Two articles in particular stuck out for me this past week, both on that mental disorder endearingly called liberalism. So, with things busy at work, I'll let these guys do the talking:
The 13 Steps of Liberals Anonymous
C. MacLeod Fuller
American Thinker | January 27, 2008
Liberals Anonymous (LibAnon)
is a nationwide organization of current, former, and recovering
American liberals and Democrats. Its sole mission is to establish and
maintain recovery programs designed to help similar individuals
overcome the plethora of congenital illnesses inherent in postmodern
American liberalism with which they are embittered. Liberals Anonymous
accomplishes this worthy goal by making the idiosyncratic elemental
disease nature of liberalism self-evident to the afflicted individual.
LibAnon then educates him (or her, as
the case may be) in the cold steel of factual investigation and
inoculation. This is followed by repetitive, supervised exercises in
analysis and synthesis of actual and accurate concrete data, combined,
when necessary, with occasional doses of reaction-formation therapy and
electroshock treatments. After this, a documentary collection and a
psychological baseline of Conservative opinions is established for the
recovering liberal. These are rooted firmly in a substantial, PaleoCon
strata of clear, hard fact. The individual's "factual baseline" is
used as his daily touchstone to impede potential program backsliding or
worse - withdrawal, followed by a return to magical thinking, renewed
liberal ideation through collective association, and re-infection with
its attendant self-deification.
Many LibAnon
members have never before experienced an opinion actually based in
either fact or the experiential real world, much less both.
Academicians, politicians, and Episcopalians are the organization's
most difficult members in which to affect even a semblance of thought
moderation - much less cure.
An
important part of the recovery program to which Liberals Anonymous
subscribes is set forth in the chart below - 13 Prescriptive Principles
or "Steps." These principles can be traced to experiences of LibAnon's
membership following Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
unsuccessful attempt to stack the U.S. Supreme Court in order to impose
by handpicked judicial fiat what he could not accomplish through
Congress nor the ballot box.
Each of the 13 Principles was
developed from years of successive approximation carried out by
members' trial and error experiences freeing themselves from the
pernicious grip of liberalism by confronting it and its progenitors
head-to-head. The purpose of each step is to encourage, effect, and
maintain spiritual, moral, cultural, fiscal, and political sobriety in
the courageous recovering liberal. This is frequently quite difficult
to effectuate in the aftermath of a life lived either partially or in toto
(and in many cases, painfully destroyed) by the solipsistic confines of
America's left-wing continuum - a continuum which extends from "caring
progressives" to liberally fascistic, would-be totalitarians who
embrace the consolidation of power in their own hands as the
self-elected, self-justified and who are quite certain they know
precisely what is best for everyone else while being equally prepared
to compel it.
Each LibAnon
member uses these 13 Steps in an individual way, and so, unfortunately,
results cannot be guaranteed. However, the principles are highly
recommended as a program of recovery for even the most egregiously
opinionated but uninformed, as well as for the intentionally deluded,
for the faux-sophisticate, the youth-induced progressive, and
every other cultural or academic leftist-inspired opinion,
hallucination, or delusional ideation -- including, inter alia,
that: capitalism is evil; Che was a hero; anthropomorphic global
warming is factual and more dangerous than Iran; Al Gore won in
Florida; Israel is the "cause" of the Palestinians' problems; the
world owes you something; illegal immigration isn't a problem; Islam
is a religion of peace, love, and tranquility; all opinions are of
equal value; "Hollywood" is real; pro-abortion proponents occupy the
moral high ground; there is a dime's worth of difference between
Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama; the government owes you (pick your
poison) a living, a handout, free day care, free medical care, free
retirement in Florida, etc.; gender is a cultural construct; tribal,
tree culture is as meaningful and valuable as that of the ancient
Greeks; something for nothing; freedom without attendant
responsibility; the United Nations is a worthwhile institution;
karma makes more sense than Christ; free and easy sex without
physical, spiritual, fiscal, or temporal consequences; Ebonics; and
Keynesian (consumption) economic theory; just to mention a small
handful.
Experience demonstrates that many LibAnon
members' repentance, comfort, and future long-term success establishing
a new and balanced Conservative sobriety based in fact rather than in
incoherent utopian flights of fancy depends, to a large extent, on
their understanding and acceptance of reality as reflected in this
world coupled to the transcendent/immanent nature of the next. It also
depends upon a burgeoning understanding of and love for liberty,
freedom, and the Founding Fathers' America as well as a realization
that "equality of outcome" is not possible in a truly free society
because everyone (contrary to liberal doctrine) is not the same.
Everyone is instead unique, not only in the eyes of God, but in this
world too - and that translates into difference, difference, and more difference, not sameness.
The
final precursor to each member's success is the degree of their
dedication to practicing each of the 13 Steps in their daily lives.
CAVEAT: The only requirement for LibAnon
membership is the desire to stop being a Liberal. This can occur as a
Heisenbergesque quantum leap or a lengthy, drawn out process. If the
morally-relativistic, anti-capitalist,
all-expressions-of-thought-are-equally-valid-moral-and-ingenious,
who-am-I-to-be-discerning liberal in your life is aghast at the idea a
formal code of behavior may actually be required to live genuinely in
this world (and make amends for his past), you can put your mind at
ease - eventually, either in this life or the next, he will see the
light.
__________
THE 13 PRESCRIPTIVE PRINCIPLES ("STEPS")
OF LIBERALS ANONYMOUS
1. WE admit we are not
powerless over liberalism, but nevertheless, that we have allowed it to
make a mockery of our cities, our schools, our universities, our
borders, our foreign policy, and our daily lives.
2.
WE have finally, belatedly, and bearing well-deserved shame, come to
understand and know that a Power incalculably greater than ourselves
can restore us to spiritual and moral sanity.
3.
WE made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of
God as He is rather than as we would have Him be for our convenience
and self-esteem.
4.
WE made a searching and (hopefully) fearless spiritual, moral,
cultural, fiscal, and political inventory of our liberal, progressive,
and/or socialist, opinions, views, selves and associations.
5.
WE admitted to ourselves, to another as-yet-unrepentant liberal, our
parents, a pollster, and a voting booth the exact nature of our
previous wrongs, as well as the lack of either factual bases or reality
to have supported much less committed them.
6. WE are entirely ready to have all these defects of character removed. Permanently.
7.
WE humbly pray for the removal of our shortcomings and "good
intentions" before they result in America's burial somewhere along the
road to either a world-rendering nuclear "oops" or perdition.
8.
WE made a list of all persons we had harmed with our kooky opinions,
views, and acts by looking up everyone we ever knew in the telephone
books for every city in which we ever resided and became willing to
make amends to them all. Somehow.
9.
WE made political and societal amends to Conservatives whenever and
wherever possible, except when to do so would cause injury to anyone
other than ourselves.
10.
WE continued to take personal inventory of our liberal tendencies and
when they are exposed promptly admit it, and symbolize that admission
by making a generous contribution to the G.O.P. or a Conservative
political action committee.
11.
WE sought through hard work and dedication to improve our conscious
contact with Conservative principles as reflected in Biblical teaching
and Western Civilization, and prayed for the strength and ability to
constructively carry them out.
12.
Having experienced a political awakening of conscience, reality, and
responsibility for this and future generations as the result of these
Steps, WE evangelize the Conservative message to Liberals,
progressives, academicians, and anti-American activists of every stripe
wherever we can find them, and practice these principles in all our
affairs.
13.
Having experienced all of the above, WE vote only for true Conservative
Republicans in every election, and plaster our automobiles with the
biggest support stickers we can get as a visible outward sign of our
inward moral regeneration.
If you have questions or wish to obtain further information about the program nearest you, please contact your local LibAnon chapter. Each LibAnon chapter has but one purpose - to carry its message of redemption to the Liberal who still suffers. The only requirement for LibAnon membership is the desire to stop being one. Call today.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: A Diagnosis
Alan W. Dowd
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 04, 2008
Before
and after President George W. Bush’s final State of the Union address,
his critics hammered away at his record. For instance, in their
“pre-buttal,” delivered some four days before Monday’s State of the
Union, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
took turns attacking Bush’s foreign policy, counterterrorism
strategies, foreign-aid programs, education reforms and healthcare
initiatives. Then, in her response to Bush’s address, Governor Kathleen
Sebelius of Kansas declared, “The last five years have cost us
dearly—in lives lost; in thousands of wounded warriors whose futures
may never be the same; in challenges not met here at home because our
resources were committed elsewhere.” And just before noting that
Americans “have no more patience for divisive politics,” she added, “If
more Republicans in Congress stand with us this year, we won’t have to
wait for a new president to restore America’s role in the world, and
fight a more effective war on terror.”
All of this is to be
expected, and none of it is out of bounds, especially in an election
year. However, the Left’s deep-down disgust with George W. Bush
continues to amaze. After all, this is the man who, according to Peggy
Noonan, “destroyed the Republican Party.” But even if Noonan has
succumbed to a bit of rhetorical excess, there are other reasons the
Left might, at least, appreciate the Bush presidency.
Take,
for example, how he eschewed the realism embraced by the wise old men
in his own party—the ones who bequeathed to him and his predecessor the
radicalized chaos of Afghanistan, the “stability” of Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, the open-ended occupation of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East “peace
process, the measured responses to the mass-murder of Marines in
Beirut—and instead pursued a foreign policy that looked and sounded
more like Woodrow Wilson’s than that of the elder Bush.
“The
world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because
stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder,” he
declared. “They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”
And there was more.
“The
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of
liberty in other lands,” he intoned in 2005. “America’s vital interests
and our deepest beliefs are now one… So it is the policy of the United
States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of
ending tyranny in our world.”
“It is presumptuous and
insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world—or the one-fifth
of humanity that is Muslim—is somehow untouched by the most basic
aspirations of life,” he preached in the early days of his presidency,
sounding positively Wilsonian.
But these weren’t mere words.
There was action behind them: When the Left writes its history of the
Bush presidency, there will be no mention that his was the first
administration to officially call for the creation of a Palestinian
state, long a cause championed by America’s Left. Of course, the
tradeoff was that Bush refused to deal with Arafat and his terrorist
brethren.
Bush launched genuine wars of liberation that freed
women from a medieval monstrosity in Afghanistan and shut down a vast
torture chamber in Iraq. In place of the Taliban and the Baathists,
Bush propped up a pair of progressive, popular governments in the heart
of the Muslim world, bolstering them with the sort of open-ended,
nation-building efforts the Left once championed in places like Haiti
and Bosnia and Kosovo. He created new aid programs to support
pro-freedom elements behind Islam’s iron curtain. And he carried out a
long-overdue withdrawal of troops from the theocratic thugocracy in
Saudi Arabia.
His policies would be equally dramatic—and one
would think, equally appealing to the Left—in the realm of arms
control. The Left maintained that nuclear arms reductions would solve
the world’s problems. President Bush set America on a path to slash its
nuclear arsenal from 7,000 warheads to just over 2,000, and convinced
Moscow to do the same. It’s the sort of disarmament program Bush’s
predecessors could only imagine but dared not attempt. So why isn’t the
Left celebrating Bush’s sweeping reductions?
Likewise, the
president’s critics on the Left overlook the development programs he
poured into the chronically undeveloped world. “We must include every
African, every Asian, every Latin American, every Muslim, in an
expanding circle of development,” he explained. And then he increased
and revitalized foreign aid with his Millennium Challenge Account
program. He conceived and promoted huge new aid programs in Africa,
devoting perhaps $45 billion to the global fight against AIDS.
Here
at home, Bush supported something close to amnesty for illegal
immigrants. The Right punished him for it, and the Left certainly
didn’t applaud him personally.
Under his administration,
albeit partly as a result of the forces unleashed by 9/11, federal
spending grew from $1.9 trillion to about $3 trillion. But government
growth was also aide by new entitlements like Medicare Part D, the
widely popular and costly prescription benefit Bush endorsed, and new
education spending under No Child Left Behind, which Bush promoted. In
fact, in his first five years in office, as USA Today reported, Bush
increased K-12 education spending by an average of seven percent
annually—more than double the increases his predecessor achieved.
So
the question remains: Why do liberals despise this big-government,
big-spending, humanitarian, nation-building, idealistic,
internationalist, arms-cutting president? And why do so many
conservatives still defend him?
Ironically, the two sides may have the same reasons for their divergent opinions of this polarizing president.
First and foremost, Bush defeated two of the Left’s standard-bearers in bitterly contested elections.
In
2000, he refused to back down during the Orwellian post-election
campaign of Al Gore, author and chief adherent of the global-warming
creed. That endeared Bush to the Right and enraged the Left.
Then,
Bush played hardball in 2004, overcame incredibly high odds as an
unpopular president presiding over an unpopular war, and defeated a
leftist archetype in John Kerry.
These were Bush’s original—and unforgiveable—sins.
Speaking
of sin, Bush openly talked about how Jesus changed his heart, how his
evangelical faith shaped his decisions. Not coincidentally, he
encouraged government agencies to make more room for faith-based
groups. The Left’s reaction was predictable. A 2003 piece in The Nation
condemned Bush’s “heretical manipulation of religious language,”
declaring that “Bush’s discourse coincides with that of the false
prophets of the Old Testament.”
In 2006, Kevin Phillips, who
never fails to remind us that he was a Republican strategist, concluded
that “the White House is courting end-times theologians” and embracing
“a crusading, simplistic Christianity.” “No leading world power in
modern memory,” he inveighed, “has become a captive of the sort of
biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science.”
But
it was more than Bush’s religiousness, alleged “manipulation” of
religion, or connection with the evangelical wing of Christianity that
drove the Left to dislike him so much. It had to be.
After
all, Jimmy Carter openly shared his born-again, evangelical faith with
Americans. Likewise, Bill Clinton wore his faith on his sleeve. Indeed,
in the post-Lewinsky era, he seemingly spent more time with evangelical
pastors than he did with his cabinet and staff. As E.J. Dionne has
observed, “Bill Clinton could quote Scripture with the best of them.
Bill Clinton could preach with the best of them. He gave some very
powerful speeches at Notre Dame, where he sounded Catholic; at
African-American churches, where he sounded (African Methodist
Episcopal) or Baptist…He quoted Scripture at least as much, if not more
than George W. Bush does.” And it should be recalled Bush’s faith-based
programs have their roots in Clinton’s Charitable Choice reforms, which
opened the way for religious charities to compete for federal grants
and use federal resources to provide social services to those in need.
So
what is it about Bush’s faith that provokes such venom? I would submit
that much of it has to do with the way his faith informed his position
on unborn life.
As a consequence, he would veto a bill that
used tax dollars to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos in
support of stem-cell research. “Our conscience calls us to pursue the
possibilities of science in a manner that respects human dignity and
upholds our moral values,” he observed, reminding Congress of a
timeless truth: Just because we can do something, just because science
makes something possible, doesn’t mean we should do it.
Plus,
Bush would appoint judges and justices that seemed open to pulling the
plug on Roe. He would reinstate the ban on federal assistance to
international abortion providers. His administration would notify
states that Medicaid would no longer cover abortion pill RU486—and that
states could provide medical coverage under the Children’s Health
Insurance Program to “unborn children.” His administration would
promote “embryo adoption.”
As others have observed, Roe is the
Left’s Holy of Holies. To undermine it is to commit blasphemy, heresy,
and the abomination of desolation.
Finally, the Left’s hatred
of Bush has been propelled by his stalwart stance on what one observer
shrewdly calls “the wars of 9/11”—the military operations that
inevitably followed and will continue to follow the attacks on
America’s homeland.
Again, the Left’s reaction was
predictable. Since the 1960s, the Left has grown increasingly opposed
to the use of American power. Viewing everything through the prism of
Vietnam, the Left distrusts American power and sees war itself as the
enemy.
In addition, the wars of 9/11 served as fuel for Bush’s
black-and-white view of the world—even George Will calls him “our
Manichean president”—which view further alienated Bush from the Left.
In this regard, it pays to recall that the postmodernism which
captivates and animates much of the Left assures us that there are no
differences between evil and good, no objective truth, no
absolutes—except, of course, the absolute that claims there are no
absolutes. Thus, someone who uses phrases like “Axis of Evil” and “evil
doers” and “monumental struggle of good versus evil” and, as he did
during his final State of the Union, “evil men who despise freedom,” is
not likely to be embraced by those who see the world in shades of grey.
But those who believe there is good and evil, that force is not
inherently evil, that there is even a time for war, would rally around
such a president, which may explain why many conservatives still
support the president and many leftists never did.
Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.
Stupid Black Men
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