Liberals Have Difficulty Telling the Truth

Liberals thrive on widespread fear, pessimism and uncertainty.  But the socialist platform doesn't stand up to the simplest factual tests.  To convince gullible people to vote for liberal candidates and support their agenda, liberals spread fear, distrust and jealousy wherever they can.  Things like truth and facts and honest debate don't matter to liberals as much as winning elections and retaining power. Most liberal Democrats wouldn't know an honest debate if they walked into one.  If you engage a liberal in conversation, be prepared for a series of vituperative cheap shots, half-truths and ad hominem attacks.  When confronted with inconvenient facts, most liberals just resort to shouting. Socialist fear-mongers are so tiresome because they predict and expect the worst — about the economy, the war, the next election, the weather, and everything else.  Their solutions always involve bigger, stonger government and higher taxes. Note:  The material about Jimmy Carter's new book has been moved here. There is a separate page about Leftist lies, misconceptions and disingenuousness in the gun control debate. Liberalism is really about money and power.  So many things that liberals argue about economics are simply and demonstrably wrong.  But even when you prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are wrong, the liberals keep mouthing the same basic untruths. Religiosity Without Religion.  Secularism, of course, never has to explain itself or prove its claims, a curiously privileged position for an ideology that rests on skepticism and relativism.  Apparently everything is unknowable to secularists except the obvious wisdom of their holding a dominant spot in public debates.  How we know with certainty that secularism is synonymous with "reason" and religion synonymous with "mere opinion" is never explained. Diminishing Palin:  Starting with Gerald Ford, the inside-the-beltway class and its amplifiers in the media have routinely decided that Republicans who seek national office are dullards.  Literally every Republican candidate for president since 1980 has had his intellect belittled.  Even Bob Dole, a candidate who had spent decades proving his remarkable mental acuity in Congress, had to face such salvos because his age had allegedly dulled his mental edge.  Sound vaguely familiar? Energy Myths:  Many in Congress seem either disconnected from reality or intentionally disingenuous about our energy crunch.  They have well-honed negative responses to common-sense ideas about solving our energy crisis, particularly drilling for more oil.  These responses are based on a number of widely held myths.  Sadly, they've become the backbone of the Democrats' energy policy.  They include:  "We can't drill our way out of our energy crisis."  Actually, we can. Now it's 'swift-boating'?  It's only dirty pool if you lose.  That's the apparent Democratic approach to presidential politics.  In 2004, Democrats tried to use film, in the form of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, to discredit and bring down President Bush in his re-election effort.  CBS even got into the fray, using obviously forged documents to try to tarnish Bush's National Guard service.  It led to news anchor Dan Rather's retirement. Dems' Doublethink on Drilling:  High gasoline prices are good.  A high price, imposed through federal carbon taxes or carbon caps, is precisely the mechanism by which Democrats hope to curb carbon emissions. … [But] High gasoline prices are bad.  With constituents irate over gasoline prices that are pushing $5 a gallon, Democrats complain that high prices are a bad thing. Why Liberals Lie About What They Believe:  The liberal agenda is, in many respects, the same as it was in the thirties.  Whether you call it communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or progressivism, the only real difference is how much they believe they can get away with, the way they sell it to people, and the latest trendy name for what they believe. It Can't Get Any Worse?  I hate to burst the dystopian bubble the Leftists have persistently inflated during the nightmare known as The Bush Administration, but people have never had better food, medicine and housing than they do at this very moment.  A typical home in America today has central heat and air, the cheapest car is a paragon of safety and efficiency compared with its ancestors, and people are routinely treated for, and survive, conditions which were fatal less than half a century ago. Dems Skip Town:  Empty Promises Revealed.  Right now middle-class Americans are suffering from expensive-energy induced inflation.  We all know the adverse consequences pain at the pumps has wrought.  So what does "the most open" House majority of all time do when a fair and honest debate over drilling doesn't exactly help them?  They dodge the debate for weeks.  They disingenuously lead the American people to believe that oil and gas won't necessarily be a part of our energy needs in the future. The Democrats' Big Problem:  The War In Iraq Wasn't About Oil.  Since the liberation of Iraq in March 2003, liberals have been screaming that the war to remove Saddam Hussein and his henchmen was a facade.  They have been shouting for years on end that the real reason for U.S. presence in Iraq was to secure resources for the Exxon/Mobils of the world.  They have been shrieking that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, oilmen both, hijacked American foreign policy to pad their pocketbooks.  There was only one problem with that logic, of course:  The price of oil has been skyrocketing since the invasion of Iraq. Democrats: The Missing Years.  The DNC website section labeled "Party History," … is in fact scrubbed clean of the not-so-little dirty secret that fueled Democrats' political successes for over a century and a half and made American life a hell on earth for black Americans. … So what's missing?  There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery.  There were six from 1840-1860.  There is no reference to the number of Democratic presidents who owned slaves.  There were seven from 1800-1861.  There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation outright or were silent on the subject.  There were 20, from 1868-1948.  There is no reference to "Jim Crow" as in "Jim Crow laws," nor is there reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. Obama the Postmodern Candidate.  Mr. Obama is on a nodding acquaintance with the concept of "truth."  It appears that everything he says and does must be viewed "in context" and that the framing of that context is the sole province of Barack Obama.  Take the whole Reverend Wright issue for example.  Over the course of six weeks we were told that he had no idea these things were said; he had a vague idea they were said; he knew they were said but could no more disown them than his occasionally racist grandmother; he had been personally disrespected and was through with Jeremiah Wright.  Quite a bit of "context" to get from his initial statements to the end point a mere month and a half later… Democrats more dysfunctional than ever.  Barack Obama's people have said that Hillary Clinton will probably not be the Democratic vice presidential candidate because of her husband, Bill's past. … Aren't these the same Democrats that less than a decade ago defended the then sitting president during impeachment proceedings brought about as a result of Bill's perjury and suborning perjury? Harkin Suggests Military Background Makes McCain Unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.  Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin is catching grief for suggesting John McCain's family history of military service makes the presumptive Republican presidential nominee unfit to be commander-in-chief.  Harkin, who has a history of embellishing his own military record, told Iowa reporters last week that McCain's background as the son and grandson of Navy admirals creates a "dangerous" situation because he can only view the world through the prism of the military. The Editor says... Eisenhower worked out okay, didn't he? It's Obama's Character, Stupid.  I picked up a copy of Time magazine yesterday, in which a columnist declared that issues of "character" were a "distraction" in the Presidential race.  Obama actually said the same thing in his North Carolina press conference, that the Reverend Wright affair has been a "distraction."  Isn't this what liberals usually say when their own characters come under public scrutiny?  What a heap of pure poppycock!  Character is the primary issue in every Presidential election. Oil Lessons.  "We can't drill our way out of the problem."  Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has said it.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said it.  It's one of those bromides sincerely repeated by Democrats with such conviction that for years left-leaning audiences duly nodded their heads, never questioning whether the truism was indeed true.  Until gasoline leaped above the $4-a-gallon mark. Biblical Scholars Challenge Pelosi's 'Scripture' Quote.  In her April 22 Earth Day news release, Pelosi said, "The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, 'To minister to the needs of God's creation is an act of worship.  To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.' … Claude Mariottini, a professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Cybercast News Service the passage not only doesn't exist — it's "fictional."  "It is not in the Bible," Mariottini said.  "There is nothing that even approximates that." More Prisoners, Less Crime.  Last July, Obama said that "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities."  Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail.  Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives."  But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Shattering Three Myths About Liberals:  (#3) Liberalism is the ideology of science.  It has been said that if we ever have fascism here in America, it will be called anti-fascism.  Similarly, it's liberals who politicize science to fit their ideological goals and then declare that their opponents are the ones who have rejected reason. Dem and Dumber in Ohio:  Democratic congressional candidate Mary Jo Kilroy sent a look-alike to rural parade.  Much like Saddam Hussein, Ohio 15th congressional district Democratic candidate Mary Jo Kilroy uses body doubles when she tires of having to deal with all of the little people she intends to represent.  Such was the case last week when Kilroy sent her campaign body double to represent her at the Plain City Steam Thresher parade. How the Left Intimidates the Media.  Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was recently paid $20,000 by Virginia Tech to tell the students that there aren't two sides to the global warming debate and that the problem with the media today is that we don't have a fairness doctrine.  Those positions, which sound contradictory, betray the modern liberal agenda.  They want to bring back the fairness doctrine not to ensure true fairness and balance in journalism but to intimidate and censor those expressing a view contrary to their own. That's a lie.  Ten often-repeated Democrat canards, half-truths and misconceptions. The Wages of Sensitivity.  The Democrats are the party of self-conscious inclusion, of identity politics, of sensitivity training, of hate crimes, hate speech, and of rules to control them.  A presidential campaign, on the other hand, is nothing but "hate speech," as opponents dive deep into opposition research, fling charges true, half-true, and simply made up against one another in an attempt to present their rivals as slimy, dishonest, disreputable, dangerous, and possibly the worst human beings who ever drew breath. Phony Pflegerism:  Normally the Democrats encourage priests and religious to misuse their office, to treat the binding teachings of their church as debatable while treating the platform and causes of the Democratic Party as doctrine; to put on their religious garb at political meetings, then take it off for catechesis. Swift-Boating for Truth:  Democrats never think they lose a fair fight.  The fix is always in and it is against them.  When the 2006 midterms came around and Democrats won, of course, that was accurate.  If Democrats win, it is a fair outcome, when they lose — the response is the personal destruction of anyone in their way. Global Warming Led to 'Black Hawk Down,' Congressman Says.  A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the "black hawk down" battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.  Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women's suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Liberal Smears Unchallenged.  The general election season is under way, and the leftists are already displaying their hypocrisy.  They've launched pre-emptive warnings against a Republican "swiftboating" of Barack Obama at the same time they're making up wild allegations about the villainous ultraconservative plots against goodness planned by John McCain. The Tanker Dogfight:  The Air Force has fumbled the bidding for new aerial refueling tankers for seven years now, and suddenly it's John McCain's fault.  That's election-year politics for you. The Democratic National Committee claims it was Senator McCain who steered the $35 billion tanker contract away from Boeing and toward Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co., or EADS. Right-Wing Perverts.  [Former presidential candidate, Gary Hart] claims that the right's strategy is:  "Continue to demonize liberals, blame them for all social and economic problems, and soon enough no one will be willing to admit to being a liberal.  Claim that liberals and Democrats are too soft to combat terrorists and soon enough a majority, even in the oldest democracy on earth, will believe it."  Would that this truth were so easy to convey!  If Hart's charges weren't so pompously humorless, you'd have to laugh at his calling conservatives "radical perverters of language," coming as it does from the former darling of a party whose most recent president had us scrambling to define the meaning of the word "is." Hillary:  Stand By Some Other Man.  Liberals believe, often accurately, that if they say the same thing over and over again 1 billion times, people will believe it:  "Bush lied, kids died," "We've lost in Iraq," "Reagan is stupid," "Bush is stupid," "Republicans are stupid," "Global warming is destroying the planet," "Gloria Steinem is good-looking" and — their most provably false assertion — "Bill Clinton is the most talented politician of his generation." Obama's Deceptive Anti-Oil Ad:  'I Don't Take $ From Oil Companies'.  It has been illegal for the last 100 years for an oil company to directly donate to a political campaign.  So, while it is technically correct that Obama isn't taking money from oil companies, it is ALSO true that neither is anyone else! FDR's dream comes true as nightmare.  When the US Mint was closed to gold in March, 1933, by Roosevelt and the country embarked on the sea of managed currency, a very large number of individuals and organizations urged a prompt return to the gold standard. The question arises as to what has become of those opposing voices in the intervening years. Why, some were silenced through bribe and blackmail. … All knowledge about gold money was systematically purged from university curricula and from institutes of advanced studies, replaced by a claptrap of pseudo-mathematical bunk. The Surreal World of the Progressive Left:  Misrepresentation of facts, distortion of motives and general acts of character assassination are the preferred modes of progressive discourse, as any conservative who has acquired a public persona can attest. … Efforts by the targets of this malevolence to correct fabrications and mis-statements of fact are guaranteed to fail nearly every time, in part because progressives don't regard their judgments as opinions but as a received moral (and therefore incontrovertible) truth.  Eventually an alternative reality is created by this process which no one would even think to check. How Do You Spell F-R-A-U-D?  Many politicians "stretch the facts" at some point in their careers, but this was more than that.  While Republicans do the same thing on another level — like campaigning for spending cuts and then outspending Democrats when they become a majority — what [Congressman Paul] Kanjorski has admitted to is outright fraud. Camelot or Cesspool?  The Kennedys recently endorsed Barack Obama, and Teddy Kennedy drew a parallel with President Kennedy — a vision of a new Camelot rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the Bush administration.  Either he was addressing the largest group of amnesiacs ever gathered in one place in history or the media and much of America have been eating funny mushrooms and are in the throes of a mass delusion. Obama's Bible Defense of Same-Sex Unions Wrong, Experts Say.  Kiera McCaffrey, director of communications for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said it is a mistake for Obama to look to the Bible as a playbook for his political aspirations.  "It seems pretty bogus using (the Bible) to justify civil unions," McCaffrey told Cybercast News Service.  "He should be using secular reasons to back it up.  "He can search the whole Bible and not find anything that justifies gay marriage or same-sex unions," she said. Hillary's Record:  Lamenting the healthy U.S. economy, a certain senator from New York says "it takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush."  But the Clintons' brand of soap always seems to be a mix of sleaze and socialism. Bending The Truth:  Eyebrows were raised early this year when the Senate's chief Democratic fundraiser, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, was made chairman of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) — a panel on which he wasn't even a member.  The suspicion was that Schumer would scrap the JEC's serious economic analysis and make it his own political tool that plays fast and loose with numbers. The audacity of phoniness.  Now it turns out that [Senator Obama's] top adviser, David Axelrod, often credited with masterminding Barack Obama's campaign strategy has a double life, too.  Thanks to the excellent reporting of Howard Wolinsky of Business Week, we know that the left wing campaign consultant by day also by night works for big corporations, creating phony front groups to pose as community groups who just happen to agree with his clients on controversial public issues. Attack on President Bush Continues Past SCHIP Veto Override Vote.  Democratic Rep. Pete Stark launched a shocking one-man assault on the Bush administration Thursday [10/18/2007], interrupting floor debate before a failed attempt to override President Bush's veto of the so-called SCHIP bill to suggest that U.S. troops in Iraq are getting their heads "blown off for the president's amusement." Did someone mention SCHIP? Web of deceit:  "Bush lied, people died," has been the loopy left's mantra since 2003:  The president fabricated evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida's ties to Iraq to inflame support for invading Iraq.  These claims have been refuted countless times, but refuse to die.  The evidence of Hussein's WMDs was so convincing that Congress overwhelmingly approved the use of military force against Iraq and more than three dozen countries joined the United States in liberating Iraq. … Yet the news media still take it on faith that "Bush lied, people died." Obama bin lottery.  Obama's South Carolina victory speech was the economic equivalent of a carnival snake-oil pitch.  He promised to "stop giving tax breaks to rich companies and instead put the money in the pockets of struggling homeowners who can't pay their mortgages", and at the same time stop the export of American jobs overseas, while raising everyone's wages.  The crowd chanted, "Yes we can! Yes we can!"  Excuse me:  No, you can't.  You can't keep inefficient American factories open without massive tax breaks to corporations, in the form of tariffs or otherwise. A Modest Proposal to Eco-Celebs:  I'm trying to figure out why Norman Lear with a 26 car garage insists we cut our driving and Barbra Streisand from her well-staffed mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean advises her fans to air dry their laundry outside.  And Teresa Heinz and John Kerry, who use a private plane to travel to their 5 mansions and SUVs, warn us all to cut back on our energy use. Why eco-hypocrisy matters:  This was no isolated incident, but part of what's becoming a tediously familiar pattern.  It starts when Celebrity X clambers up on a soapbox to tell the rest of us what we ought to be doing to Help Stop Global Warming.  In short order, News Outlet Y reveals that Celebrity X is, in fact, a hypocrite, owing to her frequent private jet travel, energy-sucking McMansion, and generally outsize carbon footprint. Hollywood Hates the Troops.  "We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens."  That's what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq.  He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.  He's wrong, of course.  American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years.  Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops. Harry Reid, Gen. Petraeus, and cooking data.  In an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed a million Iraqis have been killed since the beginning of the invasion.  How did Reid arrive at that figure?  He probably got it from this poll.  I know of no non-poll study suggesting anything like such a high number. 10 Things a Political Junkie Hates About Politics:  [Scroll down] On the Left, comparisons of Bush to Hitler and wild claims that the United States is a fascist dictatorship have become so commonplace as to be blasé.  Allegations nearly as vile and most certainly as false — like the United States invaded Iraq for oil and the 2000 and 2004 elections were rigged — have become so ordinary that they could fairly be said to constitute mainstream thought on the Left. Who Has Betrayed Whom?  The ad itself accused General Petraeus of betraying America and "cooking the books for the White House," of lying, in other words.  The Soros-backed, MoveOn folks made a number of scurrilous charges, most of which were easily debunked by the Washington Post Fact Checker, who gave the ad a three-Pinocchio label for dishonesty, stating that Move On's charges contained "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions." Reid's inconvenient theory will get House airing.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has been derided for saying that global warming contributed to last week's wildfires in Southern California.  Conservative political blogs mocked him.  Skeptics complained he was using a natural disaster to push his party's energy agenda.  The Nevada Republican Party said Reid had "lost touch with reality." Whom to Blame for the Bridge's Collapse?  Why, Bush, Of Course!  Today, the federal government passes highway bills every six years or so, replete with pork projects.  The last one, passed in 2005, included snowmobile trails and horse trails, as well as a documentary about infrastructure in Alaska.  Some of the money never gets to critical highway maintenance. Hillary's Texas Money Bundler.  [George Berham] Parr's most ominous pistolero was his six-gun totting enforcer, Luis Salas.  Days after the polls closed, Salas added 200 votes for [Lyndon] Johnson to Ballot Box 13 in Jim Webb County.  The fact that all the votes were recorded in the same handwriting was a clue.  But the box was never examined by those who adjudicated the election results; it had disappeared by then.  Revised returns gave Johnson a 3,000 vote margin of victory in Hidalgo County. … It all makes the chads and dimples show of South Florida look like child's play. Progress, Actually.  The word "benchmarks" was scarcely heard last week when [General David] Petraeus and [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker reappeared before Congress.  Crocker testified that the Iraqis have actually met about two-thirds of the benchmarks, including four or five of the six key legislative benchmarks and all of the benchmarks measuring their contribution to their own security.  In reply, the congressmen who insisted on legislating these benchmarks now say benchmarks are a poor way to measure progress in Iraq. Dems Distort Terror Report.  Democrats on Capitol Hill have complained for years that the White House "cherry-picks" intelligence.  Yesterday, that's exactly what the Dems did themselves with the just-declassified summary of a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism. Oscar for a panic merchant.  Take Al Gore.  While this jet-setting gas-belcher was getting his Oscar, the lights were still burning so brightly at his 20-room Nashville home that the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research yesterday announced he used more power every month than the average household used in a year.  So let's drop the terror-mongering, and calmly check something else.  As in:  is global warming really that bad, and is it really worth the pain of trying to stop it? Al Gore Goes Elmer Gantry.  Despite the media-crafted image of the GOP as home to hypocritical religious demagogues, it is the Democratic Party in which more snake oil peddling faith healers find a home, albeit disguised as non-religious in nature.  Sadly, the Left's starry-eyed faith in demagogues like Gore, the Clintons, Edwards, John Fraud Kerry, and yes, even Obama (the White Man's Hope for Absolution of Guilt At Last), is destined to be disappointed, time and time again. The Inconvenient Truth About Al Gore:  This whole thing with global warming and its leading apostle Al Gore is just more of the political left's habit of talking the talk but never walking the walk.  Gore has proven time and again to be a complete hypocrite. ... He wants you to curb your lifestyle drastically, but on the record he's doing everything he doesn't want you to do, and doing it extravagantly. The Editor says... Quite simply, the "global warming" panic is a hoax. Mary and Joseph were not 'homeless'.  This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate "the birth of a homeless child" — or, in Al Gore's words, "a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child."  Just for the record, Jesus wasn't "homeless."  He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth.  But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. The old Democrat bait-and-switch: Clock ticking on Dems' 100-hour agenda.  The clock is ticking for House Democrats, but it's hard to tell what time it is.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was touting a plan to push six bills through a Democratic House in 100 hours or less as early as June of last year.  She's reached the halfway point — in fewer than 20 hours, according to her count. … While the House has been in session for almost 48 hours since the 110th Congress was sworn in Jan. 4, the clock on Pelosi's Web site says only 17 hours 48 minutes have elapsed.  "We're just counting the legislative hours," Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill explained. [Yeah, right.  As if nothing gets done in Washington when the House is not in session.] Higher Taxes, Bigger Government:  Democrats revert to form in first weeks.  "The Democrats have reverted to form," said David Strom, President of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.  "We heard a lot of noises during the campaign and after about pursuing moderate policies, but once the Democrats started wielding real power they immediate set to raising taxes and expanding government." The Democrats' Big Lie.  Democratic tolerance means tolerance for secularism, but absolute intolerance for religion.  Democratic tolerance means tolerance for their supporters, but absolute intolerance for their political opponents.  The proof is in the pudding:  The House Democrats are currently pursuing policies that would criminalize religious thought and crack down on political speech. … This bill is aimed at quashing traditional religious thought. Democrats and disdain.  First it was John Kerry calling American troops child killers and rapists, as in the days of "Jenjis Khan."  Then there was his wife Teresa saying that Mrs. Laura Bush staying at home raising two daughters "didn't have a real job." … Now we have Barbara Boxer, Senator from Disneyland on The Bay, implying that a very accomplished, distinguished African American woman, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, isn't fit for her office because she hasn't given birth to children, a condemnation she wouldn't dare raise about the white Gloria Steinem, Donnna Shalala or Janet Reno. What the US Presidental hopeful HASN'T said about his father...  It is a classic story of the American dream made real:  an impoverished Kenyan goatherd rising to become a brilliant Harvard-educated economist.  On the way he fights racial prejudice at home and corruption at work, survives the heartbreak of a broken relationship and, despite it all, leads the fight to rid Africa of its colonial legacy. … Yet an investigation by The Mail on Sunday [1/28/2007] has revealed that, for all Mr. Obama's reputation for straight talking and the compelling narrative of his recollections, they are largely myth. … And, devastatingly, the testimony has come from Mr Obama's own relatives and family friends. 'Borking' Kerry Healey.  Ted Kennedy announced over the weekend that Kerry Healey, the Republican candidate for governor of Massachusetts, is guilty of "swiftboating." … Apparently he was accusing Healey of trafficking in contemptible slurs that no one with a shred of decency should be associated with.  If so, he used the wrong word.  The term for engaging in groundless character-assassination isn't "swiftboating."  It's "borking." The Top 1% ... of What?.  As many others have done, Virginia's Democratic Senator-elect Jim Webb recently complained in The Wall Street Journal of an "ever-widening divide" in America, claiming "the top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980."  Those same figures have been repeatedly echoed in all major newspapers, including The Journal.  Yet the statement is clearly false. Barack "blank" Obama and disingenuous politics of "understanding".  Who is Barack Obama?  He is a cipher running as a shaman.  He has been in the Senate for two years.  He has virtually no voting record; he has virtually no articulated positions.  Ask his advocates, and they will describe him as "a breath of fresh air" — but ask them about a single position he holds, and they will stare at you as though you are speaking in tongues.  They will tell you, however, that Obama "understands" every position you hold. Pathetic liberal sissies.  Liberals, who in large part are people devoid of true substance and belief, who also have great contempt for God, morality and truth, are often unable to deal with facts that reflect poorly upon them. A new low in Bush-hatred.  George W. Bush has been smeared by the left with every insult imaginable.  He has been called a segregationist who yearns to revive Jim Crow and compared ad nauseam to Adolf Hitler.  His detractors have accused him of being financially entwined with Osama bin Laden.  Of presiding over an American gulag.  Of being a latter-day Mussolini.  Howard Dean has proffered the "interesting theory" that the Saudis tipped off Bush in advance about 9/11. … What else can they say about Bush?  That they want him killed?  They already say it. The standard against which all other monsters are measured.  It is therefore not only inappropriate but utterly preposterous to compare Bush to Hitler.  But this is how things are in America today.  Bush is likened to the German leader while the true monsters we are fighting that actually warrant measurement against Hitler — Osama bin Laden and his followers — are instead called insurgents, freedom fighters or jihadists.  Many of us don't even call them terrorists any more! Anti-poverty vapors:  Everybody knows President Bush and the Republican Congress have chopped poverty spending to finance massive tax cuts for their wealthy friends. … Once again, what "everybody knows" turns out to be false.  Heritage Foundation budget analyst Brian Riedl actually looked at social spending under Republican control.  What he finds is as astonishing as it is counterintuitive:  Under the mean, nasty, coldhearted Republicans, expenditures on the poor have zoomed to record levels.  In 2004, 16.3 percent of the federal budget went to anti-poverty efforts.  This figure never has been higher. Postmodernism:  Rejecting objective truth is the cornerstone of postmodernism.  In essence, postmodern ideology declares an end to all ideology and all claims to truth. The liberal case study — one big dysfunctional family.  [Al] Gore practices vicious demagoguery when it comes to private enterprise, yet he campaigns on the "strong economy."  He hates "big oil" but owns $500,000 worth of Occidental Petroleum stock.  He argues for better housing for the poor — except for his impoverished tenants.  He is strong on the environment — except when it is an income-producing mining operation on his property. Reviews of Al Gore's new movie can be found at the bottom of this page. The Truth is Alien to the Left.  In George Orwell's 1984, Big Brother constantly reminded the citizens that "ignorance is strength" to diminish the public's desire to know the truth.  Adherence to this principle kept the government in control and the citizens in the dark.  Liberals now employ the ignorance strategy to distort the truth and deceive the public on all manner of issues, including the global war on terrorism, the economy and tax policy, border security and illegal aliens. What About Clinton and Kosovo?  Get Over 'Bush Lied' Nonsense.  The White House — finally — began pushing back against irresponsible charges that Bush "lied" to the American people in making the case for war. The Great Prevaricator.  Clinton's now-famous Lewinsky lie makes for an instructive comparison because it reminds us that this man, this former U.S. president, is a peerless prevaricator.  "Clinton's an unusually good liar," said former Democrat Senator and Medal of Honor recipient Bob Kerrey.  "Unusually good."  Indeed.  Even The New York Times once lamented Clinton's "mysterious passion for lying" and for "lying about his lies."  And the liberal New Republic's Andrew Sullivan noted, "From the beginning, Clinton has lied with indiscriminate abandon." The Clinton-Gore deceitful fundraising sideshow.  Congressional Democrats and their supporting political organizations … could have aided in successfully executing the war against radical Islamist terrorism in an effort to bring it to a more immediate conclusion, but they didn't.  They could have helped to heal this country after the hard-fought and contentious elections of 2000 and 2004, but they didn't.  They could have put the good of the country ahead of their political ambitions, but they didn't.  And now they want your money so they can, "move the country in the right direction."  Yeah, right.  And Al Gore invented the Internet. Hillary, Not as in the Mount Everest Guy.  For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's informal biography has been that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest.  The story was even recounted in Bill Clinton's autobiography.  But yesterday, Mrs. Clinton's campaign said she was not named for Sir Edmund after all. … Sir Edmund became famous only after climbing Everest in 1953.  Mrs. Clinton, as it happens, was born in 1947. Middling mummery:  When Sen. Hillary Clinton, New York Democrat, began to readjust her campaign rhetoric to reinvent herself as a born again centrist, few bothered to check out whether she had shifted rightward in her voting record, too.  With rare exceptions, she hadn't.  Her rhetoric had changed around the edges, as when she talked about finding common ground with right to life advocates.  But "her voting record on abortion issues didn't change one iota," said an official at the National Right to Life Committee. A Christian Can Be a Christian or a Liberal, But He Can't Be Both.  For the "Christian" to lean politically to the left means that he must blow off huge chunks of the Bible and replace the scripture with the make-believe notions of postmodernism's malleable "Christ."  Only after torturing the scripture can the Christian then fit liberalism into his supposed relationship with God. The sleaziest ballot measure in America.  Are voters stupid?  The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the city's League of Women Voters apparently think so.  Both groups are pushing Proposition R on L.A.'s ballot next Tuesday.  Prop R is the ultimate test of whether the slick power elite in the City of Angels can fool the people into voting to weaken the city's eight-year term limits law by not telling voters what the measure actually does … by pretending that it "establishes" term limits already established. Ford called himself a lawyer but did not pass the bar exam.  Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Harold Ford Jr. referred to himself as a lawyer earlier this week, but the congressman has not passed the bar exam.  Michael Powell, senior adviser to the Ford campaign, said U.S. Rep. Ford took the Tennessee bar exam in February 1997 and failed.  He said that was the only time Rep. Ford has taken the test. Minnesota Democrat Caught Stretching the Truth.  One of Minnesota's top Democrats is catching grief after getting caught on tape telling a lie or, as he put it, "sanding off the truth."  Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson was recorded assuring a group of pastors that several state Supreme Court justices had told him they would not legalize gay marriage. Why Democrats win.  America is not, as the current version of conventional wisdom claims, a centrist nation.  It is an essentially conservative nation, or at least conservative in the way such terms are defined these days and in comparison to other affluent democracies.  Roughly twice as many Americans identify themselves as "conservative" compared to "liberal"….  Few candidates run for political office in America as unrepentant liberals; almost all claim to be in some way conservatives. The myth of the big bad drug companies.  The pharmaceutical industry is getting bad press.  Recent books … have harshly condemned the industry for recklessness, insensitivity and all-consuming greed.  They gain sales by spicing up their titles with inflammatory phrases about "deception," "complicity" and how drug companies "endanger your health." Which Party Has a "Culture of Corruption"? This subsection is now on a page of its own, located here. Bamboozled Obama's big black lie:  I have been predicting for three years now that Obama will most likely be part of the presidential ticket in 2008.  He's got everything that democrats look for in a candidate, looks, charm, and the uncanny ability to distort truth like few have seen since William Jefferson Clinton.  In fact Obama may be better at it than Clinton. Righting Clinton administration's wrongs won't be easy.  He convinced his cabinet, party leaders and wife to lie for him on television.  He committed perjury under oath, was impeached by the House, and was several votes away from being convicted by the Senate. … He disregarded the advice of his staff, disrespected the Office of the President and became a punch line worldwide embarrassing America and Americans.  Though a terrific orator and someone many Americans believed, he was really only a snake oil salesman. Hillary asks gay activists for marriage amendment help.  [When New York residents] call her office her spokespeople say that she supports marriage — she just doesn't wish to see the federal government over reach.  Right … Ms. Universal Healthcare wants government not to intrude! A confused party.  Democrats deserve an A for effort, but their strategy isn't likely to succeed.  In addition to the flagrant untruthfulness of their allegations, they still aren't presenting an alternative policy agenda. Dispelling myths about American soldiers.  Myths abound when it comes to military personnel in the modern American armed forces.  Most are in some way related to recruiting new soldiers, who's fighting, and who's dying. President Bush:  From "dunce" to "dictator".  [The Democrats] eventually figured out that depicting Bush as hopelessly dim would make it tougher to demonize him personally (it's hard to hate a hapless moron). … In no time, Bush went from stupid to stubborn — "a man unwilling to admit his mistakes," "mistake" being defined as any implementation of conservative policy. Why the low jobless rate challenges Left and Right:  The latest jobless rate — 4.7 percent — is at a five-year low.  Yet, despite this and other good economic news, the Left is frantic to repeal the Bush administration's tax cuts.  In fact, even if every single economic indicator were better than at any time in American history, the Left would still want to repeal the tax cuts. The myth of the level playing field.  The term is cliché, but it is an extremely misleading one.  The sports analogy implies that everyone should be required to play by the same rules; that all competitors should have approximately the same equipment for the contest.  Who could object to that?  Well, anyone who understands that this is simply not how the world works. Enough with the distortions.  [Democrats] habitually misrepresent what they stand for and what Republicans stand for, and constantly mischaracterize President Bush's actions.  If they had confidence in the salability of their ideas, would they need to play word games, resort to euphemisms, revise history, distort facts and repeat patently false charges? Are facts obsolete?  People who urge us to rely on the United Nations, instead of acting "unilaterally," or who urge us to follow other countries in creating a government-run medical care system, often show not the slightest interest in getting facts about the actual track record of either the UN or government-run medical systems. A higher calling:  Sadly, there is recurring evidence that to liberals, one's political predilections trump everything else so that if you stand for the right things, you are virtually exempt from scrutiny. … The religious fervor of the left, in its high evangelical mode of spreading the gospel of liberalism, can be seen in its willingness to ignore the facts in furtherance of advancing its dogma. On the use and abuse of labels:  When it comes to the issue of race, liberals have a field day.  Many of them believe that conservatives, by definition, are racists.  Some believe that Republican candidates speak in code to appeal to the presumed racism of red state rednecks.  For their part, liberals sometimes don't even bother with code.  They just come out and say that a vote for a Republican is a vote for another black church to burn. The clay feet of liberal saints.  To be sure, Martin Luther King Jr. deserves his place among American heroes.  But it's worth noting that what makes him an American icon, as opposed to purely a liberal one, is his vision for a colorblind nation.  And colorblindness is no longer a core tenet of the American left.  President Kennedy was hardly the liberal of Oliver Stone's imagination.  And his brother, Bobby, was more hostile to civil liberties than John Ashcroft, eagerly wiretapping Americans, including King. So Hillary Speaks For Jesus on Immigration Now?  This one simply tickled me.  Hillary made claims that by enforcing tougher immigration laws, we are in effect transgressing against Jesus Christ.  Here is a woman, who has spoken to the entire nation about adhering to biblical principles with a history that would shame the devil himself.  So I would like to find where Hillary gleaned her knowledge of scripture and question what she has said when what I have read and learned is contrary to her statement. Hillary plays the name game.  A donation to Sen. Hillary Clinton can be the gift that keeps on giving.  That's because New York's celebrity senator uses one of the least-known but most common political fund-raising ploys that helps squeeze every last cent from her prolific hat-passing:  She sells the names of donors. Bill Clinton Finally Comes Clean — Sort of.  In perhaps his most revealing interview since leaving office, former president Bill Clinton said Wednesday [7/7/2004] that during the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he felt he had no choice but to lie about his relationship with the former White House intern, because if he had told the truth, "the overwhelming likelihood is that I would have been forced from office." A Lack of Vision or Democratic Chicanery?  The winner the last time Republicans split to a third party candidate gave us environmental restrictions that are one of the root causes of the pain you are feeling at the gas pump today.  It gave sensitive missile technology to China.  It entered into a joke of a nuclear arms agreement with North Korea, saw our soldiers slaughtered in Mogadishu and allowed Osama bin Laden time and sanctuary — in Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan — to bring to fruition a plan that slaughtered 3000-plus Americans on 9/11. Was Thomas Jefferson Really a Liar and a Rapist?  [This story] appeared to be a handy red herring to drag across the Clinton scandal trail [in 1998], since there was a story circulating that President Bill Clinton, while governor, had fathered a child by a black woman prostitute named Bobbi Ann Williams. Clinton vet:  Pets were just props.  The Clintons were not the animal lovers they appeared to be in those family photo ops walking with first dog Buddy on the South Lawn, a former White House veterinarian says.  Turns out the former first couple didn't allow Buddy or first cat Socks in the White House residence, according to the Army vet. Avoiding the Liberal Label:  Does it matter that [Melody] Townsel is a liberal Democrat and founder of the Dallas chapter of Mothers Opposing Bush?  Maybe not. … But it matters a lot that most news outlets withheld her partisan connections in reporting the story. … Many liberal groups often go unlabeled in the media, as if they were somehow unbiased and uncommitted. The "extremism" of Judge Sam Alito:  In short, an "extremist" — to a liberal — simply means someone with whom they disagree. Sticks and stones:  Have you noticed the irony in the Left's hollow screams about the alleged dishonesty of conservatives — when they have demonstrated again and again that they have little respect for truth? Republicans Should Go On The Offensive.  Among Democrats however, too much opportunity for political grandstanding is presently available to be discouraged by such comparatively trivial concerns as the lives of the American people, both on the streets of its cities and in the battlefields where the terror war is presently being fought and won.  Of sole importance is the potential prize of political dominance.  So a bit of "collateral damage" among their fellow citizens is apparently a small price to pay. CNN's 'Gay' Slash.  Comedian Bill Maher's malicious snipe on the "Larry King Show" that Republican Party boss Ken Mehlman is gay was pulled from CNN when it aired in later time zones and expunged from transcripts.  After telling King Wednesday night [11/8/2006] that the GOP was secretly run by hypocritical gays, Maher turned his tongue on Mehlman — after a little prodding from King, who asked for the names of the homosexuals to whom Maher was referring. The difficulty of intellectually engaging the Left.  One of the more appealing aspects about being on the Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions.  You can simply dismiss your opponent as "anti." Delusionary, insulting liberals.  It's amazing what liberals will do, say and put up with to remain politically correct. … There are myriad examples in the San Francisco area.  There are constant reminders of how incredibly insulting liberals are to anyone with common sense, two eyes to see and a brain to comprehend. Why I am not a liberal:  This may prove to be the toughest challenge of all.  For me, it is like explaining why I am not a communist, or why I am not a Nazi.  Where does one begin? Truth "Is".  I believe that Bill Clinton is such a good liar, he will lie when the plain spoken truth would serve him better.  Come on, Bill, you did not sleep on the couch — you only claimed that you slept there to make things seem more dramatic — more exciting to the reading audience.  You wanted more sympathy.  You wanted to paint yourself as having been appropriately punished, or as a victim. "Flip-flopping" defines Democrats.  When you compare Republican and Democratic candidates over the last 25 years, it's hard not to notice a major difference.  The pressure within the Republican Party has been to promote politicians willing to take strong conservative positions, even if they turn some people off.  The pressure in the Democratic Party has been to promote candidates who can be all things to all people. Proud to be a conservative.  Liberals have become so accustomed to having only their own points of view disseminated by the mass media that they now believe that any opinion in conflict with their own is an infringement on their right to free speech.  So not only do they feel entitled to spout off ad nauseam, but honest disagreement is regarded as censorship! Liberals' Use of Words is an Effective Tool in Promoting Radical Ideologies.  Let's face it, liberals over the years have been effective in requiring the public and the media to use terminology they have reinvented to engage in philosophical debate.  While the spectrum might be broad, it is clear that liberals' use of philosophically friendly words has gone a long way in winning over people who may never have entertained liberal ideology in the first place. The Left doesn't support the troops and should admit it.  Liberals, Democrats and others on the Left frequently state that they "support the troops."  For most of them, whether they realize it or not, this is not true.  They feel they must say this because the majority of Americans would find any other position unacceptable. Distractions and hypocrisy.  Do you remember how many times during the Clinton years Democrats told us everyone lies about sex and that Republicans were shamefully distracting the Clinton administration by harping on White House cover-ups about sex with an intern?  Well, we have far worse distractions now being promoted by Democrats about far less important matters and during far more dangerous times. Pathology of the Left:  Generally, liberals tend to be mentally rigid and closed-minded because they are insecure, the result of low self-esteem associated, predominantly, with fatherless households or critically dysfunctional families in which they were not adequately affirmed.  They exhibit fear, anger, and aggression — the behavioral consequences of arrested emotional development associated with childhood trauma.  Liberals display pessimism, disgust, and contempt for much the same reason. Schumer Confesses to Not Understanding the Constitution.  United States Senator "Chuck" Schumer broke his own stupidity record the other day following President Bush's announcement of John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court.  In a tag-team appearance with Senator Pat Leahy (D. Vt.), ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, Schumer confessed to the Nation that neither he, Leahy, nor the Democrat party for whom he spoke, understands a fundamental principle of American constitutionalism:  separation of powers. The Left's Tactics on Judicial Warfare:  The Left has a history of distortion — of both words and a nominee's record — so you can't assume that they mean what you mean or what they say is the truth. Fighting the Good Fight.  We've always known winning the war on terror would be difficult.  But hearing critics such as Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., claim that "we're making no progress at all" in Iraq, you'd think it was impossible.  Fortunately, the pessimists are wrong. Liberals are lying about the economy Not only politicians, but union leaders and the embedded media. Democrats say we're losing the war and our economy stinks.  Most economists define a recession as three consecutive quarters of falling real gross national product.  Yet for the last 10 quarters, the economy grew at an average of more than 3 percent, with the latest quarter coming in at 4.3 percent.  Inflation and interest rates remain low, with homeownership at an all-time high. Kerry Makes Bogus Comparison to Great Depression.  He claims US suffers greatest job loss since the 30's, which is not true.  John Kerry didn't make it through the third paragraph of his formal announcement speech before stumbling over a key fact about the U.S. economy. … Comparing the current job slump to the Great Depression is ludicrous. The Big Lie About The Great Depression.  The Depression lasted nearly a decade longer than it should have, due almost entirely to governmental meddling under both Herbert Hoover and FDR.  High tariffs and government-sponsored deflation followed by enormous taxation and unthinkable government expenditures turned a stock market stumble into a decade-long nightmare. Kerry:  Worst Economic Record Since Hoover.  For more than a year, as far back as his speech Sept. 2, 2003 formally announcing himself as a candidate for the nomination, Kerry has been making bogus comparisons to the Great Depression, overstating the number of payroll jobs lost during Bush's tenure, and (once jobs started growing again last August) falsely claiming that the new jobs pay $9,000 less than those that were lost, a claim unsupported even by the evidence he cites from a pro-labor think tank. Herbert Hoover never had it so good.  According to Dick Gephardt, "Bush has lost more jobs than Herbert Hoover — almost."  On that "almost" (Gephardt is only off by about ten million jobs) hangs a prodigious amount of partisan spin and most of the Democratic economic case against George Bush. Worst Job Records Since The Great Depression?.  "The President has the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, and the economy is slowing due to the housing slump."  The budget and trade deficits as well as public debt levels have all climbed to record levels," Pelosi said.  [Oh, really?]  Unemployment is down to 4.4%.  92,000 new jobs were created in October; 470,000 new jobs over the last three months.  Our economy has now added jobs for 38 straight months. Black Friday poised to be best in years.  This year's 'Black Friday' could be the strongest opening to the holiday shopping season in years, if the droves of American eager to exploit early-bird specials are any guide.  Terry Lundgren, chief executive of Federated Department Stores, told Reuters he arrived at the company's flagship Macy's Herald Square store at 5:30 a.m. to find lines wrapped completely around the building, which takes up a whole city block. That wouldn't happen if the economy was in bad shape.  One-day sales on the day after Thanksgiving were about $8 billion in 2005. Left-wing politicians are abetted by the news media's biased reporting about the economy. Gore Uses Religion to Attract 'Global Warming' Converts.  "The Book of Revelation [says] God will destroy those who destroy his creation," Gore said, noting that some evangelical Christian leaders have expressed concern about climate change.  "Whatever works," Gore added, prompting applause and laughter.  Gore departed the event, sponsored by Wired Magazine, with his wife Tipper in a chauffeur-driven black Lincoln Town Car provided by a New York City limousine service. Did someone mention Global Warming? Note:  Most liberals don't actually believe we're headed toward a Christian theocracy, but it is to their advantage to spread such a story.  Of course there are a few people whose lifestyles really would suffer under a Christian theocracy, and they're probably genuinely afraid. How's this for hypocrisy? Democrats plan to inject spirituality into agenda.  A conference geared to help Democrats infuse God into their politics begins tomorrow [5/17/2006] at All Souls Unitarian Church in the District with the unveiling of a "spiritual covenant with America." New phenomenon is just the same old double talk.  Democrats have couched their ideas in favorable language for decades.  President Bill Clinton, for example, was a master at getting folks to see the world as he wanted them to see it.  Of course, Clinton's communications skills set a high bar.  But that doesn't mean other Democrats haven't tried to frame the public debate.  Does anyone believe Al Gore's "risky scheme" and John Kerry's "Stronger at home, respected abroad" were anything other than market-tested slogans? What, me apologize?  The United States Senate has passed a resolution … apologizing as an institution for preventing the passage of anti-lynching legislation.  We are still waiting for the Democratic Party to apologize for its role, which is far greater than that of the whole Senate, inasmuch as all the senators who prevented action to abolish lynching for all those decades, were Democrats. Soros Assails Critics for "Endangering Our Country".  Billionaire political activist George Soros, at the center of a controversy involving the alleged use of American taxpayer dollars to support needle exchange programs, Thursday [5/12/2005] accused his critics of "bigotry" and said they were "endangering the country." Ending a losing streak:  The left is on another losing streak today, and so their intellectual leaders in the liberal media have gone back to the old playbook for an easy win that will get their team out of its slump.  This time, it is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, which has been working for them since the days of Karl Marx. The storm over poverty:  Forty years after a myriad of Great Society programs, the fact is that many people are still poor — about the same percentage as back in 1968.  Unfortunately, those who see government as the solution for every problem, especially those caused by their last attempted solution, have never let results, inconvenient facts, or common sense get in their way. Liberal attitudes.  Liberals may think of themselves as people who believe in certain principles but, if you observe their actual behavior, you are likely to discover that most liberals have a certain set of attitudes, rather than principles.  Liberals may denounce "greed," for example, but in practice it all depends on whose greed.  Nothing the government does is ever likely to be called "greed" by liberals. Cynicism exposed:  Mona Charen's incisive new book, "Do-Gooders," is about the enormous damage done by liberal social policies from the 1960s on, but it is also about the shameless demagoguery unleashed against those who have dared to oppose the liberal agenda or reveal its failures.  Examples range from cynical lies about judicial nominees to the biggest big lie of our time, the claim that black voters were "disenfranchised" by Republicans in Florida during the 2000 elections. Rock the Victim mentality:  On the heels of the AARP, NOW, NAACP and other left-leaning groups' hysteria over Social Security reform and personal retirement accounts, the Rock the Vote campaign is latching on to the issue and misinforming a whole new generation. Are Liberals Destroying the Democratic Party?  I don't remember anyone arguing that Bill Clinton should cancel his 1996 inauguration because of the violent conflict in the Balkans or the terrible genocide in Rwanda, in which 800,000 were murdered while the UN and the US did nothing. … President Bush is not under attack because he's having an inauguration during a war.  He's being attacked solely because Liberals hate the man personally, along with everything he stands for. The left is worth nothing.  Since I was an adolescent, I have been preoccupied with evil:  specifically, why people engage in it and why other people refuse to acknowledge its existence.  As I have gotten older, I often find the latter group more infuriating. Naysayers are tight-lipped since success of Iraq vote.  Skeptics of President Bush's attempt to bring democracy to Iraq have been largely silent since Iraqis enthusiastically turned out for Sunday's elections.  Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros and left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore were among critics of the administration's Iraq policy who had no comment after millions of Iraqis went to the polls in their nation's first free elections in decades. The Truth About Wages:  Under Republican administrations, liberal critics would have laid the blame for any decline in wages directly on the doorstep of the president.  However, [Bill Clinton's] Labor Secretary Robert Reich attempted to deflect blame by pointing the finger at Big Business.  "The owners of capital are registering huge gains while ordinary working Americans are seeing their incomes fall," he said. Bush vs. Clark's kooks.  Turning reality upside down is easy when you live in the world of people like actress Janeane Garofalo, who proclaimed on MSNBC just hours after the inauguration festivities:  "George W. Bush is unelectable, in my opinion."  This isn't dissent.  It's beyond denial.  Welcome to liberal dementia. Translation of the Democratic Response to President's State of the Union Speech.  One integral theme emerged from the Democratic response to President Bush's State of the Union address:  the party's underestimation of the American people to solve their own problems and to see through liberal rhetoric.  Let's just look at what they were really saying on the various issues once you strip away the generalities and euphemisms. Moyers and the party of gloom.  Speaking at Harvard recently, Bill Moyers, a preacher in the Church of Unreconstructed Liberalism, painstakingly constructed a straw man and then bashed it to pieces. COPS Makes for Crooked Cops.  COPS, borne of President Clinton's 1992 campaign promise to put 100,000 new police officers on the street, has been troubled from the outset.  It hasn't come close to fielding that many new officers.  And its objectives — to curb neighborhood crime by encouraging innovative and effective policing styles — haven't been met. The Destruction of Jeff Gannon:  The campaign against Jeff Gannon demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left. Market Myth:  Worst Economy Since The Great Depression?  To hear John Kerry tell it, America is mired today in the worst economy since the Great Depression.  How dumb does he think voters are?  We just set a record for yearly production:  a GDP of nearly $12 trillion, or $120,000 per family.  As for what really counts, personal well-being:  A record 69 percent of Americans own their own homes, and the account balance in the average 401(k) plan is $77,000, up 22 percent in three years.  Editor's Note:   No doubt you have seen news footage of large crowds of people surging through the doors of department stores when they opened on the morning after Thanksgiving.  Some stores opened on Thanksgiving Day and were crowded all day.  My family and I visited the Galleria in north Dallas on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and the place was packed!  Four parking garages were full, and there must have been at least 50,000 people inside.  But during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry and the Democratic Party told us that we were in the worst economy since the great depression.  Obviously, the Democratic Party was lying to the American people in an attempt to win the election by any means necessary. (Flashback to 1992.  Then-candidate Bill Clinton repeatedly referred to the economy as the worst since the Great Depression.  It worked.) Making a Dent in Liberal Disinformation:  Worst Economy and Jobs.  While some Democrats still rail about the economy and the more loose-lipped critics still refer to it as a disaster, the steady economic growth has muted most of the harsh criticisms of the president's impact on the economy.  First it was "Bush's recession," then when that bottomed quickly and the recovery began, spurred by tax cuts, the critique morphed into, "Yeah, but it's a jobless recovery."  When the jobs started coming back, the complaint evolved again into, "Well, manufacturing still is losing jobs."  Then, when manufacturing gained jobs, it was "Sure, but these new jobs are all flipping burgers." Making a Dent in Liberal Disinformation: RatherGate.  By now you should know the story — the blockbuster memos CBS "unearthed" for 60 Minutes II last Wednesday were immediately spotted as being suspiciously like something created on Word.  CBS denied, saying they had been authenticated by one of the purported author's fellow officers, who subsequently said he never saw them, and after seeing them felt they were fraudulent. Don't Confuse Me With the Facts.  Liberals constantly call for more money for education when every statistic shows that money is not the answer (just look to Washington, D.C.'s schools and the $13,000 per child spent to achieve some of the nation's lowest test scores).  Libs talk down the economy when indices like home ownership, real income, and unemployment are better than the average in any of the past three decades.  They claim that we are no safer today, ignoring the fact that we have not had the expected major terrorist attacks since 9/11/01 and the government has thwarted dozens of plots. Making a Dent in Liberal Disinformation:  Voter Disenfranchisement.  Democrats have never been known to cast fraudulent ballots, eh, Mayor Daley?  We won't go into the NAACP allegedly paying Chad Staton in crack cocaine to register such stalwart Dems as Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins, and Janet Jackson in Ohio.  Or the 8,000 fraudulent Democratic voter registrations discovered in Lansing, Michigan.  That's "Get out the Vote." Lying About the Draft.  The first question about the draft is ... why?  We have an active military of about 1.4 million men and women today.  This is down from the peak of 2.1 million in the mid-1980s.  Did we have a draft then?  No.  Did Reagan need a draft to ramp up from the lower levels from the Carter years?  No.  Would we need a draft to get back up to that force level, assuming that we had to?  No. The Left's Fairy Tale:  Former Senator Max Cleland scared up Colorado college students in 2004 with tales that "America will reinstate the military draft" during a second Bush term.  However, the only proponent of the draft in Washington was Charlie Rangel, an antiwar Harlem Congressman who ultimately voted against his own bill when Congressional Republicans called his bluff. Conservatives don't always wear black hats.  Most commentators don't understand what it means to be a conservative.  When you listen to newscasters or read newspaper accounts of such matters, it seems that "conservatives" are simply the people who want bad things and the liberals are the ones who want good things. On the use and abuse of labels.  Liberals don't usually call conservatives merely "conservatives."  That's because the term, standing alone, is not a pejorative.  Instead, we are "extremists," "bigots," "homophobes," "racists" and "intolerant."  And these labels, unlike the conservatives' general invocation of "liberal," are usually gross distortions. Cultural issues confuse the liberals.  Democrats seem to be leaning toward the idea that Bush's victory is based primarily on turning out religious nuts to vote for him.  These people are viewed in certain Democratic quarters as the American Taliban.  It is thought that if they gain political power, not only will abortion and gay marriage be banned, but so will dancing, rock and roll, and any movie with an "R" rating.  This is nothing but nonsense, but is commonly believed in places like Hollywood and New York's upper west side. Amoral media, lowlife fans, spoiled athletes and beer.  Let's finally stop repeating the false notion that big business has conservative values.  Big business has no values. ... Liberals perpetuate the falsehood of big business as conservative for three reasons:  They have a materialist view of the world (just about everything is explainable by economic status and motives; it aids in getting people to vote Democrat); many people resent the amorality of big companies; and it seems to counter the argument that the major news media are liberal — "How could the news media possibly be liberal when they are all owned by large corporations!" Former Brooklyn Democratic boss sentenced to prison.  A former assemblyman and head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party was sentenced on Wednesday [1/10/2006] to two to six years in prison for separate convictions on campaign corruption charges.  At two trials in state Supreme Court last year, juries found Clarence Norman Jr., 54, guilty of stealing $5,000 that was donated to his re-election committee in 2001, and of trying to conceal $10,000 in contributions. The Left's Lies That Never Die:  I'm sick of hearing the myths spun endlessly by the left repeated over and over again, often by people who ought to know better.  So here, once again, is another attempt to set the record straight. Coulter Stirs Up a Storm:  For about two decades, name-calling has been the principal policy position of liberals.  If [Republicans] oppose the National Endowment for the Arts, we're said to hate art.  If we oppose the Department of Education, we hate teachers.  If we oppose the Environmental Protection Agency, we hate the environment. Socialist Myths, Capitalist Truths:  Capitalism is profoundly egalitarian.  Its existence relies on institutions that protect the equal rights of consumers and producers, eschews privilege and authority, and distributes wealth based on each participants' contribution to satisfying the needs of others.  So we should immediately be suspicious of claims that capitalism causes inequality. The Double 'Thank-You' Moment.  I suspect ignorance about economics leads many to believe that when two people exchange goods and money, one wins and the other loses.  If rich capitalists profit, the poor and the weak suffer.  That's a myth. New Lies of the Old Left:  In the 1960s, the "New Left" came to prominence on America's university campuses.  Today, those New Left radicals are America's tenured university professors.  They populate the newsrooms of the television networks and our once-great newspapers.  More disturbing still, the New Left now comprises the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Political demagoguery:  Our unemployment rate, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put at 5.4 percent in September, is one of the lowest in the world and in our history.  France's unemployment rate is 9.4 percent, Germany's 9.9 percent and Italy's 8.6 percent.  Our Canadian neighbor's is 6.6 percent.  The only reason for today's hysteria over jobs is because it is an election year, and one of the ways politicians gain power is to create fear among the electorate.  The next time you hear a politician whining about our "awful" job climate, ask him which European country we should look to for guidance in job creation. The myth of the stolen election:  The Democrats seem determined to keep the 2000 election issue alive, even though it failed miserably as a rallying cry against Jeb Bush, who won a resounding 56% to 43% re-election victory in the 2002 Florida Governor's race.  It is worth examining the mythology and the real, not-so-ancient history of the "stolen election". Jobs and snow jobs:  Senator John Kerry says that he would create 10 million jobs if he were President.  But Presidents don't create jobs. Emotion vs Reason This section has been moved to a page of its own, where I'm sure it will be much happier. The "Theocracy" Subsection: Why are some liberal Democrats so worried about religious influence on American politics?  The easy answer is this:  Without the constraints of religion or any moral foundation, it is much easier to live the life of a 1968 California hippie; that is, a drunken, philandering, dope-smoking, baby-killing liberal.  Where there is no God, things like conscience and sin and guilt and self-restraint are no problem.  Apparently many people on the east and west coasts are afraid that if people behave like Christians, the party's over. Oddly enough, the people who seem to be so afraid of a Christian theocracy are the same people who don't want to hurt the feelings of the Muslims who really do want to establish a theocracy in this country. Now, the Theophobes.  Most of [the nation's intellectual elites] equate religious expression to fascist incitement.  That's a curious twist, since the only thing protecting the American political system from fascism is religion itself.  Here's why:  faith supplies the essential ingredient for individual liberty — and that ingredient is virtue. Theocracy and Liberal Paranoia:  Liberals are offended and feel threatened by all expressions of spiritual religious faith, which they perceive as evidence of a theocratic conspiracy and therefore sufficient grounds for banning Judeo-Christianity from all public discussion.  Opposition by Christians and religious Jews to abortion, fetal stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, and the hedonistic license of sexual promiscuity is equated by liberals with medieval ignorance and abolition of modern science. It's the worldview, stupid.  The American left exhibits ambivalence toward Christians and Christianity.  On the one hand it routinely demonizes them and their values, and on the other, identifies with them.  This sometimes looks like an insulting charade.  Liberals often mock the perceived backwardness of Christianity, yet their prominent politicians jump at the chance to appear at megachurches to rub elbows with their robust congregations.  They conspicuously wear their Bibles for photo-ops and cite Scripture in campaign speeches, yet deride Christian conservatives and condemn Republican politicians for allowing their Christian beliefs to inform their policies. Obama's Imperilled Candidacy:  I found it very interesting to hear [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright explicitly endorse Obama over Hillary in church.  Normally when evangelical preachers cross the political line they get hammered for violating the separation of church and state.  One pastor I know invited a local Republican official to give his personal testimony in church and had to answer to the IRS for it.  How come black churches engage in blatant electioneering, even to the point of busing members to the voting booth, and nobody from the ACLU or the media raises an eyebrow? Would Jesus Take The Bus?  The largely secular press corps does not usually regard Jesus Christ as a suitable authority to cite in political or policy discussions.  When George W. Bush invoked Christ's name in a December 1999 debate, for instance, journalists gasped at the insertion of religion into the public square, something to make non-Christians squirm.  To liberal media purists, the slightest acknowledgement of Christianity by a public official is evidence of a sinful desire to impose a Taliban-style theocracy in America. The Fascists are Coming, The Fascists are Coming.  Last Sunday, The New York Times featured a review of American Fascists:  The Christian Right and the War on America, in which author Chris Hedges makes the argument that millions of Americans are about to fall on their fellow citizens and punish them in the name of a righteous Lord. … While reviewer Rick Perlstein doesn't particularly approve of the book in question, he does buy into the thesis.  "Of course there are Christian fascists in America", he insists, followed by several anecdotes that demonstrate no such thing. The Theocons are Coming!  Take Rosie O'Donnell.  The other day, one of her co-hosts on "The View" was musing on current events and opined, "If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to…" And at this point Rosie interrupted.  "One second.  Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state."  Does she really believe that?  That "radical Christianity" is "just as threatening" as "radical Islam"?  These terms are imprecisely defined.  You get the feeling that to Rosie O'Donnell "radical Christianity" is pretty much Christianity — or at any rate any Christian denomination without an openly gay bishop. [Have radical Christians ever flown an airliner into an office building?] Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, "God Delusion"?  The theocracy is coming!  The theocracy is coming!  So warn authors, documentary makers, and celebrities, who would like to rip away what they see as veils of religious superstition.  They warn us of the dangers of Christian belief and extend their arguments to religion in general. "Theocrats" for freedom.  The word "theocrat" is a rapidly emerging swearword in American politics.  If someone opposes gay marriage, or supports giving sustenance to Terri Schiavo, or has any strong moral convictions that inform his policy positions, he is a "theocrat" who secretly wishes to begin burning people at the stake. Are the theocons taking over?  Those who imagine that it is religion's defenders who are the aggressors here are simply not paying attention to the increasingly sharp attacks on religious faith that can be found today in such influential places as The New York Times. Were Nazis Christians?  Are Christians fascists?  Christophobia is marching through movie theaters and onto the pages of books.  One much-discussed documentary, "Jesus Camp," concerns a fringe-Christian program in Devil's Lake, N.D., that the filmmakers suggest is representative of the evangelical world.  The film has small children praying before a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush and swinging swords while dressed in combat fatigues. The Nazis Were Marxists.  The Nazis were Marxists, no matter what our tainted academia and corrupt media wishes us to believe.  Nazis, Bolsheviks, the Ku Klux Klan, Maoists, radical Islam and Facists — all are on the Left, something that should be increasingly apparent to decent, honorable people in our times.  The Big Lie which places Nazis on some mythical Far Right was created specifically so that there would be a bogeyman manacled on the wrists of those who wish us to move "too far" in the direction of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater. The Nazis and Christianity:  Many atheists presume that the Nazis were a weird variation of Christianity. … [On the contrary] Weimar Germany largely had abandoned Christianity and increasingly was embracing hedonism, Marxism and paganism.  There, decline of Christianity in Germany led directly to the rise of Nazism.  Professor Henri Lichtenberger in his 1937 book, The Third Reich, describes the religious life of the Weimar Republic as a place in which the large cities were "spiritual cemeteries" with almost no believers at all, except for those who were members of the clergy. Faith Is A Right, Not A Theocracy, Senator Schumer.  To call a group of people of strong faith theocrats because they want to exercise their rights as citizens and participate in government is astounding but not surprising.  Senator Schumer would like to silence his critics. Faith in our future?  If you read the headlines, you run the risk of thinking we are headed toward a theocracy. Fundraising Foolishness.  If you think I'm exaggerating, consider what the head of the Anti-Defamation League recently told his membership.  Speaking at the same time, ironically, that Muslim youths were setting French communities on fire, he warned his members about the threat posed by, of all things, "the Christian worldview." Probing the judges:  One of the appellate judges who learned that his financial records were sought by a Democratic political consulting firm told a friend that he felt violated by this political intrusion.  He did not know that the firm's client was NARAL.  The abortion advocacy group surely was not asking the judges' views on abortion.  Nancy Keenan, who has been NARAL's president some five months, told this column her organization is concerned about "out of touch theological activists" becoming judges. Pagans vs. "religionists":  "We need people in Hazmat suits to go in and smoke 'em out," writes Nicholas von Hoffman in a New York Observer column. … "Religionists are crawling in everywhere, swarming the schools, movies, medicine and research labs," warns Hoffman, sounding like someone from Terminix.  "Their intent is to install a faith commissar to oversee every major social institution. Why theocracy can't happen here.  Recently, Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and former Pennsylvania Democratic congressman, warned a conference of People for the American Way and 500 other secular liberals the religious right was hell-bent on imposing a "theocracy" on America. Atheists Feel Threatened by Bush.  The Freedom from Religion Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way, are leading the legal battles to push God from the public square and create a nation in man's image. Killed for breaking fast.  A 14 year old Iranian boy was sentenced to 85 lashes for breaking his Ramadan fast.  The boy died from his wounds.  Keep this story in mind next time you hear a liberal referring to the "Taliban wing" of the Republican party, or arguing that Christian "fundamentalists" in America are comparable to Islamic "fundamentalists" in the Middle East, or suggesting that the Bush administration is trying to establish a "theocracy." The Left's "Dominionist" Demons:  In recent decades, the Left has come to see evangelical Christians as the principal obstacle to the realization of its social agenda, hence the embodiment of evil.  Correspondingly, attacks on "fundamentalists" have grown increasingly shrill. Secular Humanists to the Rescue!  The Buffalo-based Center for Inquiry (CFI) announced the opening of its new public-policy office in the nation's capital last month.  Their mission?  Nothing less than to save America from "the undue influence of religious orthodoxy." … Such triteness, whether in CFI's messaging or architectural styles, is not as disturbing as it is embarrassing.  What is genuinely disturbing in their literature is the mantra-like repetition of that ever-fashionable line of ideology:  Science has the corner on the market of reason. The Christians are at the gates, but they don't want in.  All right, enough already.  The Christians aren't coming to get you.  I can take the somber, frightened "special reports" on National Public Radio, where you can literally hear the correspondents wringing their hands over the possibility that the "Darwin fish" affixed to their Volvos will be banned.  I can even handle the dog-whistle shrieks of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd types about the looming Inquisition led by an alliance of the new German (wink, wink) pope and the Kansas Board of Education. Theo-Panic!  What does [Oliver] Cromwell's rule have to do with contemporary American political life?  If your answer is anything other than "nothing," you are probably in the grip of the "theo-panic" that is sweeping precincts of the American commentariat.  They warn that America is beset by raging theocrats seeking to overturn our liberal democracy.  Otherwise respectable historians, Kevin Phillips and Garry Wills, have made this charge.  It is a staple of the New York Times op-ed page. Conservatives Accuse Watchdog Group of 'Christianophobia'.  A liberal government watchdog group has asked the Secret Service to release its records of prominent conservative Christian leaders' visits to the White House, but one of those leaders called the request "an act of Christianophobia."  Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Wednesday [10/18/2006]. Taliban west?  Secularists are in a state of panic about the role of evangelical Christians in the reelection of George Bush.  They actually believe that American democracy is in danger, that we are on the verge of becoming a theocracy.  "Putting God in the public square runs the risk of turning our democracy into a theocracy," frets DeWayne Wickham in USA Today.  Leonard Pitts of The Miami Herald warns darkly of "the soldiers of the new American theocracy who want to force 'creation science' on the schools." Give me that old-time (liberal) theocracy.  "The right-wing hijacking of religion's public role in our political discourse is as undeniable as it is inappropriate, and represents one of liberalism's most serious problems."  Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman illustrates this problem perfectly.  Speaking for liberals, he later states that "we happen to have Christianity's deity on our side."  Apparently it's only a "hijacking" and "inappropriate" if religion bolsters conservative causes. The left would relish a theocracy of this sort... Al Gore, the United Nations, and the Cult of Gaia (1999):  [Scroll down] The religious overtones of this movement are too obvious to ignore.  Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) has described this phenomenon as "environmental religion" and says that it has "profound constitutional implications" because of the First Amendment prohibition on government establishment of religion.  Columnist Alston Chase, a reformed environmentalist, agrees, warning that "It may be only a matter of time before America becomes a complete theocracy — a place where, in the name of environmentalism, science and religion fuse with civil authority to rule the populace."  Dr. Michael S. Coffman, president of Environmental Perspectives, says, "They are instituting a new state religion."  But it is a religion at sharp variance with the Judeo-Christian foundations of the American constitutional republic. Evangelicals:  America's Taliban.  If you think that comparing Evangelical Christians to the Taliban sounds extreme, you might just be a normal American.  But if you think that the comparison is valid, you might just be a supporter of North Carolina Senator Julia Boseman.  In fact, Boseman's supporters have just launched a new website making that very comparison. See also Anti-Christian/Pro-Islam Bias in Today's American Society How much do you know about Senator Joseph McCarthy? The Venona Secrets:  The fact is Joe McCarthy was right, but by now his name has been turned into a dirty word by the same liberal, leftist propaganda machine that today is trying to convince Americans the President "lied" to them about Iraq. Joe McCarthy was Right.  The release of transcripts of closed-door hearings conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy gave the media another opportunity to charge that the Wisconsin Senator made reckless charges about communists that destroyed the lives of innocent people.  But many of the stories about the hearings and McCarthy were far more reckless, inaccurate and misleading than anything he ever said or did. Of "Treason" & Tailgunner Joe:  What the Left calls McCarthyism — smearing an enemy on false or non-existent information — has been its stock-in-trade since the Left invented the term to destroy its great antagonist, the ex-Marine and Wisconsin senator known as Tailgunner Joe. Joe McCarthy, Freedom Fighter.  A couple of years ago, I debated a professor from American University named John Doolittle who, prompted by me, admitted that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wisconsin (1909-1957), may have exposed some real communists working in the federal government.  "But I saw the Edward R. Murrow broadcasts," Dr. Doolittle added.  "He was a bad man."  Veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans, who has studied more of the government files from that era than Dr. Doolittle or his peers, or for that matter, Edward R. Murrow himself, have ever seen, reaches a different verdict. History Shows Joe McCarthy's Reputation is Undeserved.  McCarthy understood, long before Reagan, that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, one of whose strategies was to infiltrate agents into our government in order to guide our policy to favor Communist goals.  In fact, our government was much more infested with Soviet agents than McCarthy imagined. The Real McCarthy Revealed.  Near the start of "Blacklisted by History:  The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies," Evans asks, "Can we in fact name one certifiable communist McCarthy ever came up with in all his speeches and contentious hearings?"  According to Evans, "it's indeed hard to cite one such person — just as it's hard to eat one potato chip or salted peanut."  He then provides a list of 10 McCarthy targets that turned out, indeed, to have been spying on this country. Jump to Liberals - Intro Page Back to the Home page

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