Leftism

What, Eight Years Wasn’t Long Enough?

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Okay, the leftmost half of the Democrats, including Obama, Pelosi et al, have  continuously claimed  for 8 years that detaining illegal  combatants  at Gitmo was obviously illegal under U.S. law, immoral and counterproductive. Usually, when someone makes such a sweeping claim, it means that they have throughly thought out the problem and have a detailed alternative to offer. Given that Democrats have had 8 years to think about the problem, why didn’t Obama and Congressional Democrats have a plan to handle Gitmo and its  detainees  ready to implement on Day 1 of his  administration?

Why are they still dithering to the point of refusing to allocate funds to close Gitmo? [h/t Instapundit]  How dumb are they?

After all, it’s not like they’ve proposed a plan and then the Republicans, using their dominance of the three branches of government, shot it down. No, they haven’t even made a single, concrete, detailed proposal, and the Republicans don’t have the power to stop squat. If Democrats actually had a workable idea, they could have launched it four months ago.  

It’s almost as if they’ve suddenly discovered that the problem of dealing with illegal  combatants is a complex problem rife with dangers and tradeoffs that presents no clear, optimal solution. Too bad somebody hasn’t tried to tell them how difficult a legal, practical and moral problem these people pose for us. Oh, wait, somebody did.  

It’s almost as if they always knew that Bush had to make serious tradeoffs but chose to create a simplistic narrative just for the sake of political marketing. It looks like they spent all their time reflexively  criticizing  Bush and zero time actually thinking about the challenges he faced.  

It’s almost like they never really gave a damn.  

Then Why Couldn’t They Find a Real Vet?

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From a story about a fake vet who campaigned heavily for Democratic candidates, including Obama, in Colorado. [h/t Instapundit] The candidates, who claim that they were defrauded along with Colorado voters, say:

The Polis and Udall campaigns emphasize that Strandlof was a bizarre exception to the outpouring of help they received from veterans disillusioned with Bush-era policies.  “His actions in no way reflect on the credibility of real veterans who supported Mark’s campaign or on the importance of their issues,” said Trujillo, Udall’s spokeswoman.

If there were a lot of veterans disillusioned with Bush-era policies (now Obama-era policies) why did they find it necessary to rely on a fake vet? If they had dozens or hundreds of real vets ready to sign on to their campaigns what are the odds the most prominent one would be a mentally-ill fraud?

You con someone by playing to their prejudices. Strandlof conned the Democrats by presenting them a fabricated persona and history custom-designed to fit the Democratic narrative.  An actor playing a vet scripted to their narrative served their purposes better than a real vet

However, the real reason they didn’t check Strandolf’s creditials is that they didn’t care if he was real or not.

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Gasping For Air and Energy

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Environmentalists claim they aren’t extremist. They claim they don’t want to make radical and dangerous changes to our technological life-support systems, they just want to make a few minor adjustments to protect not only the environment but the health and safety of humans as well.  

They’re lying. When it comes down to it in the real world, environmentalists will kill people just to gain an utterly trivial  environmental  benefit. As a political movement, environmentalism has crossed over into a kind of religious fetishism.  

Look at the example of the banning of CFC asthma inhalers. [h/t Instapundit] Here we have a clear-cut tradeoff between the deaths of thousands of asthmatics and prevention of a degree of damage to the ozone layer that is so small that we can’t even begin to consider measuring it.  

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Grow Up, Obama

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Leftists appear to believe that the only reason that criminals use guns is that the police set a bad example by doing so first. This seems to be the logic behind the Obama administration’s campaign to  unilaterally  disarm the U.S. of our nuclear deterrent.    [h/t Instapundit]

Am I the only one who feels like our President has the foreign-policy  sophistication  of a romantic teenager?

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Masculine Bullies in the Workplace

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A disturbing  bit of sexist thinking in the business world:

“Just the mention of men treating other men badly on the job seemingly shakes the men’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called ‘the blue elephant’ in the room. . . . ‘We believe that a sense of pride in men’s accomplishments is important in getting men to help one another,’ Ms. Lau said. ‘To have this sense of pride, men need to be aware of their shared identity as men.’ In the workplace, however, it is unlikely that men will constantly think of themselves as members of one group, she said. They will more likely see themselves as individuals, as they are judged by their performance.” –[Instapundit]

Honestly, what is our country coming to? Can you imagine a more cooperation-destroying idea than one in which people should think of themselves first as members of a group and only secondly as individuals? Do we want men looking at their  colleagues  and judging them based on their sex instead of their merit? This is especially true given men’s clear advantages in educational achievement which means that in the future a higher percentage of men will hold management positions than do women.  

Do you want to live in a world in which your male boss believes that he has a moral responsibility to side with the men working under him instead of the women? Imagine if that kind of sexist thinking occurred at every level in management! Women might find the entire workplace a hostile environment where a woman would have to be twice as good as a man to get the same reward!  

I find it disturbing that we seem to have developed an entire political movement around the idea that men should look at women as some kind of enemy against which they should collectively and automatically circle the wagons.  

Men just have to bite the bullet and accept that they have to judge other people as individuals instead of as members of any type of group. Only then as a society will we receive the benefits of meritocracy and social justice.