions of the US. Just as now with Islamic terrorism, it could never be that there were purely evil people who had to be fought and stopped. Nevertheless, regardless of the cause of the Cambodian genocide, we had an obligation to stop it, not to excuse the actions of mass murderers. Two million people died in Cambodia. Not only did the left not want to stop this genocide, they actually praised the people committing the genocide! For a more complete telling of the true story of the Khmer Rouge, see the chapter called “The Bloodbath” in Mona Charen’s book “Useful Idiots”.
Whether it’s as severe as mass extermination or a banking crisis, schools that can’t educate, a war on poverty that creates more poverty, inner city programs that create crumbling cities, rent control ideas that create a lack of housing, ideas to stop crime by understanding criminal behavior, rather than punishing it – thereby causing more crime, welfare ideas that cause dependency instead of personal growth, the messes created by liberal ideas are endless. They are never held accountable for these failures. It’s either because they didn’t do enough of whatever their miserable idea was, or they didn’t have enough money to do it correctly. It never dawns on them that maybe the ideas, themselves, are flawed.
So, we are now being forced to buy this bill of goods that has failed so miserably in the past. Apparently, we have no choice but to accept it. We’re supposed to just “get out of the way and stop talking”, but we have to leave our money behind of course -- they’ll need that. Obama is like a vacuum cleaner salesman who is going to pour some dirt all over the floor to prove how great the vacuum cleaner will work. It won’t work and we shouldn’t have to pay $10,000,000,000,000 for a broken vacuum cleaner that will leave a mess on the floor.
Indeed, Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall. There are wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while terrorist groups remain a constant threat. North Korea and Iran are testing long range missiles in conjunction with the development of nuclear weapons. It’s worth noting that the precarious state of the country is what got him elected in the first place. If everything was going along swimmingly, the country wouldn’t have changed direction.
Liberals need a catastrophe to get elected. They use the misfortune of others, a bad economy, a war, racial tension, hurricanes, the Rachel Maddow show – anything and everything to convince others that they and only they, can come in on their white horses with shining armor to come to the rescue and save the day. Their very existence as a political force is predicated not on solving real problems but on having problems to justify the need for their policies.
It’s a vicious circle. Without having to have to worry about consequences, liberals can promote the most radical policies the way that a gambler can go down double or nothing, without ever having to worry about losing. They are never held to account for their policies. No matter what the facts say, it’s always someone else’s fault. Hence they have a ‘Heads I Win – Tales you lose’ policy. If the radical policy produces results, they are heroes; if not, then there is justification for more of their policies.
Think this sounds crazy? In 1977, the Carter administration passed the Community Reinvestment Act. The goal was noble, as most liberal goals seem, but devoid of logic, as most liberal plans are. The idea was to create a situation where low income people would be able to buy homes. Banks had to prove that a certain percentage of loans went to these low income people and it forced them to make loans to people who didn’t qualify. In the 1990’s, in order to guarantee those loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie May promised to buy 2 trillion dollars worth of those mortgages. This took financial pressure off banks and they were able to make more of these risky loans and show what good ‘corporate citizens’ they were. The downfall was inevitable.
Once all this was set in place, there was speculation and trading on these loans to try to profit from it but none of that would have happened if the irresponsible policies weren’t put into effect in 1977 and then increased in the 1990’s. Before the inevitable collapse, President Bush tried to point out that there would be problems if the current policies continued. It was liberals such as Barney Frank who assured everyone that Fannie and Freddy were solvent. Bush didn’t push the point as hard as he should have, but at least he recognized the problem while liberal democrats said there was no problem.
So Barack Obama is elected into office based on an economic downturn that was created by exactly the kind of policies that he wants to implement to solve the problem. Incidentally, Social Security is another problem that George Bush tried to deal with. They criticized him for bringing up Social Security the same way they criticized him for trying to deal with the mortgage crisis. When Social Security blows up, liberals will no doubt use the same policies that blew it up to try to fix it. At the same time, they will blame republican and conservative greed for causing it to fail even though conservatives were the only ones who tried to head off the problems before they became critical.
President Obama talks about those who ‘created the mess’. How many messes has the left created and how many of those messes have they had to answer for? When you don’t have to answer to your failures, when you are, in fact, rewarded for your failures, it doesn’t provide any incentive to stop failing. Liberals either don’t understand or don’t care that there are consequences to their actions that go beyond the immediate situation at hand.
One mess created by liberals is the banning of the chemical DDT. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” created hysteria around chemical pesticides. The manufacturers of DDT, farmers, scientists, and others tried to assure people that DDT was not harmful and had tremendous benefits. The anti DDT campaign took on a life of its own and when a liberal cause takes on that kind of momentum, there is no stopping it (See Global Warming). So DDT was banned. Since 1972, over 100 million people have died from malaria. This is a disease that was on the verge of being eradicated in the early 1960s. Millions of people died needlessly. This is a catastrophic event of monumental proportions that few people address and fewer take responsibility for. It’s not an exaggeration – 100 MILLION people have lost their lives yet no one is asked to answer for this! Is it because their heart was in the right place? Their intentions were good? People continue to suffer, mostly in Africa, to this very day and some are talking about re-introducing DDT – a bit late for all those who died because of well-intentioned people. For more information on Rachel Carson and the DDT ban, a good article is “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Genocide” by Lisa Makson in FrontPageMagazine.com.
Another fine mess that liberals have never had to answer for was when they pressured congress to withdraw all funding from the war in Vietnam. When the US withdrew, it did so under a treaty that it would go back in if the situation got out of hand. There was so much pressure by the left to get out of Vietnam, that they constantly blamed the US and absolved the North Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge of any wrong doing. When it became obvious that mass extermination was taking place in Cambodia, the left continued to blame the US and make excuses for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They placed all the blame on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as if, even if that were true, it would absolve them of the responsibility of living up to a treaty and saving the millions of people who were being slaughtered.
The propaganda that took place then was similar to the propaganda now and there was no FOX news, talk radio, or the internet to present the other side. Movies such as “The Killing Fields” made it seem as if everything the Cambodians did was the result of the actions of the US. Just as now with Islamic terrorism, it could never be that there were purely evil people who had to be fought and stopped. Nevertheless, regardless of the cause of the Cambodian genocide, we had an obligation to stop it, not to excuse the actions of mass murderers. Two million people died in Cambodia. Not only did the left not want to stop this genocide, they actually praised the people committing the genocide! For a more complete telling of the true story of the Khmer Rouge, see the chapter called “The Bloodbath” in Mona Charen’s book “Useful Idiots”.
Whether it’s as severe as mass extermination or a banking crisis, schools that can’t educate, a war on poverty that creates more poverty, inner city programs that create crumbling cities, rent control ideas that create a lack of housing, ideas to stop crime by understanding criminal behavior, rather than punishing it – thereby causing more crime, welfare ideas that cause dependency instead of personal growth, the messes created by liberal ideas are endless. They are never held accountable for these failures. It’s either because they didn’t do enough of whatever their miserable idea was, or they didn’t have enough money to do it correctly. It never dawns on them that maybe the ideas, themselves, are flawed.
So, we are now being forced to buy this bill of goods that has failed so miserably in the past. Apparently, we have no choice but to accept it. We’re supposed to just “get out of the way and stop talking”, but we have to leave our money behind of course -- they’ll need that. Obama is like a vacuum cleaner salesman who is going to pour some dirt all over the floor to prove how great the vacuum cleaner will work. It won’t work and we shouldn’t have to pay $10,000,000,000,000 for a broken vacuum cleaner that will leave a mess on the floor.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
War – What Is It Good For? – Absolutely Everything
Of course war is horrible. People say that war is to be avoided at all costs and it should always be a last resort. All other options must be completely exhausted before a country should consider sending troops (people) to fight and kill. War as an absolute last resort seems to make perfect sense.
Unfortunately, the idea of ‘war as a last resort’ assumes that there are two reasonable groups or countries who can resolve differences. It assumes that all differences can be ironed out with compromise. Sometimes, however, evil exists in the world and to compromise with evil is to lend it legitimacy.
Let’s look at this on a personal level. You witness a woman being mugged and beaten. What is the proper course of action? Maybe a good idea is to walk over to the mugger and say, “This mugging and beating thing is wrong. I don’t know how much money you hope to gain with this mugging but I’ll give you a twenty. Then we can all walk away satisfied.”
Or, if you are Barack Obama and you witness a mugging, you may say something such as “Hold on there young man, I know there have been differences between people who mug and those that don’t. We need to work together. Partnership and cooperation among all people is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity. I understand your frustration. In the past, people who haven’t broken laws or mugged someone have acted arrogantly and sometimes unilaterally, without consideration for those that have the need to mug others. And sometimes it is our very arrogance that has caused people to become muggers in the first place.”
In reality, when a mugging takes place, the witness to the scene has a responsibility. Perhaps you do nothing -- someone else is getting mugged and that’s not your business. Many cities have ‘good Samaritan laws’ which speak to the morality of doing nothing while a crime is being committed. You are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same way that the person getting mugged is in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, you saw the crime and you now have a responsibility that you can’t escape from.
When countries commit crimes, the choices are no different than when a crime is being committed by an individual. While the choices are the same, the consequences of doing nothing are far more severe. The ultimate example is Nazi Germany and WWII. Suppose in 1939, the world community, knowing what Hitler was up to, had acted preemptively. Let us say that the moment the world saw Hitler’s designs on Poland, it attacked Germany. Let us also assume that the act of attacking Hitler’s Germany resulted in a war in which one million people died. Yet Hitler’s designs on world domination were stopped. It prevented the Holocaust from happening and it prevented a war where over 65 million people died.
No one would have known about WWII or the Holocaust because the preventative action would have stopped it. In such a situation, there would have been intense criticism on those who initiated a war where over one million people died. At the time, Hitler was looked at as a crazy Charlie Chaplain look-a-like. A million people dead? -- For what???
In an episode of the original Star Trek series, Dr McCoy (Bones for you Trekkies!) went through a portal that took him back in time. Back in the late 1930s, he saved the life of a woman played by Joan Collins. She was about to be hit by a car and McCoy pushed her out of the way. The character played by Collins was a peace activist who ended up influencing US policy and delaying the US entry into WWII. As a result, Germany won the war and all history changed. In the end, the Star Trek crew had to set history right by going back in time and stopping McCoy from saving the life of the peace activist played by Collins. In a moving scene at the end, Captain Kirk holds back McCoy as he is about to save the life of the Collins character. McCoy says, “Do you know what you have done? I could have saved her!!” To which Mr. Spock says “He knows, doctor, he knows.” Spock then adds, “She had the right idea, but at the wrong time.”
I bring this Star Trek episode up in all its excruciating detail because it demonstrates that the choice to initiate or retaliate in war has got to be looked at differently. No one ever gets to see the consequences of the “other choice”. When there is world conflict, the UN and individual countries always ask “How can we avoid a war”. This is the wrong question. Asking this question avoids reality and places world life and death situations into the realm of “wishful thinking”. The real question that needs to be asked isn’t how to avoid a war. It is “Based on what we know and can project, what are the consequences of going to war vs. the consequences of doing nothing?
People look at WWII as “the good war” because they know what happened. The reason that people know what happened is because we waited too dam long in the first place!! The so called and much maligned “Bush doctrine” was correct! This doctrine was based upon two truths of which reasonable and intellectually honest people cannot disagree. There are two imperatives in the doctrine. The first is that there IS evil in the world and that some countries fall under evil for a variety of reasons. When a country becomes a threat to its neighbors and its own citizens, the second imperative takes place and the world has to act to stop the threat – before innocent people suffer, not after!
The so called “Bush doctrine” was not too different from the original UN charter. The UN was set up to stop aggressive immoral behavior in order to PREVENT the kind of atrocities that took place in World War II. To stop aggression, it’s usually a good idea to make a distinction between the aggressors and the victims of aggression. Unfortunately, the UN has become incapable of making this distinction, often putting both aggressor and victim on equal moral playing fields, sometimes even taking the side of the aggressor against the victim. The UN, by this inability to distinguish right from wrong, has not only been ineffective but has often made catastrophes worse.
Even those who have coined the oxymoronic term “passive resistance” have had to come to terms that it only works if the group you are resisting against has a conscience. Mahatma Ghandi was once asked what Jewish people should do at the time of the Holocaust. His answer, documented in an essay by George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi”, as well as by Louis Fischer's “Gandhi and Stalin”, is that the Jewish people should have committed mass suicide in order to bring attention to their plight and to the evils of Nazi Germany. Gandhi is considered almost saintly because of his absolute renunciation of violence. But would his methods have stopped violence or caused more violence? His methods worked against the British because the British had a conscience. Again, here is the recognition of good and evil that the UN and pacifists in general, like to make believe doesn’t exist. Yet Gandhi, as displayed by his answer, clearly WAS aware of this distinction and held on to his philosophy of non violence knowing that it would not work and would lead to the extermination of a race of people.
Many people say that patriotism and religion can be blind. Pacifism can be as blind a faith as any. Shrouded in the certainty that peace is the way, no matter what the consequences, and so certain of the moral correctness of their actions or inactions, they have put pressure on countries to tolerate and often excuse evil. Whether witnessing a mugging or watching as a rogue nation gains the knowledge to build nuclear weapons, doing nothing is never the right thing to do. People never want to be in a situation where they have to deal with such horrible choices but these choices are thrust upon us whether we want them or not. In dealing with them, we will make mistakes. We are obviously not infallible. The choices we make should be based on reality and the knowledge that sometimes the choice is between something bad, something else that is really bad, and something else that is catastrophic. When you have those three choices, making the bad choice is the right choice.
Unfortunately, the idea of ‘war as a last resort’ assumes that there are two reasonable groups or countries who can resolve differences. It assumes that all differences can be ironed out with compromise. Sometimes, however, evil exists in the world and to compromise with evil is to lend it legitimacy.
Let’s look at this on a personal level. You witness a woman being mugged and beaten. What is the proper course of action? Maybe a good idea is to walk over to the mugger and say, “This mugging and beating thing is wrong. I don’t know how much money you hope to gain with this mugging but I’ll give you a twenty. Then we can all walk away satisfied.”
Or, if you are Barack Obama and you witness a mugging, you may say something such as “Hold on there young man, I know there have been differences between people who mug and those that don’t. We need to work together. Partnership and cooperation among all people is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity. I understand your frustration. In the past, people who haven’t broken laws or mugged someone have acted arrogantly and sometimes unilaterally, without consideration for those that have the need to mug others. And sometimes it is our very arrogance that has caused people to become muggers in the first place.”
In reality, when a mugging takes place, the witness to the scene has a responsibility. Perhaps you do nothing -- someone else is getting mugged and that’s not your business. Many cities have ‘good Samaritan laws’ which speak to the morality of doing nothing while a crime is being committed. You are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same way that the person getting mugged is in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, you saw the crime and you now have a responsibility that you can’t escape from.
When countries commit crimes, the choices are no different than when a crime is being committed by an individual. While the choices are the same, the consequences of doing nothing are far more severe. The ultimate example is Nazi Germany and WWII. Suppose in 1939, the world community, knowing what Hitler was up to, had acted preemptively. Let us say that the moment the world saw Hitler’s designs on Poland, it attacked Germany. Let us also assume that the act of attacking Hitler’s Germany resulted in a war in which one million people died. Yet Hitler’s designs on world domination were stopped. It prevented the Holocaust from happening and it prevented a war where over 65 million people died.
No one would have known about WWII or the Holocaust because the preventative action would have stopped it. In such a situation, there would have been intense criticism on those who initiated a war where over one million people died. At the time, Hitler was looked at as a crazy Charlie Chaplain look-a-like. A million people dead? -- For what???
In an episode of the original Star Trek series, Dr McCoy (Bones for you Trekkies!) went through a portal that took him back in time. Back in the late 1930s, he saved the life of a woman played by Joan Collins. She was about to be hit by a car and McCoy pushed her out of the way. The character played by Collins was a peace activist who ended up influencing US policy and delaying the US entry into WWII. As a result, Germany won the war and all history changed. In the end, the Star Trek crew had to set history right by going back in time and stopping McCoy from saving the life of the peace activist played by Collins. In a moving scene at the end, Captain Kirk holds back McCoy as he is about to save the life of the Collins character. McCoy says, “Do you know what you have done? I could have saved her!!” To which Mr. Spock says “He knows, doctor, he knows.” Spock then adds, “She had the right idea, but at the wrong time.”
I bring this Star Trek episode up in all its excruciating detail because it demonstrates that the choice to initiate or retaliate in war has got to be looked at differently. No one ever gets to see the consequences of the “other choice”. When there is world conflict, the UN and individual countries always ask “How can we avoid a war”. This is the wrong question. Asking this question avoids reality and places world life and death situations into the realm of “wishful thinking”. The real question that needs to be asked isn’t how to avoid a war. It is “Based on what we know and can project, what are the consequences of going to war vs. the consequences of doing nothing?
People look at WWII as “the good war” because they know what happened. The reason that people know what happened is because we waited too dam long in the first place!! The so called and much maligned “Bush doctrine” was correct! This doctrine was based upon two truths of which reasonable and intellectually honest people cannot disagree. There are two imperatives in the doctrine. The first is that there IS evil in the world and that some countries fall under evil for a variety of reasons. When a country becomes a threat to its neighbors and its own citizens, the second imperative takes place and the world has to act to stop the threat – before innocent people suffer, not after!
The so called “Bush doctrine” was not too different from the original UN charter. The UN was set up to stop aggressive immoral behavior in order to PREVENT the kind of atrocities that took place in World War II. To stop aggression, it’s usually a good idea to make a distinction between the aggressors and the victims of aggression. Unfortunately, the UN has become incapable of making this distinction, often putting both aggressor and victim on equal moral playing fields, sometimes even taking the side of the aggressor against the victim. The UN, by this inability to distinguish right from wrong, has not only been ineffective but has often made catastrophes worse.
Even those who have coined the oxymoronic term “passive resistance” have had to come to terms that it only works if the group you are resisting against has a conscience. Mahatma Ghandi was once asked what Jewish people should do at the time of the Holocaust. His answer, documented in an essay by George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi”, as well as by Louis Fischer's “Gandhi and Stalin”, is that the Jewish people should have committed mass suicide in order to bring attention to their plight and to the evils of Nazi Germany. Gandhi is considered almost saintly because of his absolute renunciation of violence. But would his methods have stopped violence or caused more violence? His methods worked against the British because the British had a conscience. Again, here is the recognition of good and evil that the UN and pacifists in general, like to make believe doesn’t exist. Yet Gandhi, as displayed by his answer, clearly WAS aware of this distinction and held on to his philosophy of non violence knowing that it would not work and would lead to the extermination of a race of people.
Many people say that patriotism and religion can be blind. Pacifism can be as blind a faith as any. Shrouded in the certainty that peace is the way, no matter what the consequences, and so certain of the moral correctness of their actions or inactions, they have put pressure on countries to tolerate and often excuse evil. Whether witnessing a mugging or watching as a rogue nation gains the knowledge to build nuclear weapons, doing nothing is never the right thing to do. People never want to be in a situation where they have to deal with such horrible choices but these choices are thrust upon us whether we want them or not. In dealing with them, we will make mistakes. We are obviously not infallible. The choices we make should be based on reality and the knowledge that sometimes the choice is between something bad, something else that is really bad, and something else that is catastrophic. When you have those three choices, making the bad choice is the right choice.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Terrorism – The Left, The Right, And the Middle East
It has often been said that “All forms of extremism are equally bad”; often by people who are extremists. Extremism, in itself, is not wrong. To fight for a just cause and to be uncompromising in that fight is the noblest thing a person can do. People on the left, mislabeled as liberals, are uncompromising in their fight for certain values yet they never refer to themselves, and are never referred to by anyone else, as extremists.
When people on the right start to make noise and air their dissatisfaction, words such as militia, Nazi, skinhead, redneck, racist and many others get routinely thrown around. When people on the left air their dissatisfaction, words such as activism and protest get used. Liberals are community organizers while people on the right are rude agitators. This double standard has never been more evident than in the treatment of people who are voicing their displeasure on the proposed healthcare debacle.
The double standard was evident in early April when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning that there might be an increase in domestic terror by "lone wolf" right-wing extremists, possibly with military experience. There was no specific intelligence for this threat. Janet Napolitano issued a report from Homeland Security that, according to Ralph Peters, “repeatedly warns of our military vets being terrorists. She uses ‘terrorist’. It warns about people who oppose illegal immigration as being terrorist threats, as people who may differ on right-to-life issues as terrorist threats.”
Right wing radio has repeatedly been referred to as hate mongering and extremist. As a result, the Obama administration is actively trying to limit talk radio, disregarding the hate being peddled by people on MSNBC, the misinformation from CBS, NBC, ABC, the NY Times… you get the idea. Would it ever occur to anyone to wonder why conservatives flock to talk radio? Would it ever occur to the people on the left that the reason people seek out talk radio is because the conservative view is constantly being disparaged and maligned by the main stream media? People on the left, not the right, created right wing talk radio. They did this by their media malpractice. People in the MSM weren’t doing their job and in true American and free market fashion, when there is an unfulfilled need, someone will come along and fill that need. FOX news and talk radio came along and filled a black hole in the media market.
It’s much easier to refer to right wingers as Nazis and terrorists than to actually listen or try to understand what conservatives are saying. Is this projection? Does the left look at the right and judge the right based on their (the left’s) values? When conservative authors and scholars give speeches at universities, liberal groups have done all they can to shut them down. They have thrown pies at authors; they have confiscated conservative newspapers and have successfully shut down conservative speeches. Is that an example of their “tolerance”? When Janet Napolitano warns of right wing terrorism, is she thinking, or expecting that the right wing will act the way the left has acted for the last 45 years?
To really view the double standard, imagine Al Gore making a speech on global warming. Someone comes along after the speech and says “Mr. Gore should be careful in his rhetoric. There might be another Unabomber out there who may take what he says too literally.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for that scenario to happen.
It would seem ridiculous to imply that this one crazed environmentalist (The Unabomber, not Gore) should be compared with everyone who is an environmentalist. Yet that invidious comparison is constantly used by people on the left. How often does the name Timothy McVeigh come up when liberals are talking about Conservatives? To the left, all people on the right are potential terrorists. For people who supposedly pride themselves on their understanding of other people, cultures and faiths, they are remarkably ignorant and intolerant of anyone with a different worldview than theirs.
While labeling people on the right as potential terrorists (or as Nancy Pelosi said about people attending town hall meetings, “People with swastikas on their arms”), liberals are eager to look at the causes of Islamic terrorism. Liberals want to know the reasons that would cause a group to do such horrific things. Moral equivalence rears its ugly head and liberals reach for the quote at the beginning of this article; “All forms of extremism are equally bad.”
First of all, when I take my belt and shoes off to go through the terminal in the airport, I’m not doing it because of Christian fundamentalists or Zionists. There is one group that has caused this to happen. We can’t live in a world where we have to pretend that the Emperor is wearing clothes when we can plainly see he’s wearing nothing but a pair of striped boxer shorts. Saying that “all forms of extremism are bad” is one of the most idiotic comments that have come into the modern lexicon (well that and “at the end of the day…”).
Some forms of extremism are noble and some aren’t. Common sense can always be used to tell which is which. The ones who tell 12 year old children to wear suicide belts can be described as the crazy extremists. The ones who fight against that ideology can be described as the noble extremists. It’s really not that difficult. Yet when liberals try to excuse Islamic terrorism, they’ll often play the Timothy McVeigh card again. “Well, there are people who bomb abortion clinics and what about Timothy McVeigh?”
The fact that Timothy McVeigh has to be mentioned so often, really indicates that there is not the epidemic of homegrown right wing terrorism that the left tries to display every time there is a controversial issue. Abortion bombings aren’t cheered by conservatives and they are extremely rare. Though when one happens, the MSM will play it up with news coverage that can only be rivaled when a child accidentally shoots someone.
Middle Eastern, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is clearly the biggest threat the country and the world has faced and will face in the future. The left draws a moral equivalency between the tens of thousands killed all over the world from Islamic terrorism, and the few people who have died from home grown terrorism. Of course, one person’s death is one too many but no one on the right said, “We need to understand Timothy McVeigh.” Home grown terrorism, as an issue, has been misrepresented. The image one gets when faced with the term “homegrown terrorism” is one of right wing militia groups, Nazis and skin heads.
Two of the biggest and most organized terrorist organizations in the United States are the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The FBI considers them two of the most dangerous home grown terrorist organizations. The Earth Liberation Front, along with its sister group, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), have taken responsibility for more than 600 crimes since 1996, totaling more than $100 million in damages. The Earth Liberation Front sprung from -- and in many ways is still an arm of -- Earth First! As described on their own website: Earth First! (EF!) is a "warrior society" that takes a "by any means necessary" approach to "defending mother earth." The group declines to participate in the democratic process, preferring instead to damage, disable, and destroy the property of its ever-growing list of enemies. EF! targets include, but are by no means limited to, loggers, ranchers, and farmers.
Where is the right wing home grown terrorist group that rivals that? There aren’t any but no one would know it by listening to the MSM. Of course it doesn’t stop there. There are the FALN terrorists (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional), responsible for more than 120 bomb attacks United States targets between 1974 and 1983. Not only did this group commit these horrific attacks, but the current Attorney General and Secretary of State were instrumental in the pardons of some of their members! Can you imagine a Republican pardoning of abortion bombers?
There has been the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and many more. The current president is an associate (some would say good friend) of two of the founding members of the Weather Underground, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Some of the biggest worldwide terrorist groups that are not home grown, but still pose a threat to the US and its interests, such as FARC, are left Marxist groups. There just aren’t the extreme right wing groups that the left mythologizes about.
Liberals talk about “all forms of extremism” being bad, while associating, endorsing, pardoning and excusing some of the most extreme groups ever created. Memo to the left; Please stop calling other people hypocrites.
When people on the right start to make noise and air their dissatisfaction, words such as militia, Nazi, skinhead, redneck, racist and many others get routinely thrown around. When people on the left air their dissatisfaction, words such as activism and protest get used. Liberals are community organizers while people on the right are rude agitators. This double standard has never been more evident than in the treatment of people who are voicing their displeasure on the proposed healthcare debacle.
The double standard was evident in early April when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning that there might be an increase in domestic terror by "lone wolf" right-wing extremists, possibly with military experience. There was no specific intelligence for this threat. Janet Napolitano issued a report from Homeland Security that, according to Ralph Peters, “repeatedly warns of our military vets being terrorists. She uses ‘terrorist’. It warns about people who oppose illegal immigration as being terrorist threats, as people who may differ on right-to-life issues as terrorist threats.”
Right wing radio has repeatedly been referred to as hate mongering and extremist. As a result, the Obama administration is actively trying to limit talk radio, disregarding the hate being peddled by people on MSNBC, the misinformation from CBS, NBC, ABC, the NY Times… you get the idea. Would it ever occur to anyone to wonder why conservatives flock to talk radio? Would it ever occur to the people on the left that the reason people seek out talk radio is because the conservative view is constantly being disparaged and maligned by the main stream media? People on the left, not the right, created right wing talk radio. They did this by their media malpractice. People in the MSM weren’t doing their job and in true American and free market fashion, when there is an unfulfilled need, someone will come along and fill that need. FOX news and talk radio came along and filled a black hole in the media market.
It’s much easier to refer to right wingers as Nazis and terrorists than to actually listen or try to understand what conservatives are saying. Is this projection? Does the left look at the right and judge the right based on their (the left’s) values? When conservative authors and scholars give speeches at universities, liberal groups have done all they can to shut them down. They have thrown pies at authors; they have confiscated conservative newspapers and have successfully shut down conservative speeches. Is that an example of their “tolerance”? When Janet Napolitano warns of right wing terrorism, is she thinking, or expecting that the right wing will act the way the left has acted for the last 45 years?
To really view the double standard, imagine Al Gore making a speech on global warming. Someone comes along after the speech and says “Mr. Gore should be careful in his rhetoric. There might be another Unabomber out there who may take what he says too literally.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for that scenario to happen.
It would seem ridiculous to imply that this one crazed environmentalist (The Unabomber, not Gore) should be compared with everyone who is an environmentalist. Yet that invidious comparison is constantly used by people on the left. How often does the name Timothy McVeigh come up when liberals are talking about Conservatives? To the left, all people on the right are potential terrorists. For people who supposedly pride themselves on their understanding of other people, cultures and faiths, they are remarkably ignorant and intolerant of anyone with a different worldview than theirs.
While labeling people on the right as potential terrorists (or as Nancy Pelosi said about people attending town hall meetings, “People with swastikas on their arms”), liberals are eager to look at the causes of Islamic terrorism. Liberals want to know the reasons that would cause a group to do such horrific things. Moral equivalence rears its ugly head and liberals reach for the quote at the beginning of this article; “All forms of extremism are equally bad.”
First of all, when I take my belt and shoes off to go through the terminal in the airport, I’m not doing it because of Christian fundamentalists or Zionists. There is one group that has caused this to happen. We can’t live in a world where we have to pretend that the Emperor is wearing clothes when we can plainly see he’s wearing nothing but a pair of striped boxer shorts. Saying that “all forms of extremism are bad” is one of the most idiotic comments that have come into the modern lexicon (well that and “at the end of the day…”).
Some forms of extremism are noble and some aren’t. Common sense can always be used to tell which is which. The ones who tell 12 year old children to wear suicide belts can be described as the crazy extremists. The ones who fight against that ideology can be described as the noble extremists. It’s really not that difficult. Yet when liberals try to excuse Islamic terrorism, they’ll often play the Timothy McVeigh card again. “Well, there are people who bomb abortion clinics and what about Timothy McVeigh?”
The fact that Timothy McVeigh has to be mentioned so often, really indicates that there is not the epidemic of homegrown right wing terrorism that the left tries to display every time there is a controversial issue. Abortion bombings aren’t cheered by conservatives and they are extremely rare. Though when one happens, the MSM will play it up with news coverage that can only be rivaled when a child accidentally shoots someone.
Middle Eastern, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is clearly the biggest threat the country and the world has faced and will face in the future. The left draws a moral equivalency between the tens of thousands killed all over the world from Islamic terrorism, and the few people who have died from home grown terrorism. Of course, one person’s death is one too many but no one on the right said, “We need to understand Timothy McVeigh.” Home grown terrorism, as an issue, has been misrepresented. The image one gets when faced with the term “homegrown terrorism” is one of right wing militia groups, Nazis and skin heads.
Two of the biggest and most organized terrorist organizations in the United States are the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The FBI considers them two of the most dangerous home grown terrorist organizations. The Earth Liberation Front, along with its sister group, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), have taken responsibility for more than 600 crimes since 1996, totaling more than $100 million in damages. The Earth Liberation Front sprung from -- and in many ways is still an arm of -- Earth First! As described on their own website: Earth First! (EF!) is a "warrior society" that takes a "by any means necessary" approach to "defending mother earth." The group declines to participate in the democratic process, preferring instead to damage, disable, and destroy the property of its ever-growing list of enemies. EF! targets include, but are by no means limited to, loggers, ranchers, and farmers.
Where is the right wing home grown terrorist group that rivals that? There aren’t any but no one would know it by listening to the MSM. Of course it doesn’t stop there. There are the FALN terrorists (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional), responsible for more than 120 bomb attacks United States targets between 1974 and 1983. Not only did this group commit these horrific attacks, but the current Attorney General and Secretary of State were instrumental in the pardons of some of their members! Can you imagine a Republican pardoning of abortion bombers?
There has been the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and many more. The current president is an associate (some would say good friend) of two of the founding members of the Weather Underground, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Some of the biggest worldwide terrorist groups that are not home grown, but still pose a threat to the US and its interests, such as FARC, are left Marxist groups. There just aren’t the extreme right wing groups that the left mythologizes about.
Liberals talk about “all forms of extremism” being bad, while associating, endorsing, pardoning and excusing some of the most extreme groups ever created. Memo to the left; Please stop calling other people hypocrites.
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