Saturday, August 08, 2009
Re: Liberal whining
Phillip Klein makes some very good points ...
I have a rule of thumb in politics that if one side is doing a lot of whining, it probably means they're losing. This was true, for example, when liberals were on an electoral losing streak and carped that Republicans were simply meaner people and better at Rovian/swift boat tactics; or when conservatives blamed the media for the fate of the McCain-Palin ticket. Liberals complained about special interests destroying health care legislation in 1993/94, while conservatives were forced to lament the dishonest demagoguery being used by the left to turn the public against Social Security reform in 2005. As I wrote yesterday, Democratic lawmakers have been at the receiving end of a public backlash against their health care proposals, and now they've been working with their liberal allies to discredit protesters by painting them as tools of insurers and the Republican Party. Today, a blogger for liberal activist group Campaign for America's Future equated opponents of liberal health care policies with Holocaust deniers, and the Democratic National Committee jumped into the fray today with a statement claiming that, "The Republicans and their allied groups - desperate after losing two consecutive elections and every major policy fight on Capitol Hill - are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right wing extremists funded by K Street Lobbyists to disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of health care in America taking place in Congressional Districts across the country."
This is silly. We can argue about how many of the anti-government health care protesters were encouraged to attend townhall meetings by larger groups and how many decided to organize at the local level. But either way, it doesn't really matter, because the whole reason activist groups exist is to encourage citizens who agree with them to get more involved. This is no different from what unions, liberal activist groups, the DNC, or Obama's own Organizing for America are trying to do.
Read the rest here.
My only beef with Mr. Klein is his description of liberals as "whiners." That's like saying bees are "buzzers," or strippers are "mooners," or gang members are "bangers." Liberals, for the most part, are ignorant souls who couldn't explain the difference between a marginal tax rate and a tub of margarine if their life depended on it. I can think of many, many other ways to define a modern liberal, but I really don't want to spend 48 consecutive hours doing such.
I have a rule of thumb in politics that if one side is doing a lot of whining, it probably means they're losing. This was true, for example, when liberals were on an electoral losing streak and carped that Republicans were simply meaner people and better at Rovian/swift boat tactics; or when conservatives blamed the media for the fate of the McCain-Palin ticket. Liberals complained about special interests destroying health care legislation in 1993/94, while conservatives were forced to lament the dishonest demagoguery being used by the left to turn the public against Social Security reform in 2005. As I wrote yesterday, Democratic lawmakers have been at the receiving end of a public backlash against their health care proposals, and now they've been working with their liberal allies to discredit protesters by painting them as tools of insurers and the Republican Party. Today, a blogger for liberal activist group Campaign for America's Future equated opponents of liberal health care policies with Holocaust deniers, and the Democratic National Committee jumped into the fray today with a statement claiming that, "The Republicans and their allied groups - desperate after losing two consecutive elections and every major policy fight on Capitol Hill - are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right wing extremists funded by K Street Lobbyists to disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of health care in America taking place in Congressional Districts across the country."
This is silly. We can argue about how many of the anti-government health care protesters were encouraged to attend townhall meetings by larger groups and how many decided to organize at the local level. But either way, it doesn't really matter, because the whole reason activist groups exist is to encourage citizens who agree with them to get more involved. This is no different from what unions, liberal activist groups, the DNC, or Obama's own Organizing for America are trying to do.
Read the rest here.
My only beef with Mr. Klein is his description of liberals as "whiners." That's like saying bees are "buzzers," or strippers are "mooners," or gang members are "bangers." Liberals, for the most part, are ignorant souls who couldn't explain the difference between a marginal tax rate and a tub of margarine if their life depended on it. I can think of many, many other ways to define a modern liberal, but I really don't want to spend 48 consecutive hours doing such.
# posted by Joltin' Django @ Saturday, August 08, 2009 
