Leftism

You Really Want to Remind Us of That, John Kerry?

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In an Afghanistan policy speech, [h/t Instapundit] John Kerry evokes a famous phrase from his infamous testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971.

David Sanger mentioned that in 1971 I asked the Foreign Relations Committee “how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

I think it relevant to the contemporary debate to recall what else he said in that testimony:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
 

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
 
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.[emp added]

Just to be clear, the Winter Soldier “investigation” was shortly proven to be wholly fraudulent.

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Stop Obama’s Wars of Imperialist Aggression!

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I don’t typically wade into politics with my posts, but I just can’t help myself. The other day I was driving around in a town to be unnamed and stumbled upon the building you see in the picture below.

sooper seekrit warehouse

It looks like a typical warehouse that you would find in any of a million industrial parks in the United States.

But upon further investigation I found something quite different. This is the warehouse that the left uses to store it’s papier mache heads, sign making materials and other props for protest marches. Upon sniffing around it for a bit, I noticed that is was packed to the brim. It looked to me as they had contracted with a local lumberyard to supply the wood for their signage.

All humor aside, does the left not think that we haven’t noticed a certain…well…silence over Obama’s policies? It is OK for Obama to not only not decrease troop levels, but increase them as he is doing in Afghanistan? Why isn’t Gitmo closed? What the hell, even Iraq even has troops there that represent the Great Satan ™ as of now. I know because I am still sending care packages to them (unlike ANY of the protesters who claim they support the troops).

So just exactly what am I to think of the left? That these wars are OK as long as the President and Congress have a D by their names? Puhleeeze.

What the Limbaugh Quote Hoax Really Tells Us

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Listening to the contemporary American left’s views of the rest of us is increasingly like listening to a paranoid schizophrenic slip farther into delusions that they are surrounded by malevolent people. Just as we have to worry that the schizophrenic might act on their delusional beliefs and strike out violently against the evils they imagine, we have to be increasingly worried that leftists will strike out against the rest of us based on their delusional fantasies about what we non-leftists believe.

And make no mistake about it, leftists do harbor dark delusions about non-leftists. The fact that so many leftists fell completely for the Limbaugh quote hoax proves it.

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Academic Freedom

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There is no more unaccountable group in America today than academics. This is true even when they work for public institutions. This is clearly on display in this story about the American Association of University Professors arrogantly claiming that anyone who seeks to bring academics’ work out into the sunshine threatens their “academic freedom”.

Academics tell us all how important they are and how they need great gobs of funding. But when when the people ask for an accounting of the work and spending, academics declare with great moral outrage that “academic freedom” is under assault by the people wondering where their money went and what is being done and said in their name.

Academics have forgotten that academic freedom isn’t a natural phenomenon, but rather a cultural artifact of the free West that people support because it provides benefits to the greater society.

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Nope, No Bias Here

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Check out the headline on this AP story:

Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 12.15.53 PM

Can you image the AP describing non-leftists’ ideas on health care as “reform”? Can you imagine them describing leftists’ objections to non-leftists’ ideas as “attacks” on those “reforms”?

Revealingly, the “attack” is just an industry study of the cost associated with the supposed leftist plan du jour. The horribly unfair and unjust industry conclusion of the evil insurance companies?

The chief reason, said the report, is a decision by lawmakers to weaken proposed penalties for failing to get health insurance. The bill would require insurers to take all applicants, doing away with denials for pre-existing health problems. In return, all Americans would be required to carry coverage, either through an employer or a government program, or by buying it themselves.
 
But the CBO estimated that even with new federal subsidies, some 17 million Americans would still be unable to afford health insurance. Faced with that affordability problem, senators opted to ease the fines for going without coverage from the levels Baucus originally proposed. The industry says that will only let people postpone getting coverage until they get sick.

It is one of the strange conceits of leftists that they believe that people do not respond to economic incentives. It’s simply common sense that if insurance remains very expensive for people, but they know that by law all insurance companies will have to grant coverage at any time, even if they’re already in the hospital, the economically rational thing for people to do is to delay purchasing health insurance until the very moment they need it. Pointing out that people respond to economic incentives and that they make decisions that provide them the best economic outcome is considered an “attack” by the AP

The AP is so far in the tank they can’t even see out of it.

[update (2009-20-12 3:58pm): I must not have been the only one to notice. Now the headline reads, “Insurance industry assails health care bill.” Maybe they can learn.]