They are everywhere – a few examples:

The Obama administration is refusing to discuss reports that emerged early Thursday claiming that the White House is considering imposing sanctions on Israel for continuing construction on Jewish homes in Jerusalem.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf dodged several questions on Thursday when confronted with reports that the administration had held secret internal meetings to discuss taking action against Israel for its ongoing building in East Jerusalem…

And then this:

Rolling Stone has gotten a lot of publicity recently with a sensational article about a rape in 2012 at the University of Virginia, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and featuring some harrowing and disturbing details. The victim was identified only as “Jackie.”

Almost as soon as the story was published, doubts arose about its veracity, or at least about the journalistic standards of its author, who did not manage to interview the alleged perpetrators even though it would seem there were ways to have contacted them. Even worse, Erdely hasn’t been forthcoming about the extent of her efforts to find them, and did not include any mention of any of her efforts or failures in the article.

I’ve read many articles pro and con, including of course the original Rolling Stone piece in question (warning: it’s long), and I’ve got my own opinion, which is that not only did Erdely demonstrate abysmal journalistic standards, but that the story itself is quite possibly a fabrication by the alleged victim…

And then, this:

…When asked about Mubarak’s exoneration, State Department Spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki offered a rambling non-answer which did not fool the diplomatic press corps one bit. When Associated Press reporter Matt Lee called Psaki out for essentially saying “nothing,” Psaki gave it another try.

“Generally, we continue to believe that upholding impartial standards of accountability will advance the political consensus on which Egypt’s long-term stability and economic growth depends,” she said. “I don’t have any more specifics on this.”…

And,finally, this:

But she also told the audience that the world still has a long way to go in terms women’s participation.

Of the hundreds of peace treaties signed since the early 1990s, between or within nations, she said fewer than 10 percent had any female negotiators and fewer than 3 percent had women as signatories.

“Is it any wonder that many of these agreements fail between [sic] a few years?” Clinton asked.

So, we’ll lift sanctions on Iran even though, as just one for-instance, they hang people for being gay, but we’ll mull placing sanctions on Israel because they’ll build a house. Meanwhile, over in race-and-gender-war-land, we’ll write an article full of details but won’t include any proof the event in question happened. Over at State we’ll mouth some meaningless words and at the end of the verbal spew which contained nothing specific, we’ll say we don’t have any further specifics (in defense of the State Department flack, she was later caught on a hot mike admitting that her statement was worthless). And to top it all off, we’ve got the putative next President of the United States asserting that only if a few more women had signed the treaties, wars and calamities would have been prevented.

Why, when Hillary made her absurd statement, did the audience not immediately laugh in scorn, walk out and announce their support for Elizabeth Warren in 2016? When the article for the Rolling Stone went up to the editors, why didn’t even one of them ask, “you got any facts to back this up?”. The reason for those two bits of stupidity – and all other liberal stupidity we see these says – is that they didn’t dare. You see, to hold Hillary in utter contempt for her stupid statement is forbidden to liberals – such an act would do the worst thing possible: confirm that the liberal narrative is wrong. Similarly, when the Rolling Stone story hit the editor’s desk, there was no chance such a question would be asked: merely to ask such a question would indicate a disbelief in liberal ideology about what goes on at elite universities vis a vis women.

If you ever thought that at some point liberals, as such, could become sensible then just give that thought up – the only way they can is by switching all the way over to conservative. To be a liberal in 2014 requires belief in not just a series of lies, but in a series of very stupid lies – and my guess is that the enforcers of thought on the left want it this way: the more absurd beliefs they can enforce, the more firm their control – after all, to switch from being liberal in 2014 not only requires you to change your beliefs, but to admit you believed things which anyone with an IQ of 80 could see were stupid lies. Just do the mental exercise yourself for a few minutes and think of all the admissions of being a sucker a liberal would have to make by switching to conservatism…and how much fear of humiliation that carries along with it. Better for most to just brazen it out: “Ok, so I believe a lot of stupid stuff: but I can’t admit it or I’ll have to admit I was a fool so I’ll just keep going! Hey, conservatives, if women signed treaties there would be less war!”.

To me, its all rather sad – and yet another reason to work hard to get these people away from the levers of power. Who knows what the opinion enforcers of the left will force their minions to believe next…

UPDATE: Huge amount of comment today around the interwebs regarding the Rolling Stone article…a bunch of “how could this have happened”. Seriously? People gotta ask how an MSM outfit could have allowed a falsehood to get published? Look, my friends, when it comes to reports which advance the liberal agenda – especially in areas of race, gender and class – assume every one of them is a lie…if not an outright fabrication, then at the least a severe twisting of the facts to fit the liberal narrative. Dishonesty in liberalism isn’t a bug, its a feature.

But, you say that you know honest liberals? Sure. Bet you do. But where the rubber hits the road, that won’t matter all that much. Think about it – you’re at the editorial meeting and the UVA story comes up for review. To question the story – which supports the liberal narrative – would be highly dangerous. Even if you proved to all and sundry that it shouldn’t be run, you’ll anger the more hard core leftists whom you work with – and who might have charge of your employment prospects. Meanwhile, if you let it all slide, 90%+ of the time no one is ever seriously called out for falsehoods. Much easier to go along to get along, even if you want to be honest…the hard core lefists didn’t care, don’t care and never will care if the UVA story is true: what matters to them is that it must be true because that is what leftism demands; even if the particular details of this story are false – even if you can never find an actual, demonstrable example of that sort of thing going on (and, remember, the contention of the story is that the horrific action described is endemic to the culture of UVA…that the student body of that school knowingly and callously does this horrible thing as if they believed it to be a good thing) – the overall story is true: because those who in any way adhere to any institution not on the side of the left are just like that in the view of the left…rat bastards who kill, steal, pollute and oppress just for the sheer fun of being evil. Anything which attacks non-left institutions is thus good and true, even if false in actual fact.

Matt McCaffrey over at MisesEconomicBlog makes note of a common trait among our intellectuals:

…“For [a revolutionary] atmosphere to develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.” Enter the intellectuals.

The intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.

In other words, intellectuals are often out of place in entrepreneurial societies. The growth of the intellectual class is not a response to consumer demand, but to the expansion of higher education. Passing through the higher education system does not necessarily confer valuable skills, but it often does convince graduates that work in the market is beneath them…

That is all very true, but I’d add something else to it: our intellectuals are, for the very largest part, amazingly un-intellectual. For people who pride themselves on an alleged ability to think, they don’t think about much – and this is mostly because they don’t know very much. Marx wrote a book about what the laboring class wants when he had never done a lick of laboring work in his life. Lenin wrote a book about the development of capitalism in Russia when he had never entered the marketplace, at all.  What on earth could such men think they were writing about?  It’d be like me trying to write an in depth, philosophical work about surgery. I might have some interesting comments to make on the subject, but to take me for an expert in it, no matter how much I claim to have thought about it, would be absurd. Unless you get out there and see how its done, you’ll never really know.

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Charles Blow, who writes for the New York Times, pounds out the stupid regarding Paul Ryan’s recent comments about poverty in the inner city:

…But instead of cushioning his comments, Ryan shot back, “There was nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all — it had nothing to do with race.”

That would have been more believable if Ryan hadn’t prefaced his original comments by citing Charles Murray, who has essentially argued that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and whom the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a “white nationalist.” (The center’s definition: “White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites.”)…

Because Blow expects (correctly) that those who provide his paycheck at the Times as well as most of those who bother to read the Times on a regular basis are even bigger idiots than he is, Blow just goes off and says that Ryan – the racist – is proved to be a racist because he, Ryan, quotes a well known racist (Charles Murray).  Blow won’t tell you precisely why Murray is a racist – expecting, in the end, that most of his readers are too lazy and/or stupid to just look Murray up and see who he is (or, alternately, they are simply afraid – fearful that if they look up Murray they’ll find that maybe a liberal is lying and that can lead to all sorts of horrors).  Murray, of course, is tagged by drooling mouth-breathers (ie, liberals) as a racist because 20 years ago he wrote a book (The Bell Curve) which discussed quite a lot of things, but also noted – in passing, really – that differences in intelligence might partially be determined by genetics.  This was deemed racist by liberal dimwits because the only reason any ethnic group can possibly have a different outcome overall from American whites is because American whites are racist (it was also, at this time, forbidden for anyone to ever point out that Japanese and Chinese Americans appear smarter and more successful – on average – than the racist white Americans who work day in and day out to keep all non-white people down).  And, so, Murray is a racist, forever.  Anyone who quote Murray is also a racist – ergo, Ryan is a racist. Its proved, you see?  Heck, its in the New York Times, right?  What more do you want?

Now that Ryan is a racist, forever, it is time to make certain that no one pays the least attention to what Ryan says (boiled down – in some areas of the country, the culture is pretty much against hard work and, so, a lot of people don’t work).  You see, we can’t risk having an idiot start to think.  That starts happening and the Times will be hurt, Blow will be out of a job and Democrats will be defeated at election time.  So, we have to get some stupid in here which sounds like it means something.  On we go:

…His research, he noted, indicates that “40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period” and “54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty.” Rank concluded, “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”…

Which has, of course, precisely nothing to do with what Ryan said. But your basic liberal, reading the Times, will nod his or her head like the brainless twits they are and never go further.  Ryan is a racist and other people besides inner-city people are poor, so can we just get back to fighting racism so that black people can get ahead?  That, seriously, is how liberals view this.  The fact that plenty of Americans experience poverty is immaterial to what Ryan was saying.  I’m pretty sure that out of every 100 people who read this, 50 will be able to remember a time they lived in poverty (full disclosure: when I was a child, my father had to go on food stamps for a while.  Additionally, there have been times in my life when I didn’t have $20 to my name).  But that doesn’t matter – what matters is that in certain areas of the country, poverty is endemic and goes on for generation after generation.  This is especially true in inner cities where the culture is against work (against education, too – we all know the term “acting white” to describe a certain subset of African-Americans who view being educated and working hard as being “white” and thus some sort of race-traitor).

Blow’s work is now done.  Liberals are now free to ignore Ryan (or, better, hate him and do Twitter flame wars claiming he’s a racist).  The idiocy of liberalism can continue undisturbed.  Its all so nuanced and hard to define.  All we need is more money from government on “poverty programs”.  We don’t need to think.  We don’t need to consider that we’ve had the poverty programs for decades and yet poverty still exists. And just what are “results”, anyways?  Are we sure that a demand for positive results is not a racial code word?  We don’t need to look at pesky things like third and fourth generation poverty among inner-city people…and we’d best not contrast that with non-white immigrants who arrived 20 years ago but are now middle or upper class.  All is well.  Remain calm – and keep reading the Times!

Idiots, all of them.  Preventing thought, preventing reform, preventing people from rising out of poverty.  But, hey, why should Blow worry?  He’s got the sweet gig at the Times…and most of his readers are well off, too…