Do RINO’s who often cave for fear of the media and its liberal wrath ever get similarly despised? Of course not.

LOL, I despise RINOs most of all. They are charlatans of the worst sort, pretending that they follow and believe in a set of ideas that they not only have no faith or belief in, but have no intention of following once they get voted in.

I’ve been calling for their ouster for years. Most of them should never, ever be allowed to hold any public office (elective or otherwise) above “dog catcher”.

So, respectfully, I disagree with you. RINOs get despised. Lots. Because I don’t believe I’m alone.

I personally would happily have voted against the GOP in the last two elections save one (i.e., 2006/2008), were it not blatantly clear that the Left had gone off into lunaland in the last decade or so. As such, I knew what would happen if they got any power at all, and everyone else is just now starting to grasp how corrupt and stupid they all are. As bad as the GOP — even loaded with RINOs — the Dems are far, far worse.

Perhaps he is made of sterner stuff than you imagine. Give the guy credit for admitting his POV has started to change. Look to neo-neocon as an example. We all get to strut upon this stage because she changed.

which is why you cant convince them of what they are doing to themselves.

your warning has to come with a complete re-education into factual reality.

in other words, any case you make will be negated by the absence of the needed information and concordance to change a position one never actually took up (but seemed to just happen).

you watch the protesters say their thing..

and you realize…

when the tanks roll, they are going to be surprised.
but will they realize they asked for them?

Take the above and replace “Palin” with “Bush”, and you realize you just described BDS.

“Chimpy McBush” — “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot” (My reply: “Oh, so you’re from Texas, then?”) and so forth…

These geniuses confuse articulateness with intellect or shrewd grasp of human nature. It didn’t matter how often Bush outsmarted them in the bigger picture — either it was because those who supported him were just as ignorant and stupid as “he is”, or because he (and the rest of us all) were being craftily manipulated by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

As Bill Whittle pointed out years ago in one of his excellent essays — Bush was a fully rated fighter jet pilot. That requires, among other things, to be fully proficient in IFR calculations.

Now, consider that — this is not a capability for the intellectually bereft or the mentally challenged…. like, say, oh… JFK Jr., for example.

So it can’t be that Bush is smarter than the average libtard. No, that’s not possible, evidence to the contrary be damned.

‘Nuff said.

Lefty Lee Stranahan on the Blaze Piece on O’Keefe

Heck, I’m thinking of adding him to my daily scanning list.

Liberals paradoxically believe themselves complex by their ability to embrace simple notions. One of the biggest being the simple notion that judging character creates people of poor character. And to make things even more simple, they assert that character judgements can never apply to individuals but whole swaths of the demographic any individual happens to belong to. O.J. Simpson was aquitted of a heinous murder on just such a simple and perverted notion.

you just hit on a deep subtext of some of the best work on the nature and causes of totalitarianism – the dangerous desire, nay yearning, for simplicity.

You can find the diagnosis of the problem in the forgotten crevices of some of the hidden gems of political theory and historiography:

Bertrand de Jouvenel: “So soon as an intellectual imagines a simple order of things, he is serving the growth of power. For the existing order, here as everywhere, is complex and rests on a whole mass of supporters, authorities, sentiments, and adjustments of the most varied kind. If it is sought to make one spring do the work of so many, how strong must be the force of its recoil; or if one pillar must support henceforward what many supported, it must be of the stoutest! Only Power can be that spring or that pillar…” (On Power, p. 145).

Frederic Maitland: “The philosophy of ‘checks’ has become a little old-fashioned, and the modern protest against it was timely… But when all has been said on the other side, the fact remains that we owe our freedom from arbitrary restraints to that elaborate constitutional theory into which our opinions of right have, through long ages, been crystallizing.” (A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality, p.114).

James C. Scott: “How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? … In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.” (Seeing Like A State, p.2 – I can’t recommend this book highly enough, fwiw).

Francois Furet: “For even though bourgeois society…has still not been constituted as a political will, it is still not at the end of its journey. Deprived of a legitimate ruling class, organized by delegation, made up of diverse powers, centered on interests, subject to violent and petty passions, it comprises many of the conditions for the emergence of mediocre and multiple leaders, demagogic agendas, and fruitless agitation. Its dynamic [according to the Left] is the contradiction between the division of labor and equality… Together, these two elements constitute its reality; it is man’s relationship to nature through labor that defines the universality of man. [But] labor happens to be the curse of the proletariat, which is exploited by the bourgeoisie. If the promise of universality is to be fulfilled, that curse must be broken.” (The Passing of an Illusion, p.6-7).

Aurel Kolnai: “It is not numbers, poverty, intellectual plainness alone – nor the fact of being exploited, cheated of education, disinherited, and underprivileged – that makes the true Common Man [in the Leftist sense]. In order to become such a one, the simply ‘man of the masses’ must be artificially hyper-simplified, cleansed from common sense, distinctive loyalties and traditions, chance limitations and possessions; he must be ‘born anew’ of the Cause, the Ideology, the ‘faith’ in his own ‘mission’… In a word, he must moulded and informed by the intelligentsia-made CONCEPT of the Common Man. [He is thus] a ‘plain man’ pared, trimmed, and clipped into a generic representative of mankind. He is a robot sublimized into an angel, an offspring of poverty taking hold of limitless abundance.” (Privilege and Liberty, p.90-91).

James Billington: “The professional revolutionaries who first appeared during the French Revolution sought, above all, radical simplicity. Their deepest conflicts revolved around the simple words of their key slogan: liberty, equality, fraternity. Liberty had been the battle-cry of earlier revolutions (e.g., in America) which produced complex political structures to limit tyranny. The French Revolution also initially invoked similar ideas, but the new and more collective ideals of fraternity and equality soon arose to rival the older concept of liberty. The words ‘nationalism’ and ‘communism’ were first invented in the 1790’s to define the simpler, more sublime, seemingly less selfish ideals of fraternity and equality, respectively. The basic struggle that subsequently arose among committed revolutionaries was between advocates of national revolution for a new type of fraternity and those of social revolution for a new type of equality.” (Fire in the Minds of Men, p.4).

Examples like these could be multiplied – I would add the great liberty-loving 19th Century theorists, now terribly neglected, Henry Sumner Maine, Francois Guizot, and Walter Bagehot – but the point is doubtlessly clear. There is a certain urge to simplify social reality both to satisfy the coherence demanded by reason and to satisfy the desire for effective control and power.

But you would never hear of any of this is you were studying political science and political theory – and, for that matter, history – today in the academy. Keep those quotes above in mind, and note next that it is an IRON-CLAD truth, a UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED result of “social science,” that CONSERVATIVES cannot, both genetically and psychologically, accept “complexity” and “ambiguity.” There IS no other definition of a “liberal” in political science today than as one who, because of genes and psychology or personality, gleefully and without anxiety, faces and accept “complexity.”

The conceptual apparatus is an absolute joke. What do they mean by “complexity”? They mean not being troubled by values that cut against certain values of the status quo, and not feeling threatened by minorities that apparently or really threaten the social fabric. Period. That’s all they mean.

And any four year-old with a minimal command of English can see the flaw in that – namely, it begs the entire question against conservatives. It DEFINES complexity AS liberalism.

Yet we don’t even have to go that far. I always ask my liberal colleagues: Were Jouvenel, Furet, Maitland, Scott, Kolnai, Guizot, Bagehot, and Maine (among others), stupid men? Were they writing comprehensible sentences? Have a few “experiments” in social science definitively proven everything they wrote and argued a tissue of nonsense and absurdity?

If not, then pray tell – what on earth were they talking about? The response? Crickets.

Academics cannot even account for what those brilliant men were talking about – they lack the basic, obvious conceptual resources to make sense of it. Liberals creating tyranny born from a mania for simplicity? Oh, flatus vocus!

Clearly they need to some more thinking about how they are using the words “simplicity” and “complexity” (in the first place, what they call “absolutism” – by which they mean believing in objective values or a religious creed – is in no way the opposite of an openness or a feel for complexity).

Oh, an perhaps they should consider that a manichaean hatred and denigration of conservatives is a bit…

what’s the word?…