Leftism

“Working” versus “Fighting”

by

The Assistant Village Idiot observes that Democratic politicians tend to say “I’ll fight for you,” whereas Republican politicians tend to say “I’ll work for you.” His explanation:

Republicans run for office telling you they’re going to work for you, because that’s how they perceive progress happening: someone works for it. Democrats run telling you they’re going to fight for you, because they believe that’s how improvement comes: someone has to wrest good stuff away from others.

I think it’s generally true that Republicans have tended to say “work” and Democrats have tended to say “fight”, although I did notice that McCain used the F-word several times during his announcement of Gov Pailin’s candidacy.

Neptunus Lex had some related thoughts:

The innate character flaw of the political right, with its thrumming appeals to the logic of blood and soil, is its lamentable tendency to go in search of enemies abroad. The left, on the other hand, with its own appeals to the politics of envy and class warfare, is content to find mortal enemies closer to hand.

To me, it seems pretty clear that today’s Democrats view society basically as a neo-Hobbesian war of group against group…hence, their preference for the “fight” formulation–with the fighting, of course, to be done against fellow Americans–is a natural one.

Noonan On Palin

by

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.[WSJ Online]

Palin does remind me very strongly of the women I grew up with in Texas. All them could literally ride and shoot. I have one cousin I never see because she spends every Thanksgiving and Christmas hunting. The idea that such women look weak in the eyes of “feminists” says a great deal about the defects of contemporary “feminist” thinking.

The Democrats’ Denial-of-Service Attack

by

The TV news is all Palin, all the time. And daughter of Palin. Politically this isn’t necessarily bad for Republicans, to the extent it focuses scrutiny on Governor Palin, who I think stands up well to it. However, it is bad (or good, depending on your partisan inclination) in that it removes scrutiny from Obama, who does not. The risk of a media pile-on on Palin was one of the risks McCain took in selecting Palin. Only time will tell if it was a justified risk.

The distributed Obama campaign — including the Obama organization, leftist bloggers and MSM — quickly figured out the dynamics of the situation and are responding effectively. The campaign or bloggers introduce daily talking-points that are repeated and amplified by a media cascade and can generate enough network (online and TV) discussion to crowd out most other topics. That’s what happened today and yesterday. Today’s main talking point was, McCain didn’t adequately vet Palin. This is clearly not true, given that McCain’s people were checking out Palin months ago. Yet given the story about the daughter, the talking point is just plausible enough to give media people cover in keeping it alive for a day as a major story. Conservative and Republican bloggers and MSM people unwittingly help their opponents by focusing even more attention on Palin in order to defend her and correct the record. While all of this is going on, Obama is almost invisible, and he appears to have picked up a few points in the polls. (Notice that the bounce didn’t begin until waves of Palin stories rescued him from the media spotlight.) The concurrent weather story, which isn’t really a story but is being hyped for all it’s worth by the pro-Obama media, further distracts scrutiny from Obama.

Conservative MSM people haven’t quite caught on to the full extent of what is happening. Their supposedly non-partisan colleagues are gleefully helping Obama by repeating endlessly “questions” about Palin that displace both McCain’s message and serious scrutiny of Obama. Who wants to talk about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, or about offshore drilling or tax cuts, when there’s juicy gossip (or merely reckless speculation) to be spread about Palin’s family. On Brit Hume’s show tonight, the conservative commentators were almost sputtering with rage at the Democrats’ dishonest attacks on Palin. Yet these same conservative commentators spent most of their time attempting to rebut the attacks, which means they didn’t talk much about anything else. Larry Kudlow devoted much of his show to defending Palin. Conservative media people watch impotently as their leftist colleagues do Obama’s work. The big-media conservatives aren’t temperamentally or tactically equipped to respond effectively. Perhaps the pro-McCain bloggers will do better.

Obviously Obama would like to keep Palin at the center of media focus. Obviously McCain would like to keep his own policies, and Obama’s failings, at the center of focus. McCain’s electoral prospects depend on how quickly he and Palin can maneuver to shift the focus back to Obama. McCain may yet come out OK if public disgust with scummy media partisanship generates a backlash, or if voters lose interest in the MSM’s dishonest Palin-as-soap-opera meme. Whatever happens, it’s clear that Governor Palin and her family are in for a nasty ride. The leftist political-media complex will go all-out to destroy her as long as attacking her deflects attention from the radical leftist at the head of the Democratic ticket.

UPDATE: Other views, from Rich Karlgaard, Jay Cost and Tom Smith (Smith’s post links to several additional good posts).

Do We Want a President Who Makes Ayers happy?

by

In the summer of 1995, a group of influential leftists gathered in the home of unrepentant Maoist-terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in order to hear Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer introduce her hand-picked successor Barack Obama. Imagine that scene. Palmer looks at Ayers, then looks at Obama and in her mind perceives no politically significant contradiction or conflict between the two people. Neither did anyone else at the gathering. No one looked around and thought, “man, those two don’t belong in the same room,” or “there’s no way that the people who accept and respect Ayers will accept and respect Obama.” 

This meeting tells us something important about Obama. It tells us what kind of president these leftists think Obama will be. 

Read more