“Separate:
the image of Hillary indelicately straddling…”

And what about “Obama’s swinging pendulum….”

But I guess like Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…

😉

My Lai, bombing in Cambodia, Pentagon Papers; then the Watergate cover-up — the gov’t lies to the people! wasn’t the Warren Commission lying? (so why do Leftists want so much more gov’t? because they lie to themselves!)

What laws DO is specify that the gov’t should use force to punish those who violate the law, such violation being an action and the punishment occurring after the fact.

Laws against abortion in Poland have hugely reduced the abortion rate — not to 0, but much less than in surrounding EU states.

Before liberal became perjorative, it was prefaced by welfare — the “welfare liberals” that Nixon was against. The dead end that (welfare liberals =) leftists have is the idea of group rights, and victimology. The poor as “victims” of the rich, rather than as lazy or stupid or having bad habits (like promiscuous sex resulting in more babies and more abortions).

If the less fortunate are victims, than “social justice” allows, perhaps even requires, punishment of the more fortunate. Every time you hear Dems talk against the Bush tax cuts, you hear the desire to punish the rich. The evil of Envy, the desire to destroy another’s success, is at the heart of Leftism.

Although it is often mixed with the White Man’s Burden, wanting to help the inferior classes, while verbally denying that they are inferior.

Neo, neither you nor Rich talk enough about Welfare Liberals, but Rich is more nearly correct with describing a new Left that has a
“darker philosophy obsessed with America’s sins”.

In fact, this is part of the anti-capitalist anti-Globalization movement, obessed with the West’s sins, especially America and Israel.

Similarly, looking at Durban and a global perspective:
“Their agenda took on a punitive edge, focused on compensating victim groups and expiating the country’s [West’s] guilt.”

The American Left / Dems are an echo of the European rabid anti-Americanism.

The only way a new Rep Pres has a chance at winning in 2008 is if … the Dems win Congress in 2006 and really mess up. Hmm. [Is Karl Rove a genius or what?]

First, I don’t complain about the fundamentalist right: I merely say things the way they are. These are the folks that want to enact laws to fit their moral precepts, and the consequences be damned (of course, the left wants to do the same thing, but the difference is in degree…).

Second, you are jumping to conclusions, none of which were stated in what I said: trying to enforce morality through laws is penultimately doomed to failure, as when the law is an ass, it will be ignored. Moral laws are not the same as laws of morality, and Sally is absolutely, 100% correct: the choice not to use the power of the state to enforce a very specific morality is not the same as being immoral, but rather underscores how important it is that laws regarding morality be as few as possible: trying to legislate morality always results in the laws being ignored and the undermining of legal authority. That is plain and simple stupidity: if your population doesn’t believe that a given morality is to be enforced, then they will ignore those laws. Anyone believing that you can force behavior change by making it against the law is, at the end of the day, deluded: you can make laws against abortions, but that will not stop abortions.

Only moral persuasion can stop them. But try and legislate laws forcing people to behave in a certain manner, and that legislator will make a fool out of himself as those unpersuaded will ignore the law. If you can’t win in the realm of public opinion, then making that behavior that you don’t want to see illegal and punishable by law is foolish at best and totalitarian at worst.

When thrust into the position of leadership, leftist parties are awkward and prone to making large mistakes–witness Jimmy Carter. The thing that saved Bill Clinton was the 1994 election of a strong republican congress.

Now, if a leftist candidate is elected president along with a leftist congress, there won’t be anything for leftists to hide behind or blame. Opposition mentality of negativism won’t work. national malaise sets in.

Leftist media will be stuck. Who will they criticize? Who will they satirize? The only way to go for the left is further left. That way lies madness.

Many of the reforms promised by progressivism have been institutionalized within the adminstrative state and are almost beyond re-reform since the interests have become so great in it’s maintainence and self-preservation. The needs of the entrenched bureacracy have begun to trump the needs of the individual while the individual rather than the ‘collective’ was the primary concern of ‘classical liberalism’. The need for bureaucratic self-preservation have become so great within the context of vast contradictions between preserving the rights of the individual versus the interests of the state that plain meaning of language itself needed to be re-defined. Perceived injustices and inequalities find their remedies now through the aggrandizement of the state and limitations on liberty rather than on the real solution which, of course, is the expansion of ordered liberty and limitations on the state.