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Jewish World Review Oct. 11, 2010/ 3 Mar-Cheshvan, 5771 Dems: Running From Clarity By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As an older American, one of the most clarifying moments I remember was the transition from the Carter administration to the Reagan administration with respect to the USSR. Carter embraced the typical liberal mindset of the times, the idea that, although the U.S. and the USSR had different systems, both were "equally deserving of respect." Reagan? He called the Iron Curtain, Communist thugs exactly what they were: an "evil empire." Perhaps nothing both infuriates and terrifies progressives more than clarity, especially when that clarity illustrates the utter bankruptcy of their ideology. To wit:
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if the current healthcare bill is as good Democrats promised it would be, why did the Obama administration grant waivers exempting thirty different entities from complying with its rules? The answer is simple: this administration believes the rule of law doesn't apply equally to all Americans. Dress it up any way you want, my progressive comrades, but when certain constituencies get special treatment that ordinary Americans can't get, that is unbridled corruption. That such waivers are necessary at all demonstrates that this bill was either written by ignorant fools--or those whose chief purpose was as nefarious as it was obscure: to incrementally destroy private health care in the United States.
So which is it? Progressives are not ignorant fools. They are, however, statist thugs more than willing to destroy the best health care system in the world in order to put it under federal control. If they have to keep certain constituencies content in the meantime, so be it. And when the First Commandment of implementing your agenda is "do it by any means necessary," equal treatment under the law is nothing more than a minor impediment.
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if Keynesian-inspired stimulus spending "saved or created" 3.5 million jobs, why is unemployment still near ten percent? Again, the answer is clarifying simple: this administration is infested with liars. Only liars would lump the words "created" and "saved" into a single category, because liars know that such a category is impervious to accurate measurement. Even more telling is what animates such calculated obfuscation: progressives cynically believe that Americans are so stupid that they can't see a stagnant economy happening right in front of their own eyes.
Isn't it about time someone in our comatose mainstream media asked Joe Biden precisely what he meant by "recovery summer?" Maybe it's even time some of those intrepid journalists engaged in simple division, as in dividing almost $900 billion in stimulus by 3.5 million jobs "created or saved." Once they figure out that comes to over $250,000 per job, maybe they could ask the president if that's anything remotely resembling efficient and responsible spending. Make that deficit spending, for which every American taxpayer is on the hook.
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why has another government official offered up the idea that America could "absorb" a terrorists attack? The first to ostensibly utter this word was president Obama, if Bob Woodward's newest book, "Obama Wars" is accurate. Now Michael Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, used the exact same word.
How come? Because the president's vaunted "Muslim outreach program" is a complete bust. Once again, progressives obscured reality, telling the American public that once the Bush administration's "cowboy" approach to international terror was replaced by the Obama administration's more conciliatory approach, the Muslim world would come around. What Mr. Obama and his progressive followers considered "outreach"--a combination of apologetic obsequiousness and self-aggrandizing moralization at America's expense--Muslim extremists saw as weakness and cowardice.
Wake up call for the president and his counterterrorism chief: America has already absorbed another terrorist attack. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 and wounded 31 soldiers at Fort Hood--something president Obama didn't bother to mention until almost three minutes into a press conference following that attack. And it is only by the grace of God that we didn't "absorb" two more attacks on a Christmas Eve jetliner and in the middle of New York's Times Square.
Absorption is for sponges, not the blood of innocent Americans. As for "cowboy" versus "Kumbaya," Americans can decide for themselves which approach keeps them safer from those wishing to establish a worldwide totalitarian theocracy by any means necessary.
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if federal immigration law is sacrosanct, why are the feds suing Arizona, even as hundreds of sanctuary cities get a pass? Once again, the answer is simple: progressives believe America is a fundamentally broken nation and that public animus directed towards illegal aliens is motivated by nothing more than racism and xenophobia. Nowhere have progressives worked harder to undermine clarity than their attempt to obfuscate the difference between legal and illegal immigration.
Here's clarity: the citizens of Arizona are under attack from their own government for confronting illegal immigration, while cities that aid and abet it are free to continue doing so. The "sanctity" of federal immigration law? A progressively-tainted fraud.
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if tax cuts are good for the economy during bad times, why aren't they good all the time? Three presidents, JFK, Reagan, and Bush 43 gave Americans a substantial tax cut. In all three cases, more revenue, not less, subsequently flowed into federal coffers. Why? Because even though each American was paying less taxes percentage-wise, an expanding economy produced more Americans overall who were paying taxes.
So what's the problem for progressives? Perhaps the answer was revealed many years ago during one of those PBS seminars hosted by Fred Friendly in the '70s. The question (paraphrased) was simple: if a particular economic policy benefits every American, but the rich do disproportionately better, would you be in favor of it, or not?
Every liberal on the panel answered no.
Nothing's changed. Progressives hide their contempt for successful Americans with phrases such as "social justice" and economic "re-distribution" while the economy goes to hell in a hand basket.
But there is something far more sinister progressives do their best to obscure: higher taxes are not merely about money. They're about government control over ever-increasing percentages of American livelihoods--and, as a result, Americans themselves. Anyone wondering why a rock-solid Democrat majority in Congress refused to extend the Bush tax cuts prior to the election can stop wondering: they're hoping to obscure their contempt for the free-market and entreprenuerial Americans until after the November election.
It is no secret that many Democrats are running away from their achievements in order to get re-elected. That's the essence of obfuscation.
It is also a tacit admission of their ideological bankruptcy. It is also why the same president who ran on hope and change claimed a Republican Congressional majority would result in "hand-to-hand combat"--and why numerous reports suggest that Mr. Obama may test the outer limits of Executive power in order to bypass that Congress.
Which brings us to the ultimate clarity regarding progressive ideology: government of, by, and for the people be damned.
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© 2010, Arnold Ahlert |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
