A.J. DiCintio
Red hot liberal arrogance
By A.J. DiCintio
Ever since Karl Marx lied that he based his ideas upon science — for example, his "scientific socialism" — a defining characteristic of leftists has been an insufferably arrogant bragging about their exquisite rationality.
Now, if it were true that leftist ideology is based upon reason, it would qualify for inclusion in science textbooks. However, as every honest person knows, it can't be because it isn't.
My purpose here, however, is not to analyze the entirety of this important question but to comment upon how liberals have blown their arrogance red hot during this summer of the nation's discontent.
Fortunately, Maureen Dowd has made the task enormously easy, as a result of "Going Mad in Herds," which she opens by mentioning that a bookstore on Martha's Vineyard presented the nation's Vacationer-in-Chief with a copy of Freedom, a novel "about a dysfunctional family in America."
As we would expect, the word "dysfunctional" sent Ms. Dowd raving in true liberal fashion:
This [gift] is apt, since Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.
Yes, the fact that landslide majorities of the public oppose Obama's most important policies and positions has got Dowd and Friends violently screeching the truth about how they regard themselves and the 80% of the American "family" who don't identify themselves as liberals.
Indeed, liberals have been so loud and persistent in this maniacal shrieking that there can't be one soul who, for example, hasn't heard them praise President Obama as a supremely "rational" and "high-minded" human being or denigrate citizens of non-liberal America as a repulsive herd of yahoos.
In my view, however, Irony is playing a very important role in this obnoxious liberal behavior, and thus it's the other way around regarding who's been reduced to behaving like a boorish buffoon by the thing that "goeth before a fall."
These few questions about the healthcare debate make the point:
Who was it that a la Maureen Dowd scorned an enormous majority of the public when he turned the job of reforming healthcare — an issue that literally deals with life and death and also represents 16% of the nation's economy — entirely over to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the nation's real Yahoos?
Who was it that failed to empower a group of innovative doctors and other experts who have only the honest reforming of the nation's health system as their "ideology" to devise a healthcare plan that, in the great tradition bequeathed us by the Founders, keeps government involvement to a minimum?
Who was it that celebrated in a carnival atmosphere surrounding not a healthcare victory but a rotten political victory achieved by enacting into law an unread, unreadable, corruptly "reconciled" 2,000 page abomination that has more to do with social engineering than it does the nation's healthcare problems?
In each case the answer is, of course, "perfectly rational" liberals.
Now, we conservatives don't assert that huge agreement on an issue automatically confers the blessing of science and rationality upon the public's thinking.
However, we can proudly say that we are infinitely more disposed to place our faith in the wisdom of the Constitution's "We the People" than in a pack of self-anointed elites hopelessly addicted to fulminating about the superiority of their minds.
Like Thomas Jefferson we believe that there is "no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves." And like William Buckley, we would rather "live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."
But whether the issue is centralized, "command" government, healthcare, the national debt, economic policy, border policy, immigration policy, Arizona's immigration law, or constructing a mosque complex near Ground Zero, liberals don't just dismiss the wisdom of the people, they denounce and slime them as racist, fascist, Latino-loathing, Islamophobic, nativist Know-Nothings.
Finally, there is one more disturbing truth about this summer's contemptible viciousness:
However red hot its flame, it is capable of becoming incredibly hotter.
Indeed, if the people vote out the current regime come November and especially if they do the same to Obama two years later, liberals are certain to blow the fire of their arrogance plasmatically white hot as the angry, hypocritical, pretentious herd of creatures who anoint themselves as avatars of reason continue to insist they are the ones not just America but the entire world has been waiting for.
Not that Jesus, Confucius, Lao Tse, the writers of the Upanishads, or the authors of the Greek tragedies would be surprised.
© A.J. DiCintio
September 5, 2010
Ever since Karl Marx lied that he based his ideas upon science — for example, his "scientific socialism" — a defining characteristic of leftists has been an insufferably arrogant bragging about their exquisite rationality.
Now, if it were true that leftist ideology is based upon reason, it would qualify for inclusion in science textbooks. However, as every honest person knows, it can't be because it isn't.
My purpose here, however, is not to analyze the entirety of this important question but to comment upon how liberals have blown their arrogance red hot during this summer of the nation's discontent.
Fortunately, Maureen Dowd has made the task enormously easy, as a result of "Going Mad in Herds," which she opens by mentioning that a bookstore on Martha's Vineyard presented the nation's Vacationer-in-Chief with a copy of Freedom, a novel "about a dysfunctional family in America."
As we would expect, the word "dysfunctional" sent Ms. Dowd raving in true liberal fashion:
This [gift] is apt, since Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.
Yes, the fact that landslide majorities of the public oppose Obama's most important policies and positions has got Dowd and Friends violently screeching the truth about how they regard themselves and the 80% of the American "family" who don't identify themselves as liberals.
Indeed, liberals have been so loud and persistent in this maniacal shrieking that there can't be one soul who, for example, hasn't heard them praise President Obama as a supremely "rational" and "high-minded" human being or denigrate citizens of non-liberal America as a repulsive herd of yahoos.
In my view, however, Irony is playing a very important role in this obnoxious liberal behavior, and thus it's the other way around regarding who's been reduced to behaving like a boorish buffoon by the thing that "goeth before a fall."
These few questions about the healthcare debate make the point:
Who was it that a la Maureen Dowd scorned an enormous majority of the public when he turned the job of reforming healthcare — an issue that literally deals with life and death and also represents 16% of the nation's economy — entirely over to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the nation's real Yahoos?
Who was it that failed to empower a group of innovative doctors and other experts who have only the honest reforming of the nation's health system as their "ideology" to devise a healthcare plan that, in the great tradition bequeathed us by the Founders, keeps government involvement to a minimum?
Who was it that celebrated in a carnival atmosphere surrounding not a healthcare victory but a rotten political victory achieved by enacting into law an unread, unreadable, corruptly "reconciled" 2,000 page abomination that has more to do with social engineering than it does the nation's healthcare problems?
In each case the answer is, of course, "perfectly rational" liberals.
Now, we conservatives don't assert that huge agreement on an issue automatically confers the blessing of science and rationality upon the public's thinking.
However, we can proudly say that we are infinitely more disposed to place our faith in the wisdom of the Constitution's "We the People" than in a pack of self-anointed elites hopelessly addicted to fulminating about the superiority of their minds.
Like Thomas Jefferson we believe that there is "no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves." And like William Buckley, we would rather "live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."
But whether the issue is centralized, "command" government, healthcare, the national debt, economic policy, border policy, immigration policy, Arizona's immigration law, or constructing a mosque complex near Ground Zero, liberals don't just dismiss the wisdom of the people, they denounce and slime them as racist, fascist, Latino-loathing, Islamophobic, nativist Know-Nothings.
Finally, there is one more disturbing truth about this summer's contemptible viciousness:
However red hot its flame, it is capable of becoming incredibly hotter.
Indeed, if the people vote out the current regime come November and especially if they do the same to Obama two years later, liberals are certain to blow the fire of their arrogance plasmatically white hot as the angry, hypocritical, pretentious herd of creatures who anoint themselves as avatars of reason continue to insist they are the ones not just America but the entire world has been waiting for.
Not that Jesus, Confucius, Lao Tse, the writers of the Upanishads, or the authors of the Greek tragedies would be surprised.
© A.J. DiCintio
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