Stuff Leftist People Like #11-20 (aka Top 10 Things Leftists Like Continued)

Posted By Scott Spiegel On November 7, 2010 @ 2:31 pm

Note: For the first installment of this series, please see Top 10 Things Leftists Like (aka Stuff Leftist People Like #1-10).
Two years ago, the satirical site Stuff White People Like (SWPL) debuted with the self-description:
“This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable.”
Author Christian Lander released a book last year compiling the first 100 items in his list, and plans a follow-up release next month titled Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews. Copycat sites have sprung up since then, including Stuff Asian People Like, Stuff Black People Like, Stuff Latino People Like, and Stuff Queer People Like.

Though Lander’s write-ups are insightful and entertaining, there’s one problem: too many of the items in his list constitute stuff leftist white people like. For example, Lander offers the entries: Being Offended, Bumper Stickers, Non-Profit Organizations, Picking Their Own Fruit, Political Prisoners, Public Radio, Taking a Year Off, The Sunday New York Times, The World Cup, Threatening to Move to Canada, and Unpaid Internships. This is to say nothing of more obvious entries such as: Barack Obama, Diversity, Free Healthcare, Hating Corporations, Recycling, The Daily Show/Colbert Report, Toyota Prius, Vegan/Vegetarianism, and Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops.
In the spirit of SWPL, and to extend the tradition for the amusement of those on the Right, I hereby continue “Stuff Leftist People Like”:


#11: Double Standards
Leftists love setting higher standards for their ideological opponents than themselves, because it allows them to condemn the supposed wickedness of the opposition while downplaying their own shortcomings. The complicity of the mainstream media allows them to pull off this duplicitous posture with élan.
For example, consider the issue of environmentalism. Most delegates to last year’s Copenhagen Climate Conference made firm commitments on behalf of their constituencies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but such privations most definitely did not extend to summit participants themselves. Laughable hypocrisy was abundantly on display in conference attendees’ lavish, luxury-filled, CO2 emission-intensive accommodations and entertainments. The UK Telegraph documented that the summit, including jet and limousine travel, would “create a total of 41,000 tonnes of ‘carbon dioxide equivalent,’” about the same as the daily emissions of 30 smaller countries.
Regarding free speech: at a townhall meeting on the Iraq War in San Francisco in 2006, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi highlighted the critical, historical role of legislator-constituent meetings and the importance of face-to-face confrontations between congressmen and the voters they represent. Pelosi declared:
“I draw great inspiration from [Franklin Roosevelt], because he was a disruptor. I’m a fan of disruptors.”
Three years later, Pelosi coauthored an editorial in USA Today on protestors at health care townhall meetings, in which she characterized health care townhall protests as “un-American.” She portrayed the protestors as enemies, not just of reform, but of our very way of life:
“These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid… of differing views… Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American… [I]t is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway… to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue.”
Regarding ethics reform: in 2006 the mainstream media and Congressional Democrats screamed bloody murder when President George W. Bush asked eight U.S. attorneys to resign, an act which he had full discretion to carry out. Several years later, President Barack Obama discharged Inspector General Gerald Walpin in retaliation for his critical report on Obama supporter and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson’s misuse of funds with nonprofit organization St. Hope Academy. Obama, instead of giving Congress 30 days’ notice regarding Walpin, as required, had a staffer contact Walpin on his cell phone and tell him he had one hour to resign or be fired. In doing so, Obama violated the Inspector General Reform Act—which Obama himself had cosponsored the previous year. Bush’s firing of his attorneys was within his right, whereas Obama’s firing was illegal. Naturally, mainstream newspapers broke the Bush story the second they got a whiff of it and didn’t remove it from their front pages until months later, whereas they practically ignored the Obama story.
Next: You are free to do as we tell you…

#12: Banning Things
Leftists love banning, restricting, and controlling anything they think is bad for you and don’t happen to enjoy themselves—or that they do enjoy, but don’t have enough self-control to prevent themselves from indulging in.
I thought we had it bad in New York City where, over the course of the last seven years, leftist-in-moderate’s-clothing nanny-state Mayor Michael Bloomberg has (1) banned smoking in all bars, restaurants, and other private commercial establishments, (2) banned the use of trans fats in restaurants, and (3) required calorie labeling of all items in chain food establishments. One Brooklyn Assemblyman proposed banning salt in prepared restaurant meals, until the city rose up in arms and chased him off the Brooklyn Bridge.
But no—San Francisco wins the prize for banning inanity. In recent years, San Fran has banned the following: ATM fees, bottled water, plastic bags, styrofoam, Happy Meals, trans fats, clove cigarettes, cigarette sales at pharmacies, smoking indoors, soda in vending machines on state property, Segways, baby animals, feeding birds, pictures of guns in advertisements, alcohol ads, Internet filters on library computers, Junior ROTC, city workers’ traveling to Arizona, loitering in front of nightclubs, and sitting on public sidewalks. They also recently proposed banning the sale of all pets except fish, which would put pet stores out of business in about 30 seconds.
Next: Juan Williams? Hello?

#13: NPR
Insular, deadly earnest, and humor-free—like most leftists—National Public Radio’s idea of a rollicking, merry good time for everyone is “Car Talk” or “A Prairie Home Companion.” Saturday Night Live has correctly satirized NPR’s mumbling, comatose brood of radio hosts as capable of curing insomnia—which is why the Traffic and Safety Administration advises against listening to the station while driving.
NPR’s recent firing of liberal Juan Williams for saying he was personally fearful when he saw Muslims in full religious garb on airplanes is proof of the network’s blinkered leftist worldview. NPR of course had no such problem with über-leftist commentator Nina Totenberg’s disgusting remarks about Jesse Helms in 1995:
“I think he ought to be worried about what’s going on in the Good Lord’s mind, because if there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will.”
More disturbingly, the publicly funded organization also displays a persistent anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the Middle East, leading some critics to dub it “National Palestinian Radio.”
Next: Why don’t they just move there and leave us alone?

#14: Europeans
Leftists would love it if everyone lived the enlightened, leisurely, government-dependent lifestyles of Europeans, and although they’re always talking about moving there to get away from the fascist regime known as the United States, they spend even more time trying to turn the U.S. into a quasi-EU.
Here are just a few of the things leftists love about Europe and wish we could adopt here: mandated six weeks’ vacation; mandated 35-hour workweeks; universal health care; tiny, inexpensive, useless militaries; the ability to hold hostile attitudes toward Israel without half the citizenry taking you to task; a national sales tax; draconian limits on carbon dioxide emissions; an indolent café lifestyle without all those pesky businessmen and entrepreneurs; less pejorative attitudes toward marital infidelity; and a millennia-long history they had no part in creating but can coast on and use to act superior and more cultured than the rest of the world.
NRB reader MollyBrazen notes of Europeans:
“They’re mostly white (despite their pretentions, Leftists really prefer to be among white people); they enjoy… promiscuity and drugs… and they cheerfully accept 60% tax rates and registering their every detail with the government. Europeans are a whiter, more gay-friendly version of what the Democrats are trying to do to blacks and Hispanics.”
Next: Here you go Al…

#15: Global Warming
While real climate scientists like Australia’s Ian Plimer have broadened the scientific timeline under consideration for climate change to incorporate millions of years, to show how climate has been changing through hot and cold swings much wider than anything we’ve seen in recent centuries, leftists insist that the globe is turning into a raging fireball because of disposable Starbucks cups.
In his book Heaven and Earth, Plimer depicts the cyclical effects of sunspots, glaciation, tilts in the earth’s orbit, ocean currents, CO2 reabsorption by the oceans, plate tectonics, clouds, and volcanic eruptions on global temperature. He covers the Medieval Warming period from 900 to 1300 AD, which was warmer than today, and points out the vastly higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during previous Ice Ages. He details the beneficial effects that warmer periods historically have had on crop growth, species survival, and human longevity. He documents the inadequacy and inconsistency of land temperature measurements, relative to satellite measurements, the latter of which show global cooling. He notes the failure of any global warming model to predict that the earth would start cooling in 1998.
But according to leftists, the debate is settled, and all the cool scientists agree: global warming is our fault.
Leftists have no idea how the free market works, so they attempt to couch their proposals to curb global warming in terms they think will appeal to conservatives and other normal Americans. Paul Krugman reassures us that carbon credits would become a “scarce” resource, just like oil, land, and water, and that the “magic” of the free market would allow it to “cope” with emissions limits. Huh? Any idiot realizes that natural resources are not the same thing as artificial, government-imposed restrictions. The former allow us to be productive, and the latter prevent it. Legal leg irons are not amenable to expansion through scientific innovation.
Mocking laissez-faire capitalists for believing the free market is “magic” is a straw man—no one ever said the marketplace could compensate for unpredictable, industry-destroying, government-imposed limits, which preclude the very existence of the free market. How’d the “magic” of the market do in overcoming “scarce” resources in the former Soviet Union?
Another lacuna in global warming alarmists’ scheme is the little matter known as “Climategate.” Last year a whistleblower at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia leaked thousands of e-mails and other files documenting climate change researchers manipulating data, losing data, being unable to reconstruct data, and doing everything but counting dimpled chads to make the numbers come out the way they wanted.
Even before Climategate, polls showed that a majority of Americans believe climate change is primarily due to natural and not human causes, and that such beliefs have been growing more common in recent years.  But trying telling that to a leftist.
Next: What about those “little victims” Ann Coulter talks about?

#16: Victimology
Ever since the “consciousness-raising” movements of the 1960s and 1970s in this country, it has become an American status symbol to be able to declare yourself a victim. Whether you feel oppressed because of your sex, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, weight, height, religion, English-speaking ability, health condition, income level, or receipt of bedbug bites at a Manhattan hotel; it is now considered more accomplished by the Left to be able to fall into one or more of these categories than it is to… um, have actual accomplishments. People who ignore the “handicaps” society tells them should be inhibiting them from fulfilling their potential, and go on to become productive members of society, are dismissed as exceptions to the rule or even looked down upon for not being concerned about their oppressed brethren.
Leftists love victimology, because they despise individual ambition and materialistic success, and would like to drag everyone down to the level of the least fortunate among us. Because they don’t want to actually suffer as victims, though, they are content to advocate the state-sponsored victimhood of other groups in society, who do the suffering for them. Some have also discovered that they can lead the charge for victims for fun and profit. As MollyBrazen notes:
“Being a victim is the highest state a Leftist can aspire to. It is the Leftist equivalent of a holy martyr. Unlike actual religious martyrs, though, Leftists want to be compensated with money and power for being victims. Indeed they want to be compensated with money and power for other people being victims. This is [a] Leftist ‘two-fer’ because they get the money and power without themselves suffering the inconvenience of actually being a victim.”
Next: If there’s a problem you know the Left is going to be pursuing it… with YOUR tax dollars, of course.

#17: “Taking Action”
Leftists love “taking action” to solve what they perceive to be society-wide problems, even when (1) no problem exists, (2) government intervention is inappropriate or unconstitutional, and (3) the government’s solution creates additional problems or makes a problem worse.
Cash for Clunkers: Thanks to Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program last summer, American taxpayers subsidized car owners to do what they would have done eventually—scrap their old cars and buy new ones. “Clunkers” was perversely profligate in numerous ways, among them the fact that it forced car dealers to waste time filling out onerous paperwork to get reimbursed by the government and adding legal riders to contracts with car buyers regarding liability for rebates. Mechanics had to squander effort draining each car’s oil, then donning protective suits and carrying out a dangerous procedure involving pouring sodium silicate on the engines to make them “seize up” and cease to function. This government-mandated engine-cide was a problem for auto parts sellers, who earn the bulk of their income reselling engines, motors, and transmissions—all of which had to be intentionally damaged and made unsalable to comply with program rules. More disturbingly, the reduced supply of used engines led to increased costs for used cars, because so many used car engines could not be resold to potential buyers.
Health Care Reform: For most of last year’s health care reform debate, Obama acted as though he were the very opposite of Hamlet—desperately eager to do something on health care reform, right this minute, without any particular idea what it should be. In a speech he gave in September, Obama declared that “we do intend to get something done this year” but hedged by saying that he was “open to new ideas.” Open to new ideas? This is the guy who demanded that Congress had to pass a comprehensive overhaul by the end of last July? Obama and his staffers were urgently motivated to do something, anything, on health care reform, so that they would be able to say that they did—something, anything.
Stimulating the Economy: Given the miserable failure of last year’s trillion-dollar stimulus bill, naturally Congressional Democrats began clamoring for… another stimulus bill! In July 2009, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer declared, “We need to be open to… further action.” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said that another stimulus would “probably take place towards the end of the year.” Because if there’s anything that helps get you out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into, it’s digging even deeper.
In arguing for Ben Bernanke’s reappointment as Federal Reserve Chairman earlier this year, Time magazine raved:
“[H]e conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies… lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash… revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed’s balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation.”
“Conjured up,” “blasted,” “engineered,” “revolutionized,” “shopping spree,” “blew up,” “desperate improvisation”—these don’t sound like reassuring terms for investors in the world’s largest financial system. But to Democrats, Bernanke gets major points because these steps all involve “taking action.”  The only action leftists don’t like taking is “butting out.”
Next: Why nothing is your fault…

#18: Determinism
Whenever leftists don’t believe that some behavioral characteristic is caused by genes, they believe it’s caused by the environment. Always absent from the equation are the role of individual motivation, thought, free will, and choice.
For example, leftists love to spread the lie that poverty causes terrorism. Yet Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day last year, was the son of a prominent, wealthy Nigerian bank chairman. The U.S. provided Arlington, VA-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan with a free medical education worth tens of thousands of dollars, yet he still murdered fellow soldiers on his military post in Ft. Hood, Texas. John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and San Anselmo, California and attended a “California Distinguished School” in the Tamalpais Union High School District.
If poverty caused terrorism, then poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India, non-flat screen TV owners in the U.S.—would be rising up en masse to wreak havoc in hijackings and suicide bombings. The most reliable factor in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies is: whether the individual adheres to an ideology that encourages engaging in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies. The ideology in question, of course, always happens to be Islam.
Next: The one Left-approved religion…

#19: Islam
Leftists love Islam because it is the single-most anti-American religion practiced en masse on the face of the earth. Radical Islamist spokespersons, of the terrorist variety and otherwise, regularly issue talking points that are indistinguishable from the unguarded remarks of the more liberal members of the Democratic Party. Thus, for example, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright blames the U.S. for 9/11, a position not incongruent with that of Osama bin Laden. Leftists sometimes even inadvertently provide Islamist leaders with talking points, as when bin Laden borrowed the Left’s diatribes against Halliburton to condemn the West for its imperialism and corruption.
MollyBrazen notes:
“Although leftists appear to hate religion because of their opposition to Christianity… and increasingly to Judaism… they make exceptions for other religions, especially if 1) they are not very common near where they live, and 2) they are practiced mostly by brown-skinned people. Therefore leftists tolerate Shamanism, Hinduism and Buddhism as cute, exotic and picturesque. There is one religion, however, that makes leftists positively wet themselves with veneration: Islam. Not only does Islam have traits 1) and 2) above, but it also has 3) they make demands and kill to obtain them. Leftists would like to do that too, and they talk about it all the time, but they rarely carry it out, because they don’t know how to use weapons and they are all cowards anyway.”
Next: Yes, they actually think this award means something…

#20: The Nobel Peace Prize
With winners in recent decades including the United Nations, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore, and Barack Obama, but not Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Benjamin Netanyahu, John Bolton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or nuclear weapons, need I say more?
Perhaps the heartrending lament that the Turkish aid flotilla Mavi Marmara—headed for Gaza and stopped by the Israeli Navy last summer—contained a bevy of innocent Nobel Peace laureates would have been more compelling if recent Nobel Peace laureates hadn’t included the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.
Scott Spiegel blogs at http://www.scottspiegel.com/. He can be reached at spiegelscott@yahoo.com.

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Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com/
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/11/07/stuff-leftist-people-like-11-20-aka-top-10-things-leftists-like-continued/