First up, Dennis Prager, a pundit uniquely “attuned to the importance of words” poses an unanswerable conundrum to liberal smartypants:
Question to Left: If You Love America, Why “Transform” It? by Dennis Prager
If you met a man who said he would like to “transform” or “remake” his wife, would you conclude that he: a) thought very highly of his wife and loved her? Or b) held his wife in rather low esteem and therefore found living her rather difficult?
The answer is obvious: Those who wish to remake anything (or anyone) do not think highly of the person or thing they wish to remake.
Little is as revealing of Barack Obama’s and the Left’s view of America than their use of the words “transform” and “remake” when applied to what they most want to do to America.
How about if you met a man who was walking through a field with his wife, when suddenly a drunken Dick Cheney reared up from behind a bush and shot her in the face, blowing her ear clean off? And how about if, while the wife clutched her bleeding head and screamed, “Find my ear, put it on ice! Maybe they can reattach it at the hospital!” the husband said, “Honey, I loved you when you had two ears, and I love you just as much now that you’ve got one ear, and a cheek full of birdshot. I don’t want you changing on my account.” Then, suddenly, a drunken George W. Bush burst from the underbrush on an ATV and ran over the man’s wife, fracturing her leg. What would you conclude if the maimed woman shrieked, “call 911!” but her husband simply shook his head and smiled fondly and murmured, “Baby, I’m not going to try to ‘remake’ you into someone who’s got a pair of ears, a buckshot-free face, and two sound legs; you’re perfect in my eyes.” And as the wife’s pulse became thready and she slipped into shock, moaning, “Get an ambulance, you asshole — push the bone back inside the skin, set my leg, put it in a goddamn cast –!” he merely kissed her bloody forehead and softly crooned Billy Joel’s 1977 hit, “(I Love You) Just the Way You Are.”
Next up, fellow professional moralizer Michael Medved boldly advises Obama to Listen to Leviticus.
The core mistake of liberalism involves the confusion of charity and justice.
How do we know it’s a disastrous error to blur the distinction between these two timeless virtues?
Because the Bible specifically warns us against it.
“The Bible said it. I believe it. And that’s my column — thanks, I’m outta here!”
Allowing justice to be twisted by emotions of sympathy for the unfortunate is no less corrupting than bending toward the rich and powerful out of a sense of awe or admiration, or in hopes of personal advancement.
It’s just a lot less common.
In both cases, Jewish tradition suggests that the judge (or any other government official) has been, in effect, bribed.
As Dick Durbin complained recently of the Senate, the poor “frankly own the place.” When will our government institutions finally reject the influence of Big Pauper?
Does this mean that a system of progressive taxation constitutes the blurring of justice and charity that the Bible decries? The answer is almost certainly yes […] [I]t’s appropriate to recall the timeless and necessary Biblical separation between public justice and private compassion.
Separation of Church and State is a fundamental American ideal. Except when Leviticus has something convenient to say about homos or the flat tax.
A little further down the page we find the latest from Dr. Professor Mike Adams, Ph.D., who contributes his penetrating thoughts on Liberty and Tyranny.
For the past few years, I’ve been arguing that those who like to be called “liberals” should instead be called statists.
“So far, no one’s been listening to me. But the statists have had some success arguing that people who like to be called ‘criminology professors’ should instead be called ‘douchebags with an inexhaustible variety of novelty nozzles.’”
Edmund Burke was talking about these statists when he said “by (their) unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”
Later, by changing just one word, Don Henley turned Burke’s pensée into a .
The statist may well say that he rejects traditional religion because it provides an opiate to the masses. But there is more to his opposition to religion than his fear of a disincentive to revolt against ruling classes. He also fears that religion leads to judgment and intolerance – the kind that reminds him of his inferiority.
Dr. Mike also has a Ph.D in Inferiority Studies. However, since Democrats in Congress can’t even manage to cap usurious credit card interest rates, I kind of doubt that Arlen Specter, now that he’s a “statist,” is going to go on a Spanish Civil War-style pillage of the church.
As we bid a reluctant farewell to Townhall, let’s take a quick side trip over to RenewAmerica, where easily panicked electrical engineer Joseph Pecar believes that Barack Obama’s upcoming commencement address at Notre Dame “will indisputably increase the number of Abortions and therefore the number of victims of so-called ‘Botched Abortions’ — that is born-alive infants who either later die or who survive but are condemned to lifetimes of unimaginable suffering resulting from the pernicious side-effects of attempted Abortions that fail.”
He doesn’t come close to proving it, of course, but I was enchanted by Mr. Pecar nonetheless; despite larding his column with such grim phrases as “[Obama’s] pro-Abortion, pro-Infanticide, pro-Black Genocide quest” and “stabbing and crushing the head of a live baby,” the three exclamation points in the headline makes him sound less like an elderly crank and more like an overexcited tween texting on her Sidekick.
That Burke quotation is about revolutionaries, and Adams is either lying or an idiot if he claims otherwise. Adams appears to think that since Burke is identified as a founder of conservatism that he must have been on board with the modern movementarian synthesis of glibertarianism, social darwinism, and corporate stoogery. He was not. He identified the realm of the state to be “every thing that is truly and properly public, to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the public prosperity.” While being opposed to trade controls, he also explicitly endorsed the government managing “the corporations that owe their existence to its fiat.” This quote is on Wikipedia. There is no excuse for Adams being so blatantly incorrect about this. Movement conservatives like Adams fallaciously equate statism with totalitarianism and then label their opponents as “statists.” In the glibby sense of “statism” (i.e., thinking that government should serve as something more than hired goons to protect capitalists from the exploited), Burke was a statist.
Left by Djur on May 6th, 2009