“Nice rhinoceros,” I say to the guy at the bar holding the heavy-duty leash.
“Uh-huh.”
“Does he bite?”
“No, but he’ll ram the hell out of you.”
Bill Cosby, maestro of anecdotal humor, tells stories with an appealing realness. This variant of an old routine reminds us that life’s largest facts have a way of ramming into us. The healthy adult acknowledges truth and adjusts, simple truths like:
Go-getters win, slackers lose.
Smart succeeds, dumb fails.
Sensible, right?
Which explains liberals—who take masochistic pleasure in being rammed repeatedly by reality. These evolved creatures dismiss the societal corrosion caused by their “progressive” ways. They disregard astonishing fiascos and pursue the same paths which wrought them.
● Estimates of fatalities from Stalin’s atrocities range from 20 to 62 million. Yet Walter Duranty glorified Soviet Communism in the New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize in the process. ACLU founder Roger Baldwin praised Stalin’s totalitarianism in Liberty under the Soviets. Pushing “abolition of the properties class and sole control of those who produce wealth,” Baldwin instructed the ACLU to avoid appearing as “a socialist enterprise,” insisting that the organization “look like patriots” and “wave a lot of flags.”
● Cubans drive 1950s automobiles obtained after “years of paperwork, an official letter, [and] verification of buyer’s ideological purity”; 90 percent work for government; income ranges from $15 to $20-a-month. The Associated Press points to “sweeping poverty” that forces millions to unretire. Yet actor Danny Glover gushes over Castro. Filmmaker Michael Moore praises the abysmal socialistic health care. The Congressional Black Caucus goes ga-ga over Fidel. Democrat Representative Bobby Rush said meeting Castro was “almost like listening to an old friend.”
● Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez seizes the oil industry, strangles the food supply with an iron fist, and presides over rocketing inflation and increasing poverty. Actors Sean Penn and Danny Glover call Hugo “friend.”
To varying degrees, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Geithner, Bush, and others drive or have driven socialist/fascist policy in the face of the misery that such twisted approaches have vomited onto every society which they have infected. Liberals have a knack for embracing history’s worst mistakes, futily trying to capture something that they never had—their feel-good.
Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher of the University of New Mexico find that kids with safe, low-stress childhoods and appropriate parenting mature into conservatives while stressed-out kids who were detached from mom and dad resist growing up and become liberals. A Gallop poll reveals that less than 40 percent of Democrats feel mentally healthy versus nearly 60 percent of Republicans. Liberals are gloomier, less satisfied. They spend their lives seeking, blaming others for how they feel. Yet, as kids, liberals’ slightest achievements were extravagantly rewarded because the little liberals and their little achievements were “special.” Liberals grope for this defining feeling by spreading utopian rubbish to impress people with their wonderfulness.
America’s decades-long moral and cultural decline accelerated to a crash-dive in the last forty years. Liberals brought about the crash through programming. Public education now largely deemphasizes knowledge and logic while conditioning the nation’s young to reject achievement, liberty, and the accompanying free-market values. Indoctrination centers train the kids in the mushiness of moral relativism and moral equivalence, multiculturalism, “tolerance,” and a globalist worldview that devalues America. Liberal educators made possible last week’s Rasmussen poll showing that only half of Americans view capitalism more favorably than socialism. More revealing, Republicans favor capitalism by a huge eleven-to-one margin while only 37 to 39 percent of Democrats and the under-30 crowd prefer capitalism. A third of the under-30s actually want socialism. Results like this don’t just happen.
Liberalism thrives in Plano, Texas middle schools, where officials don’t want to consider cheating, late assignments, and homework in determining grades. According to The Dallas Morning News, school officials want “teachers to shift their focus from delivering grades to providing individual feedback” so students have “practice time to master [a] skill.” Don’t judge, pamper. Stroke, build self-esteem, and condition kids for a world where bosses cut slack for employees who can’t cut it. Don’t measure knowledge, coddle and hope that knowledge magically materializes.
Most parents reject the changes. But look no further than our arrogant, power-drunk Washington big spenders to see that liberals don’t give a rodent’s rear about what the people deem best. Liberals gotta do what liberals gotta do. Liberals know best.
Plano teachers will discourage cheating not with real consequences, but “different” consequences that don’t “pull down grades”—consequences that don’t penalize, and therefore achieve nothing. Such brilliance staggers the mind. Parents know that this will teach kids to devalue accountability. Even the kids realize that the mooshy system will “backfire on them because they didn’t do the work.” The kids know that they’ll “be tested at some point.” But not in the world liberals are creating. In that world, no one need pass tests or meet criteria. People need only three skills: Extend hands, whine, and queue up for bailouts.
In their book, One Nation under Therapy, philosophy scholar Christina Hoff Sommers and psychiatrist Sally Satel find, “Overprotected children are denied essential life lessons… when the adults in their lives take the view that what is most important is to keep them free from stress, free from self doubt, and happy in their conviction that they should be judged by no one’s standards but their own.” Researcher Janine Bempechat concludes that students who do poorly due to inadequate study grow embarrassed and study more. But when conditioned to believe ineptitude produced their failure, students put forth minimal subsequent effort. The evidence is striking. When teachers and schools baby the kids, apply special labels, and place students in “lower tracks,” Bempechat finds “lower achievement and lower self-assessments of ability.” And Obama’s new Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants our children to attend government-run schools six days-a-week, eleven months a year.
And mere truth will not dispel liberals’ naïveté. Liberals choose their dream world, cocooned in feel-good, shielded from reality by an emotional fog.
To restore our culture to sanity, Americans must leverage the outrage of people already alarmed by what Barack Obama and other dangerous dogmatists are doing. People who remain quiet prevent pent-up fury from having the transformational effect that such righteous anger can have. But the silent ones will not break silence without a grasp of the extent of the cultural decay, without appreciating the lock which “progressives” have on education, media, and government. Many people may value achievement, wholesome morals, and the free-market, and they may have the capacity to see straight but know not where to look. Too many Americans still turn to ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC. It is the job of clear thinkers to help such drifting souls define their outrage and enlist huge numbers of well-informed citizens in the battle for the future of America.
Losing the battle means surrendering our very way of life to emotionally crippled fairness mongers. How many more times will socialism and fascism wreak economic and societal devastation? Unless achievers and those who want to achieve rise up, the answer to this question will be, “At least once more.”
