Bookworm Beat 8-11-15 — the illustrated edition, devoted to excavating the Leftist mind through Facebook posters
One of my Facebook friends is an uber-Leftist, although he does staunchly support Israel. He never puts up personal posts. Instead, his Facebook feed is filled with posters, some inspirational, some funny, some pro-Israel, and most pro-Left and anti-Republican.
I thought that for this illustrated edition, instead of the usual conservative-oriented posters, I’d take a peak at, and run some comments by, the stuff coming from the Left. In each case, my commentary about a poster will be below the poster.
Every time I see the above poster on decorating Leftist Facebook pages, I have only one thing to say: Second Amendment. It seems that you cannot remind a Leftist often enough that cars do not have Second Amendment protection. If they want to have cars and guns regulated in the same way, they’re going to have to amend the Constitution. Funnily enough, every time I remind them of this point, they all fall silent.
I checked, and Goldwater really did say these words. It’s apparent that, if Goldwater were in politics today, he’d be a libertarian, not a Republican — and as a libertarian, he’d be just as wary of Jesus’s influence on politics as he would be of Karl Marx’s. I would not vote for Goldwater, since I would have to point out that Jesus staked out an individual- and life-centered moral code, while Marx staked out an economic- and political-centered power code that seems, inevitably, to lead to death.
It is in fact true that Bernie Sanders, to his great credit, has always worked hard to get more government funding for America’s veterans. I think, though, that the veterans who support him for this reason are forgetting that his anti-war stance almost certainly meant to more of them getting killed or injured in Afghanistan and Iraq (in no small part because the anti-war party greatly empowered the enemy while weakening America’s ability to fight).
Moreover, Bernie’s economic support for the veterans stems from the fact that he wants the government to pay for everything for everybody. As we’ve seen around the world, this is an unsustainable position. The government does not create wealth. In order to pay for all the programs Bernie wants, it must take wealth from the people while at the same time denying them the opportunities to replenish the wealth taken. This always ends in two ways: tyranny or bankruptcy (or, in the case of Nicaragua, both).
Never mind that, during her time in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren has done nothing to distinguish herself as a leader. I include this poster simply to illustrate the sheer wishful thinking that permeates so many Leftist demands.
Naturally, this poster came along with a comment saying “this applies to the Kochs.” The funny thing is that the Kochs desperately want government out of business, rather than to use government to further their business interests. In this, they are distinct from those who have profited from government manipulation and power, such as George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and just about every Silicon Valley millionaire and billionaire. Republicans get rich on their own; Democrats (including Trump) do it with one hand in the government’s pocket and the other hand holding the government gun steady on middle- and working-class taxpayers.
I found this one incredibly funny since I was reminded once again that Democrat politicians routinely pay their female employees less than their male employees. What the above really ought to say is that “Voting Republican will ensure that our daughters are not perpetual sex slaves to irresponsible men who can have unlimited access to women, without the inconvenience of supporting and cherishing them, thanks to government-funded birth control and unlimited abortions.”
I keep seeing posters shouting about the lack of scandals surrounding Obama. It’s as if Fast & Furious, the New Black Panthers, Benghazi, the IRS’s political persecution of conservatives, the AP phone records spying, the complete breakdown of our southern border, and the millions of dollars in vacations, to name but a few, never happened. The corollary is the bank robber who, having evaded capture, boasts that he’s obviously innocent. All of which is a reminder that the real scandal in the Obama administration is that the two most recent U.S. Attorney Generals, both the one approved by a Democrat Congress and the one approved by a Republican one, are so partisan that they have refused to enforce the laws of the United States when a Democrat administration has violated those laws.
As for whether the family is wholesome, the girls are young and have had little scope for wrongdoing. Also, the media has kept its hands off the Obama family. I have a pretty strong suspicion that there’s been a lot of bad behavior, both before and during the White House, that we haven’t heard about, and may not hear about for years.
Don’t you love the thinking behind the above poster? Because Republicans refuse to provide cradle to grave socialist services, it’s more humane to kill the baby in utero.
No, Jon, Bernie really is a lunatic. As Glenn Reynolds explains, Bernie is “a lifelong socialist who once wrote that women dream of gang rape, and that cervical cancer results from too few orgasms.” You don’t even have to get to the bizarre sexual imaginings to say “lunatic.” Anyone who supports a system that has never succeeded anywhere its been tried is a lunatic.
And speaking of left-wing lunacy, I highly recommend Abraham Miller’s article about Progressive Jews, since it indicts not only the foolish, anti-Israel Jews among us, but the entire socialist mindset: “But liberals never give up. You can show them pictures of East Germany, the old Soviet Union, and Venezuela today and tell them communist economies do not work. And they will tell you, it just hasn’t been done right.” (My father, before he became a Reagan Democrat, said precisely those words to me when I, in high school, used to argue against socialism: “It’s a great system. It just hasn’t been done right.”)
In essence, what Robert Reich is indicting, is crony capitalism. I’d applaud him, except that he’s such a moron that he cannot comprehend that the collaboration of business and government — a collaboration that always ends badly for consumers because it destroys competition by rewarding favored industries — has become infinitely worse under Obama. In order to advance such causes as “fighting” anthropogenic climate change, demeaning Israel, destroying the Middle East, etc., Obama has co-opted large sectors of American industry, and especially the financial sector.
What we have under Obama is worse than the “crony capitalism” Reich attacks. We’re now facing crony fascism, and Reich would do better to support free-market conservatives who want to get the government out of business entirely.
I include this here only to show how infantile the Left is, with its repeated trope that Fox is a scary monster because it’s biased, unlike all those other neutral news sources, such as NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., that somehow invariably seem to come down hard on the side of the Democrat party.
Yes, Democrats are ignorant. The Republican jobs plan is a free market, unencumbered by government meddling, favoritism, tax penalties, etc. Republicans most certainly did propose an alternative to Obamacare, one that again relied on the free market. Democrats ignored it because, as far as they’re concerned, if the government isn’t involved, it doesn’t exist. And Republicans have proposed myriad alternatives to Obama’s nuclear giveaway, all of which involve actually demanding a quid pro quo from Iran before handing it the keys to the nuclear kingdom.
The fact is, though, that Democrat and Progressive news outlets refuse to report on these things so the Left concludes they don’t exist. The above poster is the answer to this philosophical question: If a Republican tree falls in a political forest, and the mainstream media refuses to report it, did that falling tree exist? Answer: No.
Once again, the Democrat viewpoint is “it’s totally okay to kill fetuses because you don’t force my employer to pay me enough and you don’t give me free health care.” Or put another way, “until we have full socialism, the most humane thing we can do is kill babies.”
I do let it sink it and I don’t conclude that the GOP is bad; I conclude instead that the Left’s march through the Catholic Church, one that started in the 1950s with Liberation Theology, has successfully resulted in a church that draws as much inspiration from Karl Marx as it does from Jesus Christ.
All governments have been responsible for infrastructure. That’s not socialism; that’s basic government function. We bitch about socialism when the government takes over production; controls people’s activities; and considers itself the best arbiter of the way in which citizens should live their lives and spend their money. And that’s plenty to bitch about.
This one makes me crazy: Because Christians, more than 700 years ago, fought back against rampant, violent, genocidal Muslim imperialism, and because, more than 400 years ago, Christians had internecine warfare and took steps to stamp out heresy, we can’t complain today about Islamic depredations. “Yeah, you! Shut up about ISIS’s mass slaughter of civilians, its enslavement of women, its torture and execution of gays, its turning young boys into blood-soaked warriors. You have no standing to object because, hundreds of years ago, the Catholic faith burned heretics. And no, we don’t care that reformed, enlightened Christianity took the lead in ending slavery, child labor, and other Western excesses.”
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First Republican debate:
Radical Islam is a genocidal threat to all free people, with special emphasis on its plans to murder Jews, Christians, and gays, and to enslave all women. America, as a world leader and a beacon of freedom, has an obligation to protect Americans and to do whatever it can to free people around the world.
Legal immigrants are great, and help keep our country vital. However, as Bobby Jindal so perfectly noted, “Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.” That invasion takes on new and scary implications when the government abdicates its basic responsibility of enforcing laws allowing it to ensure that those who come into this country will not destroy it or harm its citizens.
The Leftist War on Poverty has been going on for fifty years, and we have more poor than ever (with an increase in that number, if food stamps are anything to go by, under President Obama’s unbridled Progressive rule). We believe that the best way to alleviate poverty is to unleash the power of the free market. The way to do that is to limit the government to playing a police role — that is, it makes sure that everyone plays by the rules (no fraud, no cheating, etc.). Otherwise, it gets out of the way and lets the power of the people raise the poor out of poverty.
Yes, we hate Big Government and we hate Big Taxes. Both stifle the economy and both play favorites, which is fundamentally unfair in a free nation. Worse, Big Government represents an accretion of power that is always dangerous for the individual. Small governments don’t have concentration camps and gulags and purges and all of the other stuff that is a hallmark of a government that has acquired too much power against its own people.
(And yes, most of the candidates aren’t as articulate about these principles as one would wish, but the debate format really doesn’t give them a chance to develop conservative ideas.)
