If you believe, as I do, that we are living in surreal times, then you only need to consider that the reason why is because we are dealing with a surreal political opponent. The conservative opponent, the progressive, is made up of many moving parts, none of which have any moral grounding, feeling of shame, or basis in principle. To be a progressive, you must consider personal intent as the only measure of political success, you must have the ability to lie to yourself and your audience with no compunction whatsoever and with zero impunity, you must never hold a fellow progressive accountable, and you must subscribe to consensus through conformity. There is very little room for dissenting opinion in progressive circles and those who do stray from the consensus are shamed and humiliated and called “uncle Tom’s” or “extremists”. It’s quite easy to be a progressive actually and that’s the appeal of the movement. It doesn’t require any real critical thinking as the “group think” phenomena of the movement will form your opinion for you, It doesn’t require any personal accountability because there is always someone else to blame for your actions whether that be “old white Christian men”, or “unseemly corporate profits” otherwise known as social and economic justice, and it doesn’t require any admission of fact because results simply do not matter. If you had the right “intention”, well then the results of those intentions are not of material concern – you simply lie to yourself and those in front of you and move forward with nary a concern. This phenomena has been on full display throughout the entire Presidency of Barack Obama (if you like your President, you can keep him), and is seen very often in the actions of Harry Reid (he who refuses to bring any House GOP legislation up for debate yet blames the GOP for obstructionism), Nancy Pelosi (we must pass it to find out what’s in it), Joe Biden (they’re going to put y’all back in chains), and Hillary Clinton (at this point what difference does it make). They are shameless, reckless, and lie as easy as they breathe.
Consider the progressive media echo chamber, MSNBC, and this excellent article which succinctly points out the alternate reality progressives live in. MSNBC has taken the art of political spin and demonization to new level, and shamelessly supports a political party in a manner that rivals only that of possibly the North Korea News Agency, or Pravda. And honestly, I have seen more objective reporting from Pravda.
It is impossible to have a coherent debate with any progressive simply because we are grounded in reality and they are not. We hold ourselves accountable, they do not. We have respect for the truth, they do not, and we subscribe to independent critical thinking through the issues, and of course they do not. In fact, the responses from progressives have become so predictable that any debate is simply an exercise in redundancy. To defeat this destructive monolithic movement will not be easy as their masses are wide and their allegiance’s are strong, but it must be defeated. Debate and compromise are pointless.
Blogs For Victory 
and it doesn’t require any admission of fact because results simply do not matter. If you had the right “intention”, well then the results of those intentions are not of material concern
And the reason they’re able to get away with this is because they control academia, and, by default, the recording of history, which allows them do-over after do-over and do-over. And, if by chance, someone in the media does reference actual historical failures of progressivism, they fall back on the tired, worn out mantra, “this time it will be different”.
Case in point. Since January 2007 when Pelosi and Reid took over Congress, and actually since 2004 when Kerry ran against Bush, the mantra of the Progressive Democrat has been “protecting the middle class” and “poor and unprivileged”, against the evils of capitalism and corporatism. Well –
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline,
The primary reason for this decline is not capitalism, nor corporatism – it is the heavy hand of an elite group of self appointed arbiters of economic justice whose attempts to regulate an economy in favor of core constituencies backfire with disastrous results. Of course the real truth behind all of this quite honestly is that their flowery rhetoric and intentions of economic justice are not entirely sincere, and the continued struggle of those classes of constituencies simply mean more speeches, more elections and more power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/business/the-typical-household-now-worth-a-third-less.html?_r=0
Nothing better illustrates the “do over” ability of the left than the case of Joe McCarthy – leaving aside his personal failings, the plain fact of the matter is that he wasn’t out there shouting “I have in my hand a list of 57 card-carrying communists in the State Department” (the legend of him having said different numbers at different times was the result of their being two separate lists – created by two separate bodies of investigators, none of whom were Joe McCarthy – which had different numbers of people and while a lot of names were the same, some were different); he never wanted to reveal the names of those accused until their cases had been investigated (Senate Democrats forced him to release the names); he wasn’t on a witch hunt but merely wanted to ensure that the United States government wasn’t riddled with people who owed their primary loyalty to Stalin’s USSR; and, of course, he was right – modern evidence is all on the table now which clearly shows the deep and wide spread penetration of the United States government by active and passive agents of the USSR. In fact, the full truth now known shows that the scale of the penetration was larger than the worst nightmares of Joe McCarthy. And yet here in 2014, even we on the right – when we want to insult someone – will call their actions “McCarthyism”…McCarthy told the truth and had the nations highest interest at heart, his critics told lies and had partisan, political advantage at the core of their being…but “McCarthyism” is a pejorative.
The left got a do-over: first in slandering McCarthy and the basic anti-communist cause then in assuring that in the public memory being like McCarthy is forever a bad thing. Some day I’d like to see the Senate, in formal vote, rescind the censure of McCarthy – that would at least start the ball rolling on repairing the gross injustice done to him. But, meanwhile, we just roll along in the false narrative of the left…and this is just one of a thousand examples.
Mark, you have hit on something that has bugged me for a long time now, since I learned the truth about McCarthy. Even Republicans use the term “McCarthyism” as a pejorative.
We have, as a political movement, been feckless and helpless in the face of the brilliant onslaught of Leftist propaganda tactics. One of the most effective, touched on here not long ago in a thread post by Cluster on redundancy, has been the redrafting of terms into pejoratives.
“McCarthyism” is one. “Swiftboating” is another. The Left had quite a bit of success in turning a term that really means bringing out a sordid and shameful history to reveal a person’s weakness and cowardice into what is accepted by its sheeple as a term meaning an attempt to smear someone.
McCarthy was right. The sad thing is, if he were here today, he would be right, too, but today no one cares. Today we KNOW of the infiltrators at the highest levels of government, and we simply look the other way. A homosexual pedophile who supports NAMBLA and who counseled a troubled young gay boy to have a sexual relationship with a much older man named as one of the president’s top “advisers” and involved in education? Ho hum. Communists? Marxists? Yawn. At least half of the American public has been hypnotized into thinking there is nothing wrong with any of this. It’s just “diversity”—now where did I put my SNAP card?
Cluster,
Obama and his pals could have a dozen do-overs and they still wouldn’t be able to improve on their dismal economic record. Economic justice isn’t about prosperity — it’s about equality, and, unfortunately, equality in the eyes of Progressives is always about the lowest common denominator.
Obama gets a do over every day. Hell the media sees to that.
Economic justice is the freedom to pursue economic prosperity and to be able to benefit when successful by being able to keep what is earned.
There is not one single thing stopping any Lefty from engaging, on a personal level, in working toward “economic justice”. He can invite homeless to live with him. He can sell his nice car and buy cheaper cars for those needing transportation. He can simply do what so many millions of Christians do, and tithe—-that is, set aside at least 10% of his income—-and distribute this to those he deems worthy or in need. He could organize like-minded people to join together to put their own money and resources into outreach programs.
But we see, as we look at the list of what Lefties COULD do, the fact that this would all involve them using THEIR money and THEIR resources. To them, “economic justice” means they keep what they have, and just take what others have to spread around. It is an odd and twisted sense of righteousness that depends on feeling good about confiscating the property of others to redistribute, but then that is the basis of Leftist “morality”.
This hypocrisy was on full display just the other day as I watched Kirsten Powers lecture on the current border problem. She was indignant at conservatives for wanting to send the children back, seal the border, and put a stop to this crisis. Her position was that these are “children” in need, fleeing poverty and violence and really, who are we as a people that won’t open their hearts to children. Well Kirsten, how about if you lead by example, and open that big fat checkbook of yours and make a large, very large donation to the churches and communities in the affected areas who are dealing with the problem first hand. Better yet, how about if you take a month hiatus and actually go to the border and help set up shelter, and help provide food and clothing and actually start to care for the children you profess so much concern about. It might help your case Kirsten if you lead by example rather than sitting in the comfy confines of a NY studio.
Even more egregious is the fact that there are American children here in Chicago, Detroit, LA, etc. who are also living in poverty and violent conditions, yet I haven’t seen one constructive effort on behalf of Ms. Powers to alleviate their situation.
It would help the progressive cause if in fact progressive led by example – but as usual, they always seem best suited to lead from behind.
Economic justice is the freedom to pursue economic prosperity
Actually, it’s not — at least not in the way that the Left frames it. In Left-speak, economic justice is more about leveling the economic playing field via redistribution and regulation whereas economic freedom is about augmenting policies that provide the most opportunity to the largest number of people.
This hypocrisy was on full display just the other day as I watched Kirsten Powers lecture on the current border problem.
Kirsten Powers is somewhat of an enigma on the opinion/talk circuit — sort of a female Bill O’Reilly only not nearly as intelligent. Watch the way she couches her words so as not to offend anyone. She tries to come across as knowledgeable and intelligent, but I don’t think she’s either, and she ends virtually every comment with this quirky little twitch of her head and a quizzical look on her face that seems to ask, “did I do OK?” I’ve never quite understood how she’s gotten as far as she has.
While these fretful, distressed, brow-furrowing and judgmental Lefties are lecturing us on what WE should do about the problem of the children flooding the border, they do so while steadfastly ignoring the reasons these children are there in the first place.
We can look at what the President of Honduras said about the problem: “……..Honduran President, Juan Orlando Hernández, offered his opinion on what caused the surge – the Obama Administration’s lax immigration enforcement policies.
In an interview with Time Magazine on Wednesday, Hernández said, “The lack of clarity of U.S. immigration policy [has lured migrants to the United States illegally].”
Hernández called on the United States to clarify its immigration policies.
“So my call to the United States is that it defines these rules with clarity,” he said.”
(https://www.numbersusa.com/news/honduran-president-says-obama-administrations-policies-caused-border-surge)
But why listen to someone as out of touch as the president of one of the nations with thousands of children sent to this country? Doesn’t it make ever so much more sense to listen to the Lefty talking heads as they piously pronounce judgment on those who think the problem is really a lot more complex than the presence of thousands of children on the border?
But wait——I am talking about the impossible here. That is, about the possibility of a Lefty looking beyond the superficial to see what the underlying problems really are. It’s just that real analysis is so demanding, so annoying, so counter to the emotion-driven needs of the Left pundits.
Why are these children here?
There is the obvious issue of the implicit invitation of the President to send them here—–and the assumption that once they are established here, the families can follow, because after all this pseudo-political movement is always bleating about reuniting families, blah blah blah blah blah.
And there is the ugly reality of life in these countries, life which used to be difficult because of poverty due mostly to corruption in their governments and now even more miserable due to the violent drug cartels which flourish due in great part to corruption in their governments.
We could, if we had anything like clarity of thought in the higher levels of our own corrupt government, see the escalation of violence and all that accompanies it as a threat to our own national security, and consult with the heads of state in these countries to offer our support and aid in wiping out these threats, which are after all not just threats to those disposable brown-skinned people (think Fast and Furious) but to us as well.
But….but…..but…..if we do anything to help those people establish stability in their own countries, to create environments in which they can lead comfortable lives, the Left would be cutting off their hoped-for millions upon millions of Democrat votes.
In other words, to the Left these are not real people who are suffering, they are merely pawns in the How Much Power Can We Grab At Any Cost game of the Left. Has Obama sat down in a summit with the presidents of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to discuss how their powerful and concerned neighbor, the United States, can use its might to help them eliminate the plague of drug cartels in their nations? If so, I haven’t heard anything about it. But why should he?
If we look at the problems of violence and chaos in these countries, we can see them as we might see a forest fire, herding people toward a place they see as one of safety—–the United States. If we let them continue to do this, and at the same time open the borders, the Left can pretty much guarantee themselves lots and lots of votes to allow them to stay in power. So what if villages are destroyed, families mowed down, mass graves filled, children taken from their families and forced to become soldiers in terrorist groups before they even reach puberty, and whole populations live in abject fear and misery? The Left has the Big Picture in mind—–hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing this apocalypse, to the welcoming borders of a nation desperate for their votes.
Why are these children here?
Well in my opinion, it’s because they have pretty shitty parents at home, and a society full of men who are selfish, cowardly, and indifferent to the plight of their women and children. These children did not “decide” to make a long, harrowing journey to an unfamiliar country. This was their parents decision. Parents who have abdicated their responsibility to their children and their country.
I despise men like this. Men need to step up and father their children here and abroad, and take responsibility for their actions. If you are not prepared to raise a child then do the world a favor, and don’t have any children. Is that too difficult?
Spook, you are right. I gave the real definition of economic justice, and later I pointed out the Leftist take on the phrase: ” To them, “economic justice” means they keep what they have, and just take what others have to spread around. It is an odd and twisted sense of righteousness that depends on feeling good about confiscating the property of others to redistribute….”
Here is another take on the “border crisis”, by Andrew McCarthy. (emphasis mine)
“It is a grave error to view the swarming of illegal aliens across our southern border as anything other than a challenge to our sovereignty — a challenge abetted, rather than repulsed, by a president who vows to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” The challenge brings into sharp relief a question I’ve repeatedly pressed (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here): If the states cannot or will not defend themselves, are they still, in any real sense, sovereign?
As expected, the president’s mainstream-media allies portray Obama as a man struggling to manage a crisis beyond his control, a crisis their thin and exhausted playbook instructs them to blame on George W. Bush. Nonsense.
In Faithless Execution, I detail Obama’s immigration lawlessness — at least the very extensive record compiled as of mid-spring 2014, when I had to stop writing in order to make an early June publication date. If you’re keeping track, mid-spring was before the ramping up of the ongoing invasion, which already involves close to 300,000 illegal aliens (less than 20 percent of whom are, according to the New York Times, “unaccompanied minors”). It was, however, months after what we now know was the Obama “Homeland Security” Department’s solicitation of escort services to help handle an anticipated arrival of 65,000 illegal-alien minors.
As one would expect, the usual Obama apologists claim that the administration was not conspiring in the invasion. Rather, it was preparing for a humanitarian crisis it had heard alarms about but was somehow powerless to avert. On its face, this is laughable: The executive branch has many ways of discouraging and stopping attempts by foreigners — whether as an armed force or in overwhelming numbers — to enter our country. More significantly, the facts here point unmistakably to willful administration collusion.
The January 2014 solicitation published by DHS’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement foretells (a) the arrival of 65,000 “unaccompanied alien children,” and, tellingly, (b) the administration’s intention to transfer them to “Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States.” Weasel Zippers points out the glaring fact, largely ignored by the press, that by planning to dispatch the new arrivals to ORR, the administration implicitly presumed that they should be deemed refugees, not excludable or deportable illegal aliens.
The mission of the ORR is to settle “new populations” within the United States, not to detain them pending expulsion. Clearly, the plan was — is — to seed thousands of illegal aliens in cities and towns throughout the country. That is perfectly consistent with other aspects of the administration’s radical agenda, such as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” Obama’s plan to have the executive branch engineer the racial and ethnic composition of American neighborhoods.
The president has spent nearly six years giving effective legal immunity to millions of illegal aliens already here. His administration, meanwhile, hooks them on the government gravy train and fights state efforts to detain them, deny social services to them, and prevent them from fraudulently voting. Under those circumstances, the rolling out of a federal red carpet for teeming masses of illegal aliens must be understood as intentional.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383159/obama-caused-border-disaster-andrew-c-mccarthy
We could, if we had anything like clarity of thought in the higher levels of our own corrupt government, see the escalation of violence and all that accompanies it as a threat to our own national security,
Amazona, I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that the violence that will surely accompany this massive influx of illegals is also part of Obama’s plan. Imagine if, say, just 1% of the 300,000 illegals since April are MS-13 types. It actually ties in with the previous post “The Police Problem” in that the increased level of violence will necessitate yet more military weaponry and hardware being provided to state, county and municipal law enforcement.
Cluster, I suggest you learn a little more about the reality of life in a third world country dominated by terrorists and drug cartels. I had a friend who fled a little mountain village in the Andes rather than join up with Sendero Luminoso—it was join or die so his family sent him to live with an aunt in Lima. Bad parents? Hardly.
I met him through another friend, a former Special Forces guy who did a lot of security work for US embassies in South America, and his stories would chill your blood. Good decent loving families are routinely torn apart, if not just butchered, by terrorist groups. They come into the villages and pick out the boys, 9-13, and tell them they will fight or they will watch their mothers and sisters raped and their fathers tortured before the whole family is killed. (The same thing happens in Africa.) Boys are absorbed into terrorist groups or cartels and become killers before they reach puberty. Girls are raped. No one is safe. It was bad enough when it was just the Leftist terrorist groups, but now it is also the drug cartels.
When I was in El Salvador a few years ago I had a free afternoon and asked the hotel clerk to call me a taxi so I could do some shopping. Instead, he called a private car service and the driver refused to let me out of his sight—–and it is a lot worse now that it was then. I was there for an equestrian event and was invited to some private homes, and will never forget being in a car in the midst of several armored vehicles, with armed guards in front and behind us, just to go to a restaurant. One of my new friends said it was about the second time in ten years he had gone to a restaurant in his own country, because it was simply not safe. The venue for the event was surrounded by armed guards—-not just guys with guns under their jackets but men with machine guns, spaced about 50 feet apart, circling the entire area.
As a guest at a coffee plantation hosted by another man from El Salvador, I went to the car to get a new battery for my video camera and was stopped by a man with a machine gun slung over his shoulder, who watched me remove the old battery, insert a new one, test the camera to assure it was a working video camera and not a bomb, and then escorted me back to the arena. The more affluent can afford such security measures—-most cannot, so they have to live in constant fear of death, and of seeing their children destroyed in one way or another.
Sending your beloved children to a place where they will be safe and cared for, even though it means being separated from them, is a very good definition of love and responsibility. They think the United States is such a place because they have been told it is, they have been told of “permisos” which allow it, and they have been told of the refugee centers established for this very purpose. They are callously being used, and their children are being used, to advance a political agenda.
By your standards, the parents who sent their children to live in the country, mostly with strangers, to get them away from the bombs of the London Blitz were “shitty parents”.
I don’t need a lessen in anything. If good people allow their government to be corrupt and allow drug cartels to run the show, then they get country they deserve. They knew this before they had kids, it’s not a new phenomena or sudden act of war. That’s just the brutal truth. It’s not that I am completely unsympathetic to their plight, but it’s been going on a long time.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
There’s not enough good men, and not enough dead drug cartel members.
Your story is exactly the reason why I see the problem as I do. Those kids that are forced into the cartels become even more thuggish and brutal in part because I am sure they feel abandoned by their fathers and parents. This dynamic only serves to perpetuate an expanding and increasingly violent and immoral cartel with virtually no limits on what they are capable of doing. So where does it stop? The answer is not to pay some unknown coyote some money to take your kids thousands of miles away. First of all, I could never do that to my children, and I can almost guarantee you that if those kids were asked – 90% of them will tell you that they want to go back home with their parents.
The answer is to fight cartel brutality with more severe brutality. Cartel members who prey on children do not have a right live. They do not deserve to be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned. They only deserve to be put in the ground. Absolute zero tolerance, and unless and until good men and women stop playing the victim, and rise up and summon the courage to eradicate evil from this world, well then, we get the world we deserve.
When the heavily guarded chief of police in a major city like Mexico City can be killed by a drug cartel, it’s hard to see how a simple, uneducated, poor, unarmed coffee bean picker can stand up to one. The children do not become more thuggish because they feel “abandoned”—they know full well that if they had not become part of these gangs they would have had to watch their families brutalized and murdered in front of them and then either been killed themselves or forced to join anyway. This is not some after-school special in which Jose becomes bitter because Mama and Papa didn’t love him enough. This is a harsh bitter ugly reality in which Jose is brutalized, and forced into unspeakable acts from a very early and impressionable age until his very humanity is undermined.
I used the example of British parents sending their children away during the Blitz for a reason. When the world is out of control and your family is in danger, you do whatever you have to do to protect them. You put them in the last lifeboat, you send them away, you do what you can. When you have the daily violence and specter of death, or worse, on one hand and the image of a vast and rich-beyond-imagination country waiting with open arms on the other, when you are led to believe that if you send your children to this wonderful place they will be safe and cared for and then you can join them there, this is not a hard choice—-no future at all, or the possibility of a future in which everything you want or need is given to you, and in which for the immediate future your children are out of danger. This is not a situation in which a reckless sperm donor is spreading his seed around, impregnating women as a lark and then ignoring his responsibility as a father. This is a situation in which people have tried to live decent lives, as their parents and grandparents did, working hard and owning little but having families they love, only to find themselves caught up in the fairly recent explosion of drug-related violence.
Perhaps someone ought to go to their villages and show them videos of action heroes like Bob Lee Swagger, to show them how a handful of peasants armed only with canvas bags of coffee beans can take out large camps of heavily armed drug dealers. At the same time they could be lectured on how, if they truly love their children, they will want them close by so they can all die together. After the rapes and torture, that is.
This is a problem that can only be solved from the top down, not from the bottom up. This is a problem that requires action from forces stronger than those holding the countries hostage. That is, this is the problem in those countries, if that is what we are talking about.
But we started off talking about the problem in THIS country, which is that our President and his cronies have moved to open our borders to these children in the name of humanitarianism, allowing at the same time many more illegals in who are not children at all.
THIS is what we should be worrying about, not judging the motives or parenting skills of desperate people in other countries. And we need to remember that only about 20% of the illegals flooding in under this “permisos” program ARE children.
THEIR problem, is OUR problem. And this isn’t a recent explosion of drug violence. This problem has been in the makings now for two or three decades. Ever hear of the Arellanos Brothers? They ruled northern Mexico during the 90’s and were absolutely ruthless and brutal. Who took them out? The police? The federales? Nope. Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel took them out. A cartel that is even more brutal. And these are just cartels in northern Mexico, so to say that this problem is recent, is to not be honest about the issue.
If good people in those areas continue to abandon the fight and allow their countries to descend into cartel freak zones, then we will soon have much, much bigger problems. If good people are not prepared to make the sacrifice to confront and kill evil, then again we get what we deserve. We can not simply rely on the good men and women of the military to make that effort and sacrifice. Lord knows that the Mexican authorities are not willing to, or at least not capable of doing it. This is really beyond a “top down” approach, and it’s to the point that it will take all of us. Relying on “the top down approach” is just an excuse for average people to do nothing. I live in a drug corridor and am friends with some border patrol agents and law enforcement and have heard many stories of shoot outs and other horrible things. Just recently, I was told of an SUV that was found in the desert with 5 burnt bodies inside – all were kids and by kids I mean early 20’s. I can promise you this – I would hunt down anyone that hurt my child without any regard to my safety or life. I also live in an area where these illegals are being brought to, and read over the weekend about how some of these “children” are being recruited by gangs. And you’re right – about 20% are young children, which should make all of us even more worried.
We can not allow their problem to become ours, and maybe it is past time that we do start judging their leaders ability to run their countries, and their lack of courage to confront this cancer which is quickly spreading to ours. The leader of Honduras recently stated that America lacks clarity, and that is part of the problem. I agree with him. We do lack moral clarity, and we lack the courage to confront those who perpetuate evil.
BTW, I would favor drone strikes, armed raids, and any effort possible to eradicate these drug vermin without any concern for trials or prisons.
If it sounds like I am frustrated with this problem then it is because I am, and this issue dove tails into the Police Issue thread we had a little while back. Gang and cartel members do not fear the police or prison. In fact they know that the Police’s hands are tied, and prison is a badge of honor. They have no fear of the consequences of the life they lead, and that is the fault of society.
So you watch German youtube. So? What are we supposed to get from this? //Moderator
If it sounds like I am frustrated with this problem then it is because I am, and this issue dove tails into the Police Issue thread we had a little while back.
Cluster, you live much closer to the problem than I do, so I’d like your honest opinion. What confidence, if any, do you have that major metro areas like, say, Phoenix, aren’t going to continue to devolve into societies like that depicted in the original Robo Cop movies (I haven’t seen the remake)?
There are some neighborhoods of Phoenix that are already there. I think we are still far away from that scenario on the whole however, and Phoenix is actually a very clean, well planned out city. I have noticed more homeless people downtown though over the last few years.