Posted: November 27th, 2009 | Author: Bruce Bexley | Filed under: Revolt | No Comments »
Liberals have been predicting the demise of the Tea Party Movement since it began. From The Olympian today:
The TEA Party movement is looking more like a passing political fancy than an enduring political force.
After a high-voltage summer of rallies and town hall protests targeting the government spending and health care reform policies of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress, the movement is falling victim to internal feuds over money, strategy and leadership, a number of conservative political insiders have observed.
Earlier this year, it looked like the grassroots movement might have a chance to be a political player capable of influencing elections and shaping GOP policy in the 2010 elections.
But some of that initial momentum has been undermined by the movement’s lack of structure and ability to identify a leader.
The next few months will be a make-or-break time for this conservative political movement born out of anger and frustration.
Yet voters have grown only more frustrated with the administration since the Tea Party Movement began earlier this year. As long as the Washington elites overstep their bounds, liberty-loving Americans will find ways to express their dissent — whether through “tea parties” or new means.
As for the movement, could Bachmann, Palin, and other anti-establishment Republicans rise as unofficial leaders?
Posted: September 16th, 2009 | Author: JM | Filed under: Liberals, Obama, Racism | No Comments »
Infuriated by the public’s continued opposition to ObamaCare, liberals have resorted to their final and most odious attack: denouncing Obama’s opponents as racists.
Some Democrats cry racist as a political tactic, in hopes of stirring up the White Guilt that got Obama elected and extending it to the health care bill. They’re the minority. For most liberals - the ones impressed by Arianna Huffington’s accent, wowed by Keith Olbermann’s fake adverbs, and automatically convinced of everything the mainstream media tells them- their cries of racism are without forethought or political calculation. They see conservatives disagreeing with the president and immediately conclude “RACISM!”
Conservatives need not be offended by liberals flinging the R-word at them. There’s no honest basis for the accusation, and in making it, liberals reveal their ugly, inner selves. Conservatives should take it as an opportunity to observe the liberal mind.
Opponents of the “public option” haven’t mentioned President Obama’s skin color, but they have mentioned data, philosophical differences, and specific passages within the text of the bill. So why are liberals calling them racists? It’s safe to say liberals’ accusations aren’t based on anything they’ve observed. The cries of racism come from somewhere else inside.
Of conservatives and liberals, which group is obsessed with race? Which group talks endlessly about racial issues, often conjuring up racial tension that previously didn’t exist, and staging racial hate crimes to “prove” a political point? Which group advocates the celebration of “ethnic diversity,” and tells people to see themselves in terms of their race? Which group drools over Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina justice, or Barack Obama as the first black president (after questioning for months whether he was black enough)?
When a liberal breaks from a debate over health care and, out of the blue, calls his conservative opponent a racist, there’s only one explanation: he’s projecting. The liberal is denying his own racist tendencies by ascribing them to the conservative.
Liberals see Obama primarily as a black man. They can’t help but think of him in racial terms. His personality, his past, his ideas, his actions, all are obscured by the liberal obsession with race.
When conservatives oppose Obama, liberals assume it must be because of his race. The liberal takes his simplistic, race-based perspective and projects it onto the conservative.
What can a conservative do but laugh? Next time a liberal hits you with the R-word, don’t waste time defending yourself. Tell him he’s the one fixated on race, and the conversation can’t progress until he works through his repressed, racial angst.
Examples of liberals projecting are abundant. They recently dismissed the Tea Parties and health care protests as astroturf, when they, the liberals, were astroturf. Photos of the events showed conservatives holding hand-made signs and citing very personal and specific reasons for protesting. The liberals reiterated tired, old talking points and held machine-produced signs, obviously handed out by large, well-funded organizations.
After whining about “millions of Americans left uninsured” (the majority of whom choose not to purchase insurance) and the so-called “health care crisis” (we have the best health care on the planet), liberals derided Sarah Palin for her “scare tactics” in opposing the plan. Palin criticized Democrats for the bill’s death panels. She wasn’t lying to scare people into accepting her politics — the way liberals did when they claimed the health care system was in shambles. She was pointing to a specific, undeniable provision of the text and raising a legitimate concern.
Liberals pride themselves on their feminist values, yet their treatment of Sarah Palin proved they’re shockingly misogynistic. As I discuss in my upcoming book, Sarah Quaylin (available next month on Amazon), the only thing liberal feminists have accomplished is telling women to act masculine. When a powerful, feminine woman like Sarah Palin comes along, they degrade her for her feminine traits. At the same time, liberals project their sexism onto conservatives. They tell themselves they are enlightened, tolerant, progressive; it’s the conservatives holding women back.
Rush Limbaugh asked today whether the country is capable of having a black president. If the president’s opponents can’t criticize him without his supporters screaming racist, how can the political process possibly work? It’s up to liberals to relinquish their obsession with race and to deal with Obama not as a black man, but as the President of the United States.
RELATED:
[Hot Air] Jimmy Carter: The “overwhelming” portion of animosity towards Obama is racist
[National Review] The ‘Racism’ Canard
[Hot Air] Waters: Protesters should be probed for “racist” thoughts
[Frank J. Fleming] Why Are Liberals Still Angry?
Posted: August 16th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Free Market | No Comments »
Peter Thiel writes at the Cato Institute:
“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself ‘libertarian.’
“But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 29th, 2009 | Author: JM | Filed under: Free Market, Liberals | No Comments »
Economic fallacies abound as liberals march us toward socialized medicine.
They began by mourning the thousands of Americans dying in the streets - those poor, disadvantaged souls who are turned away from emergency rooms and denied lifesaving medicines. They decried the millions of people unable to obtain health insurance, who trudge through life sick and disabled because they can’t afford treatment. They warned of insurance companies who deny claims and doctors who rip out tonsils just to make a quick buck.
The problem is none of that is true. Americans enjoy the best health care in the world. People aren’t dying in the streets. They aren’t turned away from hospitals or refused medicine. They’re happy with their health care. Screaming “Crisis!” won’t persuade them to scrap a system that, for most of them, is working just fine.
Enter Senator Bernie Sanders. He appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show last night to explain how inefficient, impractical and immoral our present system is. The strategy has shifted from shouting “Hurry! Give us control or poor people will die!” to long, nonsensical arguments about how much cleaner things are when the government is in control. Observe:
[T]he people would gravitate toward a public plan because a public plan will not have the administrative costs, the huge CEO compensation costs, and the general bureaucracy that a [private] plan will have.
A common mistake, Mr. Sanders. Just because government fairies wave their magic wands doesn’t mean costs disappear. If the government assumes the costs of health care, the costs still exist. They’re passed on to society as a whole in the form of taxes and inflation. That includes “administrative costs” - presumably the doctors, nurses, techs, and office folk - and the “huge CEO compensation costs,” like when our president rents a multimillion dollar mansion on Martha’s Vineyard for his summer vacation, or flies his wife to New York City for a date night on Broadway.
I agree with Sen. Sanders a public plan would lack the “general bureaucracy” of a private plan. “General” is far too mild a word. We already have something far worse in the bureaucracies of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the VA. We’re not talking “general bureaucracy.” We’re talking gargantuan, overwhelming, putrid, stinks-worse-than-a-Canadian-hospital bureaucracies that will make Baby Boomers beg for that sweet, chemical release just so they don’t have to make one more phone call or stand in one more line to appease sleazy, mooching bureaucrats.
Bernie continued:
[W]e‘re the only nation in the world that does not guarantee — industrialized nation that does not guarantee health care to every man, woman and child. And yet, we end up spending almost twice as much as any other country.
Yes, we spend way more than any other country on health care, and that’s a wonderful thing! We also spend more on food, cars, plasma TV’s and tropical cruises. Only Americans can afford such extravagant standards of living. The reason? Our government doesn’t “guarantee” things the way other governments do (or at least, it didn’t so much in the past). Industries prosper when government stay out of the way.
Still, Sanders worries about what prices might do if government doesn’t control them:
[I]f you want to do any kind of cost containment, you need to have the competition from a public plan because without that, the private insurance companies will be out there on their own, being able to raise rates as much as they have in the past.
In other words, costs are highest in a free market society. Left on their own, with no “competition” from the public sector, greedy corporations charge exorbitant rates. Their profit motives cause them to drive up prices, such that consumers pay more for goods and services than those goods and services are actually worth. Only by the restraining hand of government are prices kept at reasonable rates.
But is that really the way it goes? McDonald’s doesn’t have any public sector competition. It vies only with Wendy’s, Burger King, Sonic, Carl’s Jr. and other private companies, the way private insurance companies would compete only with each other if government were out of the picture.
When have McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Sonic, and Carl’s Jr. ever hiked their rates to make more money? They have no government competitor, and yet their prices have never spiraled upward. The dollar menu is still a dollar menu. If one changes its $5 combos to $50 combos, consumers will go to the cheaper options.
Now imagine if the government opened an “Obama’s” fast food chain to compete with McDonald’s. Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow deemed the $5 combo too expensive for a recession-suffering public, so the government opened an Obama’s next to each McDonald’s to offer a $2 combo.
The competition would prove impossible for McDonald’s. It could never sell its products for such a low price. It can’t print money to build restaurants, order supplies, and pay workers. Consumers would choose the $2 option and McDonald’s would close.
But would the $2 option really be cheaper? The government restaurants still would require staffing, administration, materials, etc. Unlike McDonald’s, Obama’s wouldn’t need to be efficient in its operations. The costs still would be there, and the consumer would foot the bill - just not when checking out.
Meanwhile, if Obama’s served rancid meat or moldy bread, its consumers would have no recourse. They couldn’t sue the restaurant - after all, you can’t fight City Hall. Nor could they drive to McDonald’s or Wendy’s for the more reliable, $5 option - private competitors would have vanished.
Sander’s grand vision for government health care is dangerous because it obscures the costs and then grows them. He might put a cheaper price tag on the public plan than Blue Cross or United, but the costs will remain.
[Sanders enters at 7:10]