Posted By Scott Spiegel On October 23, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
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 inaugurate “Stuff Leftist People Like”:
#1: Keeping Things Abstract
Leftists love keeping their political platforms intangible, “big-picture,” “forward-looking,” and “high-minded.” Conservatives keep things concrete, detailed, present-looking, and practical.
The further the nation is from having to deal with the reality of an issue, the more likely the public is to trust Democrats on that issue. The closer the nation gets to reality, the more likely the public is to trust Republicans. The public’s confidence ratings in Democrats are like a perpetual shell game: whichever issues the nation is dealing with are correctly seen by Americans as more capably handled by Republicans, whereas Democrats are assumed to be wonderful—just wonderful!—on all the other concerns we don’t happen to be tackling at the moment. As soon as Democrats get their hands on something and we see what they actually want to do to us, trust in their ability plummets, and they move on to another, more pressing priority.
“Ending the war in Iraq” sounds reasonable—until you read the fine print of Democrats’ plan and realize they don’t care whether we win first. “Renewing relations with the Muslim world” sounds kindhearted—until the president makes nominal demands to Muslim leaders and they start blowing things up again. “Stimulating the economy” sounds invigorating—until it is translated into a 1,588-page doorstop full of taxes and budget-busting spending.
As the apotheosis of this trend, witness the health care reform debacle of last year: for nine months, Obama made flowery promises to the nation—everyone who’s happy with the status quo can keep things as they are, everyone who’s unhappy can have everything completely different—while Congress was forced to work out the ugly details in secret, including who’s going to pay for the plan.
#2: Taking Credit for Things They Once Opposed
The Iraq War could be one of the great achievements of this administration—that is, if you’re a delusional loon named Joe Biden who formerly condemned General David Petraeus as “dead flat wrong” for wanting to go through with the Iraqi surge rather than immediately withdrawing our soldiers and partitioning Iraq into three ethnic regions.
The most factual elements of Obama’s primetime address to the nation on the end of combat operations in the Iraq War could have been cribbed from a Bush speech on Iraq from five years ago, such as:
“We must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us.”
Obama wasn’t honest enough to give Bush credit for the surge, saying only:
“[N]o one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security”
which is about as controversial to his antiwar base as saying, “No one could doubt President Bush’s support for his family, or his love of his wife and children.”
In terms of the economy, the classic modern example of taking credit for something one formerly opposed is Bill Clinton’s claim that he initiated the wonderfully successful welfare reform bill, which Congressional Republicans actually had to force him, kicking and screaming, to sign.
More recently, conservatives have been reminding Democrats that tax cuts stimulate the economy, while leftists have been adamantly denying this proven fact. In the spring of 2009, Obama and Congressional Democrats passed their poorly designed, massively irresponsible stimulus spending bill.
After the stimulus failed and it became obvious to everyone except Paul Krugman that runaway government spending does not mysteriously create wealth, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was caught admitting to the House Financial Services Committee that extending the Bush tax cuts will strengthen the economy. Obama economic advisor Christina Romer and her husband published a paper in The American Economic Review earlier this year demonstrating that tax hikes hurt economic growth. This summer, some Democratic senators started talking up the idea of extending the Bush tax cuts.
So if the Bush tax cuts are extended and the economy picks up again under Obama, don’t look for an apology from Democrats.
#3: Paraconstitutional Activity
Forget “Paranormal Activity”—we’ve got a horror show going on right in our own government:
• Taking over the nation’s largest car companies and banks by tempting them with bailout funds, then tightening the noose and micromanaging them from Washington
• Forcing taxpayers to guarantee virtually all U.S. mortgages and sticking a $5 trillion tab to people who paid their mortgages on time
• Capping executive pay for banks that took bailout money and monitoring executive pay for banks that didn’t take TARP funds
• Imposing cap-and-trade regulations to restrict and tax citizens’ energy use
• Paying car owners to destroy their used automobiles and buy new ones
• Taking over the U.S. health care system and nationalizing the student loan system
• Nominating a Supreme Court justice who believes in ignoring the equal protection offered under the law and considers race and gender in her rulings
• Threatening to violate free speech by regulating the Internet and talk radio to ensure “balanced” views and prevent “irresponsible” content
• Attacking a private news organization for criticizing the administration and threatening its freedom of the press by shutting it out of White House interviews
• Appointing dozens of unaccountable czars to set policy while circumventing Congress’s approval
• Engaging in massive, unprecedented deficit spending to stimulate the economy
Does the suspense of anticipating what leftists will try to do to us ever end?
#4: Fighting Wars with No National Security Consequences
What do Somalia, Rwanda, and Darfur, but not Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan, have in common? The former are places where leftists insist we must send troops to stabilize chaotic situations, whereas the latter are places we have no business being.
When Obama was dithering over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan last fall, we were told that he couldn’t do so, because discontent was brewing among Congressional Democrats, and Obama wanted to take into account their diverse opinions. Yet discontent is always brewing among Democrats over sending any American troops anywhere, unless the mission is purely humanitarian and serves absolutely no U.S. security interest. People who think it’s always wrong to go to war or escalate a conflict for our own benefit cannot be trusted to give strategic advice on troop levels in any specific conflict.
#5: Dressing Down
Even when they know lots of other people are going to be watching, leftists love dressing like slobs as a protest against the decent elements of society.
During the townhall meetings on health care last summer, Senator Barbara Boxer declared that the last time she had seen such suspiciously well-dressed protestors was during the 2000 Florida election recount. Newsflash for Boxer: Republicans have higher standards than Democrats. A typical left-wing protest involves twenty-somethings and washed-up hippies in ratty T-shirts and shredded jeans breaking windows at a local Starbucks during the morning rush. The average right-wing protest involves adults who dress as though they would like to elevate community standards, not degrade them.
But Democrats apparently believe that opinions are valid only if expressed by people sporting Birkenstocks and wearing buttons urging presidential assassinations. Last summer they sunk to a new low by projecting their party’s historic propensity for grubby mob rule and violent agitprop onto frail, elderly grandparents in bowties and cardigans.
#6: Never Abandoning Failed Government Programs
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are all broke. Head Start, the public education system, and gun control are all miserable, demonstrable failures. But anyone who wants to make the slightest modifications to any of these Democrat-initiated programs is considered by the left to be an irresponsible, fire-breathing radical.
Given the miserable failure of their 2009 stimulus bill, naturally Congressional Democrats have been clamoring since July 2009 for… another stimulus bill! Democrats couldn’t have been more insistent about the necessity for another stimulus bill if the first one had turned out to be a smashing, jaw-dropping, larger-than-life success.
#7: Infantilizing Minorities
Democratic leaders have historically manipulated African Americans for political gain, offering them freebies and using their “dialect” and pretending to stand for their interests, while privately looking down on them as a dependent, infantile interest group to be pandered to.
Upon discovering Barack Obama as a potential presidential candidate, Harry Reid delightedly exclaimed that Obama was “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Reid’s explicit, vulgar, race-obsessed mindset recalls Joe Biden’s condescending statement that Obama “is articulate and bright and clean” and Bill Clinton’s dismissive remark to Ted Kennedy that “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”
Reid’s motivation for his Obama comments was to use race to cynically calculate, for political purposes, the electability by the Democratic base of token black candidates. Similarly, other Democrats regularly exploit blacks to get their votes, as in Hillary “Nobody Told Me That the Road Would Be Easy” Clinton’s feverish recitation of spirituals in a Negro dialect in black churches.
#8: RINOs
Democrats’ list of favorite conservatives always includes… people who aren’t conservatives! John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Dede Scozzafava, David Brooks, David Frum—when it’s cold outside, these are the conservatives that warm Democrats’ hearts.
#9: Cheating
They tried to steal the 2000 presidential election, and they stole elections in Washington and Minnesota, all via subjective, post-hoc ballot-counting schemes. But Democrats’ penchant for cheating goes well beyond elections.
Just to pass their health care reform bill, for example, Democrats had to cheat death, rob Peter to pay Paul, take candy from babies, lie through their teeth, cut corners, move the goalposts, and burn the candle at both ends.
Holding squeakers of votes on Saturday nights and Christmas Eve, offering bribes for votes and rescinding them when the public became outraged, violating pledges to post legislation online, attempting to “deem and pass” rather than vote and pass, forcing the Congressional Budget Office to release rosy projections based on demonstrably false assumptions, issuing phony and unenforceable executive orders to mollify wary Congressmen, using reconciliation improperly—these were all par for the course in the Democratic marathon that brought us the glorious ObamaCare.
There’s a reason leftists try to bend rules in their favor: because they do not, at their core, all the way down, believe in a stable, predictable rule of law, as clearly stated and adhered to by all citizens in a system of government known as a republic. They believe in doing whatever they can get away with, if they can convince enough people at the time that it’s OK for them to do it—hence the “democracy” in Democratic.
#10: Chicago
Obama’s hometown; home to Hyde Park, with its cadre of leftist radical inhabitants; thug-style machine politics; construction payback schemes, money laundering, insider dealings, and public corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency; out-of-control crime rates; the highest murder rate in the country; and a city deficit of a quarter of a billion dollars. What’s not for a leftist to love?
So what should be included in the sequel to this post?
Scott Spiegel blogs at http://www.scottspiegel.com/. He can be reached at spiegelscott@yahoo.com.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from NewsReal Blog: http://www.newsrealblog.com/
URL to article: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/10/23/top-10-things-leftists-like-aka-stuff-leftist-people-like-1-10/
No comments:
Post a Comment