In the US, as in Canada, as in Belgium, they are not interested in winning the argument but in denying you the opportunity to have one.
Mark Steyn
Progressives are proving to be nothing more than baby-talking whiny ninnies. It’s somehow become a federal offense to offend, and so-called progressives more easily offended than ever. Watching progressives cry about hateful, racist speech (that really isn’t) has effectively transported me back to junior high school.
How dare you work as an analyst for evil Fox News and be black and liberal at the same time, Juan Williams! Tolerance is not a two-way street, so stop with the candid, rational comments already!
Juan Williams is one of the latest victims of leftist boo-hooing who made the mistake of telling the truth, and is a prime example of the fact that the progressive ideology can’t handle the truth. Juan admitted that seeing Muslims on an airplane makes him nervous. When I heard his confession I was shocked.
How dare Juan Williams associate terrorism with Islam! It’s not as if 99 percent of all terrorism the world over is perpetrated by Muslims. Who were those guys who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11? Probably evangelical Christians or CIA operatives on a secret mission for that American Hitler, George W. Bush.
Therein lies the hypocrisy of the progressive angst over words. It’s okay to say vile and ugly things about Christians, conservatives, and especially Sarah Palin. What’s not okay is honesty. What a bunch of wussies.
Put a crucifix in urine and progressives call it “edgy” and “artistic,” but put Mohammed in a bear suit and it’s beyond the pale. Question the veracity of the Carbon Footprint Global Warming Climate Change religion and you’re akin to a Holocaust denier. However, if you actually are a Holocaust denier and you’re a Muslim, you should be treated with respect bordering on insane reverence.
Being progressive means never having to say you’re sorry or engage in meaningful debate about anything that makes you uncomfortable. It’s totalitarian group think wrapped up in the proverbial unicorns and rainbows. In this magical land “tolerance” is code for “you better think exactly like us, or else.” P.J. O’Rourke gets to the heart of the matter:
They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class. Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
Imagine all the people... buying into this crap.
Barack Obama is arguably the most enigmatic president in the history of the United States, right behind William Henry Harrison. I think I know what’s going on with Mr. Obama, but apparently a majority of my fellow citizens don’t. In a recent and now-infamous poll, 61 percent of Americans either don’t know Mr. Obama’s religious affiliation or think he’s a Muslim.
Unlike Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, the cumulative record of his climb to the presidency, his associations, his voting record and the millions of words he’s written about himself whilst staring at his reflection in a pool make his beliefs and vision very clear indeed.
Most Americans are confused about Mr. Obama because they haven’t bothered to look very closely at his history. They’ve been told by those who police the information disseminated to the public, the fake-but-accurate “mainstream” media, “Nothing to see here. Move along, please.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama obfuscates even the simplest of issues. His catch phrase – “let me be clear” – has become one of the great presidential paradoxes of all time as it signals that a riddle will be explained with an enigma. This approach is not due to Mr. Obama’s inability to ‘splain himself, but is intended to shield the true nature and intent of his policymaking from the public at large.
This is the culmination of an entire career outside the mainstream and immersed in the Marxist, multicultural, atheistic, relativistic, grievance-mongering world of left-wing politics, which is really what “community organizing” is all about. Mr. Obama has never held a real job. He has no clue about what average people struggle with and how the heavy hand of government affects their lives.
Mr. Obama’s entire career has been one of theory and abstractions. Obama and his peers have busied themselves envisioning a Utopia created by a benign and all-knowing government. This is quite easy to do when you don’t have to live with the consequences of the various social engineering projects you’re planning to foist on the unwashed masses. They are part of a noble experiment that will one day yield the fully evolved society where all live in peace and harmony. It’s taking the premise of John Lennon’s Imagine and bringing it to life.
The problem, however, lies in the very title of the song, Imagine. Sure, you can imagine it, but that’s about it. Reality tends to get in the way. Still, that doesn’t stop ambitious youngsters, like the idealistic Barry Obama, who climbed quickly from obscurity as an undergrad at Columbia to being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Suddenly, he was the media’s anointed one, christened as the “rising star” of his party after the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Mr. Obama’s ascendency has been largely based on hiding his ideology. There was a jarring disconnect, noticeable at least to those who were paying attention, between Mr. Obama’s rhetoric during the presidential campaign and his actual beliefs. Americans heard a radically leftist message wrapped up in non-descript-everyone-agrees-with-what-I’m-saying packaging.
Behind the façade lies Mr. Obama’s ladder to success, each successive rung riddled with the names of his far-left mentors and ideological fellow travelers, from Saul Alinsky to the good Rev. Wright. Not one of these would be considered “mainstream” or even moderate.
I finally bought my own copy of Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone. I read a library copy shortly after it was published in 2006, but enjoyed it so much that I knew I would re-read it and refer to it often. It is, in a word, brilliant.
If you’re a “progressive,” you probably won’t agree with its premise, which is basically that there are two populations going in opposite directions: one is shrinking and getting older (post-Christian, postmodern Western civilization) while the other is growing and decidedly younger (Islam).
What happens when the first is coddled by the state from cradle to grave and believes in nothing while the other is animated by a violent ideology that takes no prisoners? Then add the fact that the former are elderly and addled by pop culture and politcally-correct multiculturalism while the latter are youthful and angry? The end of the world as we know it, at least according to Steyn.
The edition delivered to my front door includes a new introduction. While almost every sentence in the book is quotable, here’s a tasty one I found in the intro:
“Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of cultural relativism, a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something primal and raging. Islam is an ideology. To claim it’s “race” is so breathtakingly stupid as to give the game away – and to confirm that “Racist!” is now no more than the cry of a western liberal who can’t stand his illusions being disturbed.”
A growing meme amongst the progressive crowd, and closely related to the Truther movement (Truthers being those who believe 911 was an inside job by the American government), is the audacious accusation that America brought 911 on itself. This Blame America First trope is the direct result of left-wing politics being force-fed to youngsters through America’s “educational” system.
A growing number of academic programs in the university system across this great country are thinly veiled ACORN-like recruiting centers for budding progressive, social-justice activists from a pool of blissfully ignorant, beer-guzzling, medical marijuana-smoking young whippersnappers.
These precocious youngsters are taught by seemingly scholarly academic types that America (sometimes spelled with a K, as in Amerika, or the KKK of Amerika) is an imperialist, racist nation bent on subjugating people of color the world over, and that anyone to the right of Michael Moore is a fascist. The mass media relentlessly reinforce this message with constant propaganda that Joseph Goebbels would be proud of (see also: Cameron, James. Avatar, et al).
Ironically, many progressives reared in such a system find themselves in common cause with global Jihad. Of course global Jihadists, if they reach their goal of a world caliphate, are likely to frown upon the myriad of causes most dear to progressives, such as a homosexual marriage free-for-all and abortion. By “frowning” I mean “putting the infidels to death by stoning.” Mark Steyn put it as only Mark Steyn can: “A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting ‘Hands off my bush!’”
So very true, yet progressives seek to undermine any attempt to squelch this particularly virulent strain of the peaceful religion, Islam. I suppose they’re too busy re-hashing America’s shoddy treatment of Native Americans and blacks (can we move on, please?) to realize that justifying Jihad – in effect, collaborating with Jihad – may very well lead to some dire circumstances.
Still, I’m struggling with this concept; that is, how America is ultimately to blame for 911. Usually, the response to the question of how America brought 911 on itself is, “America’s global policy.” Okay. What about America’s global policy?
What is it, exactly, about America’s policies in the past 100 years that ultimately led a bunch of Islamic fanatics to fly airplanes into buildings with hundreds of terrified passengers on board with them? And, regardless of America’s policies, this is justified? Put yourself in the airplane with Mohamed Atta, amigo, and then tell me if that deranged idiot was justified in his actions.
It’s easy to sit safely in Middletown, USA and pontificate in abstract about how Muslim countries have been subjugated by Europeans and Americans and quite another to come face to face with someone who’s preparing to put the infidel (you) to death. And I tell you what, if I had lost a loved one on 911 and some hipster dufus made a crack about blaming America for 911, there would be hell to pay.
But I digress, as usual… Typically, our progressive friend cannot answer the follow-up question. Sure, they may rattle on about the division of Muslim countries after both World Wars or America’s policy during the Iraq-Iran war, and so on and so forth. But there’s one particular piece of land that’s the sticking point here, and which has driven U.S. policy since 1948. That’s right. It’s all the Jews’ fault!
Why, ultimately, do the Islamic radicals hate us? Primarily, it’s our association with Israel. Secondarily, yet related, is the fact that most of us are infidels of one stripe or another. Progressives don’t care to delve very far into the actual messages coming out of the madrassas and media in Muslim countries.
Instead, parroting the popular progressive line about poverty, they simply close eyes and ears to the truth being shouted from the rooftops… er minarets. The message is not, “We’re desperately poor, so we’re going to strap explosives to ourselves and blow up amongst the infidels!” No, it’s: “We hate the Jews and the Christians! In fact, we hate the Buddhists, the Hindus, the atheists, the agnostics… Heck, anyone who’s not Muslim, especially those who ally themselves with the Jews!”
(I suppose the usual PC disclaimer should be inserted here. Yes, most Muslims are peace-loving, law-abiding folks, depending on the law to which they’re subject. Still, the volume of officially-sanctioned anti-Jewish, anti-infidel material coming out of Muslim countries with nary a peep in dissent is disconcerting, to say the least. Plus, if you’re not Muslim in a Muslim country you’re a second-class citizen. You can’t even own a Bible in most Muslim countries.)
This Jew-hating thing has been going on for a long time, at least since the Jews were identified as Jews. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and progressives buy it hook, line and sinker. My guess is that progressives, since they believe in the goodness and ultimate perfectibility of human beings, figure the Muslim world will come around once they recognize the esprit de corps they shared with Jihad. My other guess is that they will be sorely disappointed in the outcome.
There were a lot of people back in the 1930s who figured Hitler was someone they could deal with. The problem was they never bothered to read Mein Kampf, or if they did they skipped the parts about world domination and getting rid of the Jews.
So, while the Jihadists and Iran’s Ahmadinejad and his ilk lay out their plans plainly for all the world to see (destroy Israel, kill and subjugate the infidel), progressives rattle on meaninglessly about America’s complicity for global terrorism. Oh well, at least Howard Zinn would be proud that progressives reared in our university system will continue to mindlessly regurgitate his Marxist nonsense masquerading as scholarship.
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