Stuff Leftist People Like #21-30 (aka Top 10 Things Leftists Like Continued)

Posted By Scott Spiegel On January 21, 2011 @ 6:00 am

Note: For the first two installments of this series, please see Top 10 Things Leftists Like (aka Stuff Leftist People Like #1-10) and Stuff Leftist People Like #11-20 (aka Top 10 Things Leftists Like Continued).

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 released a follow-up in November 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”:

#21: Calling Everything Torture
According to the Left, picking up enemy combatants off the battlefield in Afghanistan and keeping them on a tropical island where they get fitness classes, Internet access, H1N1 vaccinations, and mango chutney chicken for dinner is torture.
Splashing water on the faces of high-level terrorists, leaving their lights on at night, and putting a caterpillar in their cells violates the Geneva Convention.
The Left thinks that by repeating, “We are not a nation that condones torture. We have higher standards than that,” they can fool people into thinking acts that aren’t torture are really torture, or that they have higher ethical standards than conservatives.
Recently the Left sunk to a new low by claiming that Pfc. Bradley Manning, alleged to have supplied WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with the thousands of classified cables released to the public last year, was being “tortured” simply because he was in solitary confinement.
How about this for torture? When President Obama promised to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court in lower Manhattan, he apparently didn’t care that in the same court in which KSM was to be tried, bin Laden aide Mamdouh Salim, while awaiting trial several years ago for his role in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, blinded a prison guard by squirting hot sauce in his face, then plunged a comb sharpened into a dagger deep into the guard’s eye, nearly killing him and causing permanent brain and sight damage.
That, Mr. Obama, is torture.
Next: The party that thinks alike, stinks alike…

#22: All Having the Same Opinion
Watch a prominent Republican politician make a contentious but sensible statement, or take a controversial but appropriate action, and you will soon see, in the major left-wing news outlets, a flood of editorials denouncing the decision that are virtual Xerox copies of one another.
When the newly majority House Republicans announced that they were going to read the U.S. Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress and would be introducing a procedural rule that would require any new legislation to specify which part of the Constitution authorizes it, the Left feverishly circulated the same talking points in almost startling unison.
The New York Times called the proposal “A theatrical production of unusual pomposity,” while readers at Slate labeled it “silly political theater” and Time magazine pegged it as “more kabuki theater for the masses.”
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick bemoaned the Tea Party’s “fetish” for the constitution, while Time magazine’s Alex Altman warned that “fetishizing of the Constitution is unsettling.” Salon’s Michael Lind decried the “cult of the all-wise Founders” of the Constitution, while Altman railed against “The Cult of the Constitution.”
After Jared Loughner shot Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords last weekend, Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik spoke of “the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government.” Former Democratic Representative David Obey announced, “We are now reaping the whirlwind after years of wild anti-government, anti-politician, simplistic political vitriol.” The National Journal sighed, “The Vitriol Will Likely Return.”
The party that cries “Diversity is our greatest strength!” all love having the same opinion as one another. Then they can get down to business and focus on the important types of diversity, which include, not diversity of thought or opinion, but of diversity of skin color, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Next: More is less…

#23: Bureaucracy
Most people wisely and instinctively hate bureaucracy, based on their everyday experience navigating the labyrinthine Department of Motor Vehicles, the infuriatingly slow United States Postal Service, and the Byzantine federal tax code. They realize that simpler is better, and the typical citizen has dozens of horror stories about ridiculous procedures they had to unnecessarily perform because of some archaic government rule they had to follow, repetitive practices they had to carry out because of a regressive boss, or numerous appeals to a behemoth computer company with poor customer service to get a simple problem fixed.
Somehow, due to some quirk in their worldview, leftists believe that more bureaucracy is better—more centralized government control, more agencies, more czars, more paper pushers, more committees, more and more legislation and rules and restrictions and mandates. Witness the 1,000-plus-page stimulus bill Congress rushed through before it was even complete, or the 2,000-plus-page ObamaCare bill that no one read before it was passed, or the 44,000-page federal tax code that keeps entire industries of tax preparers, auditors, and lawyers employed to make sure every ‘t’ is crossed and every ‘i’ is dotted.
Leftists persist in believing that more government is the way to make things more effective, and that if things aren’t working out as planned—the answer is to spoon a nice bloated dollop of more government on top.
Next: The heirs of the National Socialist German Workers Party…

#24: Hitler/Nazi References
Leftists love hyperbole, and they love accusing their ideological opponents of crimes of humanity for opposing their agenda. However, they have a particular affinity for Hitler/Nazi metaphors. This is not just because Hitler and Nazism were evil and were responsible for the deaths of millions. After all, communism and its practitioners around the globe have been responsible for far more murder, oppression, and miserable living conditions than the relatively small-fry one-off historical atrocity of Nazism.
Leftists love Hitler references because of the meme that Nazism was a “right-wing” ideology.
True, Nazism did have elements of fascism, which has been associated with the ideology of several other 20th-century dictators. But if leftists think they can get away with popularizing the notion that Nazism more closely mirrors contemporary conservatism than leftism, they’d better hope people don’t look too closely at Nazi ideology and start drawing their own conclusions.
The Nazis’ 25-point plan contained such limited-government recommendations as:
“That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished”
“[A]ll personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits”
“We demand the nationalization of all trusts”
“We demand profit-sharing in large industries”
“We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions”
“The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young”
“We demand the abolition of the regular army and the creation of a national (folk) army”
In case it’s not obvious, these planks overlap with 90% of the platform of the modern Democratic Party.
Next: Other people’s money…

#25: Spending Money
Of the “Top 25 Obama Campaign Promises” for which the site Politifact.com summarized Obama’s progress back in April 2009, over half involved spending more money, raising taxes, or taking actions that would inhibit individuals’ and businesses’ ability to save and invest. These included such items as: creating a foreclosure prevention fund for irresponsible homeowners; creating a National Health Insurance Exchange; instituting a federal electronic health information system; creating 5 million “green” jobs (at the expense of non-green jobs;) and moving all prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to some other, unspecified location (where we would have to recreate at great cost another detention center with the same security capabilities as Gitmo.)
Obama ended up spending an additional $1 trillion on the stimulus bill, and pledging $1 trillion for ObamaCare, not to mention gobs of money here and there on other worthless and unconstitutional programs. Yet despite all this, New York Times über-leftist Paul Krugman has spent the past year-and-a-half running the same column every week asserting, as the opening of this column from July 2009 reads (the language varies, but the point is always the same): “O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus.”
That month, Jared Bernstein, chief economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, stated, “There is no conceivable stimulus package on the face of this earth that would fully offset the deepest recession since the Great Depression”—which technically puts him on record as favoring infinite, eternal federal spending.
Next: Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx…

#26: Ridiculing the Free Market
Leftists hate the free market, despite the fact that they benefit enormously from it, so they try to mock and ridicule it as an excuse to justify greater federal intervention to regulate its “excesses.” Leftists love laughing at the notion of the “invisible hand of the free market.” They pretend that conservatives don’t favor regulation to prevent fraud, and they don’t understand that hucksters who pull off legal but shady schemes will be discovered and have their businesses suffer in the long-term as word spreads of their dishonest practices.
Leftists enjoy smearing capitalism using such modifiers as “unfettered,” “rampant,” and “free-for-all”—as though their attempts to regulate the market weren’t all of the above, independent as they are of Constitutional moorings or public support.
Leftists express their admiration for Cuba’s Fidel Castro or Communist China’s Mao Zedong, as though these dictators offered more viable economic systems than the United States. They quibble because in America some people become billionaires while the poorest segment of society fails to get richer at the same rate as entrepreneurs and investors.
Ron Bloom, Obama’s Manufacturing Czar, summed up the leftist position well:
“We know that the free market is nonsense. We know the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money because they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only, no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political ‘power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.’”
When leftists are in power, it does.
Next: Celebritwits…

#27: Hollywood
Among Hollywood celebrities with known political orientations, upwards of 95% lean left. It’s difficult to be respected and receive consistent film work in Hollywood if one is known to be conservative.
Leftists feel right at home in the fantasyland in our cultural landscape occupied by Hollywood. Despite the fact that they claim to abhor wealth, ostentation, and consumerism, leftists have a soft spot for Hollywood celebrities such as Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Matt Damon, and Danny Glover.
These celebritwits give leftists money and promote their beliefs, even if most Americans privately abhor these beliefs and recognize that celebrities inhabit a bubble of privilege and condescension that has nothing to do with the way normal people live or think.
Leftists love Hollywood documentaries such as Al Gore’s global warming fairy tale “An Inconvenient Truth” or Michael Moore’s screeds “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Sicko.” They’re still lapping up the stream of anti-Iraq War/anti-Bush films that have gushed out of Hollywood over the last eight years, with their one-sided views of the conflict and sanctimonious attempts to skewer conservatives rather than provide an honest look at issues from all sides.
Next: Thanks for the comic relief…

#28: Being Unintentionally Funny
Because leftists believe strange things the majority of Americans find repulsive, and because they sometimes forget that their musings are read or heard by others outside their intellectual circles, they are often caught saying unintentionally hilarious things that are ripe for ridicule. As a prime recent example, see former Democratic strategist Susan Estrich’s post-November 2010 election column titled “Nancy Pelosi, Superhero,” in which she laments the fact that no one has sent the former Speaker of the House “flowers to say thank you” for all she has done.
Fancy Nancy has been known to provide a few inadvertent chuckles herself, as when she declared of ObamaCare, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” This type of statement makes perfect sense to leftists, since they see no problem with super-intelligent elites who supposedly have the public’s best interest at heart making behind-closed-doors decisions about how to manipulate the lives of hundreds of millions of people. But left-wing politicians normally have armies of handlers and publicists to keep them from saying things that would embarrass them in front of a levelheaded public. When these politicians are occasionally let loose to extemporize, they get themselves in trouble by saying what they really think.
Another ripe source of unintentional humor is leftists’ hypocrisy regarding what they tell us to do publicly and what they do in private. Witness the spectacle of Rosie O’Donnell lecturing the country about the evils of guns while concealing the fact that she travels with armed bodyguards, or Barack and Michelle Obama scolding us about healthy living while the President secretly sneaks off for cigarette breaks throughout the day.
Next: Which shade of jumpsuit would you like?

#29: Electing Felons
Leftists have a propensity for electing felons, criminals, and other shady characters into office, or supporting politicians who subsequently engage in sleazy, illegal conduct once in power. This is in part because the leftist worldview is bankrupt and has led to such immoral but institutionalized atrocities as Social Security and Medicare, which are giant Ponzi schemes designed to appropriate wealth from productive individuals and redistribute it to buy votes. When your whole political philosophy is corrupt, what’s the big deal about a little corruption around the edges?
Thus, District of Columbia residents, 105% of whom are Democrats, thought nothing of reelecting Marion Barry mayor of D.C. just a few years after he had served a six-month federal prison sentence for smoking crack cocaine.
After admitting to having defiled the office of the presidency and perjured himself under oath, President Bill Clinton’s poll numbers actually increased—and the extra support he received was not coming from conservatives, who had never voted for him and had seen through his act all along.
The Chicago Democratic machine keeps churning out one embarrassment after another, from “pay-to-play” former Governor Rod Blagojevich to the corrupt members of the Daley dynasty, which recently extended its reach into the White House.
And hey—why wouldn’t we expect the party that has expended so much political capital trying to protect felons’ right to vote to put a few members of their base in power?
Next: Everything is a top priority…

#30: Urgency
From the folks who brought you “Never let a good crisis go to waste” must surely come the unstated corollary, “And do it quickly, because otherwise you’ll lose your chance.”
President Obama would have nationalized healthcare, banned carbon dioxide, withdrawn from Iraq, and started a second New Deal while still in the “Office of the President-Elect” if he could have gotten away with it.
President “I want a stimulus package on my desk by January 20” (2009) Obama couldn’t be bothered with niceties like posting the bill online for 48 hours for voters to read.
President “Delay is no longer an option” is content to let the Environmental Protection Agency enact cap-and-trade regulations if Congress doesn’t pass them soon enough for his liking.
In an unintentionally hilarious column (see #28) extolling Obama’s “patience,” leftist Stanley Crouch explained Obama’s leadership style thus:
“He clearly understands that a democracy with many, many circles of power is prone to a slow velocity of policy achievements.”
Apparently Obama understands it urgently enough to cut Republicans out of committee meetings on the stimulus package, cut the American people out of a chance to look at and comment on Democratic bills, cut shareholders out of hiring and firing decisions at automobile manufacturers and banks, and cut Congress out of passing environmental regulations.
That’s one way to quickly dispense with the complexities of “many, many circles of power,” otherwise known by our pokey Founding Fathers as “checks and balances” and “limits on rule.”
***
Being leftist means never having to say you’re sorry, never having to be accountable for your actions, never having to be consistent, never having to feel guilty about taking credit for others’ accomplishments, and never having to feel shameless. Being leftist is a way of life, a status symbol, a fashion statement—but not a thoughtful or moral way of approaching the world.
Watch this space for the next installment of Stuff Leftist People Like. Please contribute your own suggestions for future lists in the comments section.
Scott Spiegel blogs at http://www.scottspiegel.com/. He can be reached at spiegelscott@yahoo.com.
Top 10 Things Leftists Like (aka Stuff Leftist People Like #1-10)
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Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com/
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/21/stuff-leftist-people-like-21-30-aka-top-10-things-leftists-like-continued-1/