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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Sully- who wrote (79950)5/26/2010 4:50:56 AM
From: Sully-  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 90947
 
Living in Obama's Loony Parallel Universe

By Kelcy Allen
American Thinker

According to my psychoanalyst, I have issues. She believes our nation's dichotomous political climate and divisive political dialogue is affecting my mental state and I'm beginning to show a "disconnect."

It's disconcerting to confess that you're coming unhinged -- to admit you're losing touch with reality and are living in some loony parallel universe. Just this month, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking expressed his belief that humans are capable of time travel. No kidding. Welcome to my world.

My therapist says my anger issues are revealing, but it's not a personality disorder that's got me. It's not an addictive disorder because I'm still meeting society's expectations and functioning effectively. And it wasn't what I originally feared -- schizophrenia -- because I show no signs of a psychotic disorder.

It's much worse than that, she said -- she suspects I'm turning into a liberal.

I was displaying three common symptoms, she explained, which confirmed her diagnosis. First, I become agitated and angry when confronted about opinions or facts that differ from my own. Second, I get defensive and deflect uncomfortable questions during conversation -- a technique not commonly found in healthy dialogue. And last, I'm showing aggressiveness by resorting to ad hominem attacks when someone doesn't understand that my point of view is always the correct one.

I'm beginning to call people names when they don't agree with me -- similar to what a third-grader does when she doesn't get her way, my psychoanalyst admonished.

With this new assessment of my mental state, I certainly wasn't going to tell her I often chat with my cat named "Schizo," or that lately I've been drinking a lot of Syrah just to cope.

According to her, my common sense is undergoing some kind of entropy, my interpretation of factual information is diminishing, and my judgment is suffering from abulia -- a deteriorating ability to exercise my will, to make good decisions, or to act independently.

Apparently I'm becoming excessively subjective and inordinately emotional, as opposed to having an objective, logical view accompanied by normal emotions. It seems I'm slipping into an altered reality where life becomes what I feel it should be, or whatever I want it to be.


Since my conversion to conservatism after a long bout with hippie-hood, vegetarianism, and philosophizing deep in the Big Sur redwoods while seeking my inner child, I've come to rely on the rock-solid truths of hard work, the unabridged exchange of ideas, and a reliance on facts and faith as opposed to feelings and unfounded fears.

I felt I'd made significant progress over the past thirty or so years overcoming my "if it feels good do it," "you are what you think," and "it's my way or the highway" mentality.

So it came as a shock when I received the bad news that I was regressing politically and returning to a time I thought I'd outgrown. Stephen Hawking said we could travel only forward in time -- not backward -- so I asked how this could be happening. She answered that astrophysics was theoretical, but my symptoms are real, and it would help if I stopped changing the subject -- that was part of my problem.

"So what do you believe is responsible for your regression?" she probed.

I was prepared to wax eloquent with my new political vernacular after recently reading a copy of Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin, but her question put me on the defensive, so I opted to tell the truth.

I've been on a mission to convince liberals that America is moving in a dangerous direction -- we're speeding down a suicidal path toward a Marxist precipice, and Obama is our head lemming.

I've immersed myself in their social circles and have tried to convey the seriousness of the perils our country faces -- not difficulties inherent in our system, but dangers being created solely by Obama and his radical progressive advisers.

The word "Progressive" seems to suggest some kind of positive movement, but it's distinctly the opposite -- it's a negative death wish for freedom and liberty. Progressive means "oppressive" -- massive, strict government; takeovers of valued American institutions; stifled speech; suppressed religion; and stunted freedoms -- replete with rules, regulations, and restrictions -- with cause and effect ultimately requiring repression. It's change we might all be forced to believe in!

A gazillion facts, videotapes, manuscripts, confessions, and even live speeches of Obama's nefarious intentions and his questionable relationships don't stir his hypnotized following. My other world has become a continuum of mordant verbal exchanges with Obama's "living dead."

As a result,
I've stopped trying to awaken liberals from their coma by battling against a paralyzing deficit, the constrictions of Cap-and-Trade, or unsubstantiated climate change.

And I've given up discussing the largest breach of faith of our time: this administration's irresponsible and dangerously lackadaisical approach to homeland security. Other battles are moot if we lose this crucial war.

I believe the Obama administration's perilous approach to terror is driving most normal people crazy.

When Obama appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, Holder departed the law firm Covington and Burling, noted for defending -- not prosecuting -- radical Muslim extremists. Other attorneys then followed him from that firm to the DOJ, as have a multitude of attorneys who defended terror suspects ad nauseam at other law firms. Without doubt, this creates a sympathetic milieu for terror conspirators.

Holder and his staff will not admit to a radical Muslim conspiracy. In fact, they won't even admit to a "concerted effort." Reid (the shoe bomber), Hassan (the Ft. Hood shooter), Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomb suspect), and Shahzad (who plotted the Times Square car bomb) all purportedly "acted alone" despite reams of contrary evidence. And thanks to Holder, if the "enemy combatants" seeking jihadi "social justice" blow a thousand Americans to smithereens, they still get Mirandized, so they can sit back, smirk, and remain silent.

Last week's 20% slashing of New York City's port and subway security funds from nearly $200 million to $145 million by the Obama administration, and Obama's recent decision to remove the terms "Islamic extremism" and "jihad" from our National Security Strategy document, are inane, naïve capitulations.

In the end, liberalism is out of touch and myopic, and its quixotic lunacy has apparently begun to rub off on me. If the liberal expression "reality is a state of mind" is true, then their decisions now have me living out of state.

"You've become angry, you keep changing the subject, and you're resorting to name-calling," my psychoanalyst described. "You're living exclusively in an emotional world -- like a liberal."

"However, you're not permanently wacky," she happily reassured me. "Simply return to your conservative roots -- be patient, speak with reason, and stick to the truth."

"My suggestion to you is," she affirmed, "go home, relax, curl up with your cat and a good book...say...Liberty and Tyranny, and have a nice glass of Yakima Valley Syrah. By the way," she added, "what's the name of your cat?"

Kelcy Allen is a freelance writer. He lives in the great Pacific Northwest.

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To: Sully- who wrote (79950)7/27/2010 5:46:00 PM
From: TimF2 Recommendations  Respond to of 90947
 
Tea parties fight Obama's culture of dependence
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
April 18, 2010

"Do you realize," CNN's Susan Roesgen asked a man at the April 15, 2009, tea party in Chicago, "that you're eligible for a $400 credit?" When the man refused to drop his "drop socialism" sign, she went on, "Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets fifty billion out of the stimulus?"

Roesgen is no longer with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last year. But her questions are revealing. They help us understand that the issue on which our politics has become centered -- the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government -- is really not just about economics. It is really a battle about culture, a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence.

Probably unknowingly, Roesgen was reflecting the the midcentury sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld's dictum that politics is about who gets how much when. If some guy is getting $400, shouldn't he just shut up and collect the money? Shouldn't he be happy that his state government, headed recently by Rod Blagojevich, was getting an extra $50 billion?

But public policy also helps determine the kind of society we are. The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves.

That is the culture of dependence. The tea partiers see things differently. They're not looking for lower taxes; half of tea party supporters, a New York Times survey found, think their taxes are fair. Nor are they financially secure: Half say someone in their household may lose their job in the next year. Two-thirds say the recession has caused some hardship in their lives. But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens' dependence on it.

And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence that has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous -- and the most charitably generous -- nation in the world. Seeing our political divisions as a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence helps to make sense of the divisions seen in the 2008 election.

Barack Obama carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and those with incomes over $200,000 and lost those with incomes in between. He won large margins from those who never graduated from high school and from those with graduate school degrees and barely exceeded 50 percent among those in between. The top-and-bottom Obama coalition was in effect a coalition of those dependent on government transfers and benefits and those in what David Brooks calls "the educated class" who administer or believe that their kind of people administer those transactions. They are the natural constituency for the culture of dependence.

Interestingly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election the purported beneficiaries of the culture of dependence -- low-income and low-education voters -- did not turn out in large numbers. In contrast, the administrators of that culture -- affluent secular professionals, public employees, university personnel -- were the one group that turned out in force and voted for the hapless Democratic candidate. The in-between people on the income and education ladders, it turns out, are a constituency for the culture of independence.

Smart conservatives like David Frum, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argued in 2009 books that modest-income conservative voters have had stagnant incomes over the last decade and that Republicans should offer them compensatory tax breaks. That seemed to make sense in the wake of the 2008 election. But it's been undercut by developments since. As Roesgen discovered, tea party supporters are not in the mood to be bought off with $400 tax credits.

They have a longer time horizon and can see where the Obama Democrats are trying to take us. Lazarsfeld saw politics as just a matter of dollars and cents. The tea party movement reminds us of what the Founders taught, that it has a moral dimension as well. They risked all in the cause of the culture of independence. The polling evidence suggests that most Americans don't want to leave that behind.

washingtonexaminer.com