(Via Hog on Ice.)
Leftism
The Overworked Class
We’ve been used to the phrase, “the working class”, but this article [h/t Instapundit] leads me to think we might need a new one. Try this on for size:
“Today Obama advocated raising taxes on the overworking class.”
I kind of like it.
Obama’s Decision Making
Tom Maguire [via Instapundit] says:
Obama was wrong about the surge while McCain was right, but by and large I think the case could be made (but not by me!) that Obama is by far the more thoughtful and reflective of the two candidates and far more disposed to listen to a range of advice. My guess is that he would have a broader and arguably better decision making proess than McCain. It’s only at the moment of decision that he worries me – I don’t know if he was trapped by lefty advisers, lefty instincts, or lefty pandering but he was wrong, wrong, wrong on the surge.[emp added]
I think Maguire is wrong. I think that Obama, like most leftist, exhibits a rigidly stereotyped decision making process. He may make a show of polling opinion but in reality, he has long before made up his mind.
“Working” versus “Fighting”
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
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.