Great Moments in Lefty Consistency

by Smitty

The first comment on the earlier "Profile in Cowardice" post bears promotion to a full post, in light of the diabolical nature of things.

[A Nebraskan Commenter] said...
'cuse me
I'm a Nebraskan and you need to know two things:
1. We know he's a Democrat. We voted for him and have been voting for him for years.

Indeed. Incumbency in the last century makes a Vasa of our ship of state. Emphasis mine here:

2. We don't appreciate outsiders tell us how to think or how our senators ought to vote.
Finally, why do republicans continue to flirt with him when you know he's a democrat?

This is where I achieve orbit. The system is broken. The practical point is that we've a small number of people wielding vast power over others. Tyranny. For now, the tyranny is disguised as 2k+ page bills that are rushed through, literally in the dead of night. As government grows, the rule of law will gradually be discarded, as was seen so blatantly last week with Sanders' amendment.

So, you have conscious people arguing against this decadence. The 10th Amendment, now merely an icon to chastity that is venerated as foreplay for new adventures in sodomy, ought to make this entire argument about health care moot. The Federal government has no business whatsoever, per the Constitution, dealing with individual citizens. Sure, interstate commerce regulation for medications. Fine, running an FDA: there are economies of scale to achieve, without violating privacy. And we're all going to get violated, one way or another.

Ah, but your Senator Nelson is telling us what we'll pay. Your Senator's vote is going to have direct impact on me, over here in VA. You sound downright conservative there, getting all puffy about your state's rights and stuff. But did you follow the Big Government link above, and see what your Senator is perpetrating on the rest of the country? Do you really think that, for all Nelson's whoredom, this special treatment isn't going to get thrown under the bus Real Soon Now?

Oh, and here is your sorry punchline:

He's betrayed no one. He acts for us - not you.

He, and both of my local pieces of work, Warner and Webb, have betrayed the whole lousy country. They act for themselves. If you think he's acting for you, or for Nebraska in any long-term useful way, then all I can say is that your glasses are a fetching shade of rose. "not" and "you" are the only accurate words in your entire reply, sir.

I don't think any of the whining from the left about the contents of the bill is meaningful. The precedent is set, once this is signed. Our brave new Orwellian version of Logan's Run beckons. Cue Young4Eyes to come in and call me paranoid. Of course it will be implemented over time: I'm giving you the decades-out view. But Chekov's Law is correct. The century-long project to demolish our country history nears completion. And we still have these silly squawks from Nebraska that we shouldn't tell their Senators how think, when those Senators are cheerfully dictating to us. You stay beautiful, lefties.

And, as I hate leaving a post on a down note, here is a parting shot:

Strange noise on the Left

A blogger named Suzi Gablik gets frosted by anti-war criticism of President Obama and writes a post called "Why I'm Not a Liberal Anymore":

All I know is that I can hardly stand reading the Huffington Post these days. The stuff coming out of "progressive" mouths is all too often on a par with Glenn Beck's abusive rants . . .
I think the straw that broke this camel's back was an horrendously ugly and smearing essay Christian Parenti wrote last week, which was published on the Huffington Post after Obama's Afghanistan speech. . . .

The essay in question was standard issue anti-war leftist discourse, no different from anything any peacenik has said about U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam. Because its target is a Democratic president, however, Gablik decides to excommunicate herself from liberalism.

While not so naive as to believe in Peace Through Pacifism, I nevertheless admire the peacenik consistency of those on the Left who, like Parenti, don't allow themselves to be bamboozled by appeals to partisan unity or stunned into silence by the haloed awesomeness of Obama.

Is there anything in Gablik to be admired? Not really. She slams Beck for "abusive rants," yet what did she write last October?

Palin's cultivated malice almost makes the KKK look untutored.

So much for consistency. And who exactly is Gablik? An art critic with a penchant for grandiose abstraction:

A new paradigm of an engaged, participatory and socially relevant art is emerging . . .
Within the modernist paradigm under which I grew up, art has been typically understood as a collection of prestigious objects, existing in museums and galleries, disconnected from ordinary life and action. . . .
Many of the beliefs about art that our culture subscribes to, that the problems of art are purely aesthetic and that art will never change the world, are beliefs that have diminished the capacity of artists for constructive thought and action. . . .
As many artists shift their work arena from the studio to the more public contexts of political, social, and environmental life, we are all being called, in our understanding of what art is, to move beyond the mode of disinterested contemplation to something that is more participatory and engaged. . . .

Verbose nothingness, the familiar incantation of buzzwords -- "paradigm," "socially relevant," "participatory" -- that function primarily as signifiers of membership in the intellectual ranks. And now, because some liberal critics have turned their guns on Obama, she decides that HuffPo is coterminous with liberalism, and therefore she is not liberal.

Remember this next time somebody tells you conservatives are anti-intellectual morons.

'Cap and Trade Is Dead'

Well, duh! This is kind of obvious, isn't it? Once the fraudulent "science" behind the global warming scare was exposed, Al Gore became the Piltdown Man of American politics and that whole Kyoto-style agenda was as obsolete as the mullet and parachute pants. Delicious commentary from Eric Raymond:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as "deniers" and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

Unlike crow, schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. And I remind you what I said in June:

The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Kind of like the Obama administration's economic plan, really. It didn't take any prophetic power to declare last December, "It Won't Work." And the emerging obviousness of the failure of Obamanomics is just further confirmation of the fundamental truth that liberalism is always wrong.

Now, if only we can get liberals to agree that Florida will win the SEC championship next Saturday, an Alabama victory is guaranteed.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: G.M. Roper:

The recent exposure of emails, data and software from the pre-eminent global warming organization -- the Climate Research Unit -- shows not only that scientists are human and thus tribal, arrogant and sometimes deceitful, but also the modern process is inadequate and antiquated.
Skeptics have argued that critical data had been "cooked," and scientists had been refusing requests for data. Now we know that not only was the data misused and that the scientists had been engaged in a coverup and suppression of dissent, but also that they are not even able to understand their own data. . . .

Read the whole thing. What we need, I tell you, is a scientific consensus that Florida will win next Saturday. Get the CRU working on it. Roll Tide.

Fort Hood Massacre: Jeffrey Goldberg on the See-No-Evil elite

When "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" strikes, there is a curious incuriosity in some quarters:

A consensus seems to have formed here at The Atlantic that the Ft. Hood massacre means not very much at all. Megan McArdle writes that "there is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this." James Fallows says: "The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre 'mean'? A decade later, do we 'know' anything about Columbine?" . . .
It seems, though, that when an American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell "Allahu Akbar" while murdering his fellow soldiers, as some soldiers say he did. . . .

The whistling-past-the-mass-graveyard reaction Goldberg discerns is quite striking among the opinion elite, if we contrast it to their reactions in other cases.

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about "Southern populist terrorism" in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as "nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war," demonstrating how "the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult"?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their "nothing to see here" reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming "Allahu Akbar" while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

So instead of a search for meaning, the elite engage in a search for non-meaning. The Fort Hood killer attended a radical mosque? Meaningless!

What is most amusing is how the elite assume that the rest of us are so stupid as not to notice the pattern.

UPDATE: Phyllis Chesler observed Saturday:

Quickly, reflexively, without waiting for more of the facts to emerge, the mainstream print media has already decided that Major Hasan is a tormented “innocent” who must have snapped under alleged conditions of extreme provocation and humiliation. The mainstream media assures people that there is no such thing as jihad; that the Ft. Hood massacre has nothing to do with Islam or with violent jihad; that if there are any victims here, it is not the dead and wounded soldiers . . . but the man accused of their mass murders.

Michelle Malkin wonders, "Why do we have to read British papers to get Ft. Hood jihadist news?!" Meanwhile, Donald Douglas notices that anyone who thinks Islam had anything to do with the Fort Hood massacre has been declared guilty of anti-Muslim "bigotry."